The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

A mysterious inheritance, an old mansion, and the legacy of a cult's suicide pact. These are the things Libby recieves on her 25th birthday. But nothing seems completely clear in the story behind her birth parents and their home. An engaging thriller with enough twists and turns to give readers whiplash, this story is as fun as it is shocking.

A great read for fans of thrillers and family mysteries! 

340 pages

Rabbit Girls by Anna Ellory

After the Berlin wall falls in 1989, Miriam, who has been living in East Berlin, goes back  to West Berlin to care for her dying father. She is fleeing an abusive husband, and is escaping both him and an abusive regime.

In caring for her father, she finds an Auschwitz tattoo on his wrist. She never knew he was in a concentration camp, so starts looking for answers to questions she never knew she had. Her mother is dead, but in her belongings she finds a uniform from a prison camp. Sewn into the linings she finds letters from a mysterious woman named Frieda.

She desperately needs answers, but her father is semi-comatose, and unable to tell her what she needs to know. Will she be able to unravel the secrets of her parent's past?



390 pages

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

Trudy Schlemmer is a professor of German history in Minnesota. She is taking oral histories of World War II survivors. Her mother, Anna, is German, also, but has never talked about her past. Trudy knows she was three when her mother married an American soldier after the war.

The story moves back and forth from the present, starting with the funeral of Anna's husband, to Anna's story in Germany during the war. It is a story of family secrets; of the horrors of the holocaust, and a sobering portrait of life in a country at war.

Trudy has always had a million questions about her mother's past; about who her father was; about the war, and her mother's part in it. But her mother refuses to answer any questions. This is a heartbreaking story of shame and guilt that forever impacts the relationship between a mother and daughter.


496 pages

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

Pluto, North Dakota, is a white town on the edge of an Ojibwe reservation. Like many small towns, the town is  dying. Evelina, a girl of mixed Indian and white descent, belongs to a 'BIA' family. She likes to listen to her grandfather's family stories, from whom she learns about the town’s long, bloody history, including the slaughter of a white farm family and the hanging of innocent Native Americans unfairly targeted as the perpetrators of the crime.

Descendants of both the victims and the lynching party intermarry, creating a tangled history. The consequences are still being felt by the community and the reservation, even after many generations.
Three narrator tell the collective stories of two interwoven communities, which ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.


324 pages

Only Love can Break a Heart by Ed Tarkington

Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. In 1977, in small-town Virginia, Paul is sixteen and cool, cruising around in his Chevy Nova, listening to Neil Young, cigarette dangling from his lips, arm around his girlfriend. Paul and his girlfriend are always happy to take Rocky with them. But one day, in an act of vengeance against their father, Paul kidnaps Rocky from school and almost kills him. Leigh, Paul's girlfriend, promises to go away with him if he takes Rocky home. Paul and Leigh then disappear without a trace.

A few years later, Leigh returns, sans Paul. She will not talk about him, or their experiences, even where they've been.  Leigh eventually has a nervous breakdown, shortly before Paul returns. A mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, and Leigh and Paul are arrested and charged with the murder.  Rocky and his family must reckon with the past while dealing with this new reality.

336 pages

Fräulein M. by Caroline Woods

Woods transports the reader to Weimar Berlin's cabaret scene. Berni, Anita, and Grete are characters that are hard to forget.

285 pages.