5 On My TBR | Siblings

Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I just have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Siblings

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

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Title: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
Author: Kim Edwards
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (2005)
No. of Pages: 401


Synopsis: 

It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr. David Henry delivers his wife’s twins is a night that will haunt five lives forever.

For though David’s son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down’s syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse.

As grief quietly tears apart David’s family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.

Title: Housekeeping
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2001
No. of Pages: 219

Synopsis: 

‘A modern classic that “brilliantly portrays the impermanence of all things, especially beauty and happiness’ (Paul Gray, Time), Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.” Ruth and Lucille’s struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Publisher: Wiedenfield & Nicholson
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 463

Synopsis: 

There are two sides to every story…

Who are you?

What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren’t made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what did happen to Nick’s beautiful wife?

Title: The Mill on the Floss
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Premier Classics
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 598

Synopsis: 

George Eliot’s semi-autobiographical novel about the brilliant Maggie Tulliver epitomizes the author’s ability to find the drama at the heart of normal lives playing out in tandem with the universal themes of nature and society. Bankruptcy, death, flood, even the very flow of the river guide and often frustrate human ambition in The Mill on the Floss. Maggie and her brother Tom have grown up with a loving but hapless father who loses his living to the courts, leaving Tom to pay his debts and Maggie to languish in their impoverished house until she can escape into rich society with the help of her cousin, Lucy. Tender and tragic, The Mill on the Floss combines rich vignettes of family life with an elegant portrayal of the novel’s heroine. At the same time, Eliot offers a scathing critique of the Victorian era’s limiting social mores in matters of the heart while also celebrating many kinds of love.

Title: The Outsiders
Author: S.E. Hinton
Publisher: Speak
Publishing Date: 1995 (1967)
No. of Pages: 180

Synopsis: 

No one ever said life was easy. But Ponyboy is pretty sure that he’s got things figured out. He knows that he can count on his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. And he knows that he can count on his friends – true friends who would do anything for him, like Johnny and Two-Bit. And when it comes to the Socs – a vicious gang of rich kids who enjoy beating up on “greasers” like him and his friends – he knows that he can count on them for trouble. But one night someone takes things too far, and Ponyboy’s world is turned upside down….