The Brambles
By Eliza Minot

There's a startling revelation—the kind that turns an extended family upside down—in Eliza Minot's The Brambles. But read this novel of three adult siblings and their terminally ill father for its deeper discoveries: how family members muddle through loneliness, miscommunication, and loss, and how a harried mother of three young children ("a waitress, a handmaiden, a love slave… Humiliated and adored… every day varying, yet every day the same") keeps from going off the deep end.