Adeline Pelham drives up in a sleek, red sports car to an Amish farm and upends the family inside, claiming to be a long lost daughter from another mother. Sylvia Miller's Old Order family is upended with the arrival of Adeline Pelham. It isn't that Adeline means to be a threat, but her very existence is a reminder of a painful secret. As Sylvia and her mother struggle to come to terms with the news, it is a challenging time to welcome an Englisher--...

"For readers of W.G. Sebald and Daniel Mendelsohn, by a writer whose storytelling is 'devastatingly agile' (New York Times Book Review). Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to be forced to then escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their...

"Bill Griffeth, longtime genealogy buff, takes a DNA test that has an unexpected outcome: 'If the results were correct, it meant that the family I had spent years documenting was not my own.' Bill undertakes a quest to solve the mystery of his origins, a quest which will shake his sense of identity. As he takes us on his journey, we learn about choices made by his ancestors, parents, and others--and we see Bill measure and weigh his own difficult...

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic...