These short story collections explore the complicated bonds of families.

1. The Blue Bedroom and Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher

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“With her evocative bestsellers The Shell Seekers and Coming Home, Rosamunde Pilcher opened your heart to the extraordinary powers of love, heartbreak, and joy. Now, in The Blue Bedroom and Other Stories, she invites you to share the full spectrum of life’s moods and emotions through her very first collection of short stories. From a child’s first knowledge of death, through city and country, to an elderly woman’s newfound freedom, The Blue Bedroom is a welcoming experience full of the honesty and warmth unique to Rosamunde Pilcher.”

2. Family Furnishings: Selected Stories by Alice Munro

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“Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.”

3. Pretty Chrysanthemum and Other Stories by Nancy Lane

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“These sixteen stories remind readers how family is at the core of human experience and how relationships, especially those between parent and child, rely on the power of love to overcome challenges. Throughout these historical and contemporary tales, the pull of family, the power of love, and unshakeable human decency prevail.”

4. The Rose Thieves: Stories by Heidi Jon Schmidt

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A hot-tempered Irish mother, a sentimental, futures-trading father, and their four children live in a New England farmhouse whose idyllic facade disguises a domestic battleground of familial love and hate.

5. The Laws of Evening: Stories by Mary Yukari Waters

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“In this dazzling debut collection, Mary Yukari Waters, a remarkably gifted, award-winning Japanese-American writer, opens a window onto a foreign culture as she reveals the universal humanity of her characters. These uncommonly elegant and assured stories explore Japanese society caught between the long shadow of World War II and the rapid advance of Westernization. The women and children who inhabit these crystalline tales have lost husbands and fathers in the war and now face a world dramatically altered by Western influence.”

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