They May Not Mean To, But They Do

The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don’t just grow, they grow old, and the clan’s matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy’s beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. And they didn’t count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as her own kids.

The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called "full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [Jane] Austen’s own" (The New York Review of Books), and here she is at her best. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is an intensely human, profound, and honest examination of three generations, all coming of age together.

• For readers of Rachel Joyce and Anne Tyler