Summertime is family time, but it’s not always a day at the beach. This month’s bumper crop of brood-centric novels plumb catastrophes, coming of age, ruptures and reconciliation.  RED HOOK ROADBy Ayelet Waldman343 pages. Doubleday. $25.95.  Tragedy arrives early in “Red Hook Road.” When the limousine carrying the newlyweds John Tetherly and Becca Copaken to their wedding reception crashes and kills the couple instantly, their families, in-laws for all of an hour, are left to navigate the emotional wreckage and an enormous class divide. Becca’s parents, Iris and Daniel, are New York City intellectuals, branded “from aways” by the locals in Red Hook, the small New England town where they summer. John’s mother Jane, a taciturn, working-class Mainer, cleans the Copakens’ waterfront house. The women clash over everything from where to bury the children to the musical education of Jane’s young niece, a gifted violinist who has bonded with Becca’s grandfather, an ailing virtuoso. Over the course of four summers the extended clans collide as grief knits scraps of loss into the fabric of life.  FATHER OF THE RAINBy Lily King354 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.  There’s divorce, and then there’s Daley Amory’s splintered brood. On one side: a liberal, socially conscious mother who nurtures good deeds more effectively than her own children. On the other, a conservative, booze-soaked dad whose place of worship is his New England country club and who recites pornography on family vacations. With a “Hop in, sugar,” Daley’s mom whisks the 11-year-old girl away, but only temporarily. Daley is simultaneously in thrall and undone by her father, whose succession of wives, spiraling alcoholism and wildly erratic behavior finally push them apart. Years go by, marked by distance and brief, painful visits. Just as Daley is poised to start her dream job and move into a California cottage with her doting boyfriend, her father nosedives, and Daley moves back home and tries to save him.  THE BLIND CONTESSA’S NEW MACHINEBy Carey Wallace207 pages. Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. $23.95.  The Contessa Carolina Fantoni is a 19th-century Italian beauty and a loner who spends her youth in blissfully unattended reverie at a lakeside cottage on her family’s property. Carolina’s childhood friend and neighbor, the eccentric inventor Pellegrino Turri, is older by a decade, but the two are bound by their curiosity and quirks. Shortly after becoming engaged to the town’s most eligible bachelor, Carolina realizes that her eyesight is slowly slipping away. But nobody believes her except for Turri. As the real word fades, Carolina begins to see in her dreams. And when her marriage goes the way of her vision, Carolina and Turri’s long-dormant passion blossoms into something potent enough to inspire the invention of... the typewriter. If the story sounds familiar, that’s because Carey Wallace based her debut novel — it feels more like a fairy tale, really — on a true story.  FINNYBy Justin Kramon366 pages. Random House. $15.  When Finny Short’s mother informs her that “it is unfortunate but true that people judge you on your looks,” Finny responds, “How can I dress if I want to look like an orphan?” So begins the story of a rebellious sprite whose social-climbing mother and Spinoza-quoting father can’t make heads or tails of their odd, frank daughter. Finny finds refuge at the home of her effusive neighbor, Earl, and his father, a narcoleptic pianist. But Earl and Finny’s stolen kiss is the last straw, and it’s off to boarding school for this difficult 14-year-old girl. There she becomes attached to a magnetic New York heiress and an eccentric dorm matron who stick around for Finny’s coming of age, which in contemporary fashion spans two decades. Justin Kramon’s first novel is being published as a paperback original.  THE LOVERSBy Vendela Vida228 pages. Ecco. $23.99.  Numb and rudderless two years into widowhood, Yvonne travels from Vermont to Datca, Turkey — the seaside town where she honeymooned nearly three decades earlier — with a vague plan to reconnect with past happiness. Unsolicited visits from her landlord and his estranged wife, however, invite troubling conversations and memories of her flawed marriage and fraught relationship with her grown daughter, Aurelia, a perennially recovering addict. Yvonne’s disequilibrium deepens as she explores the town’s altered landscape, and an attachment she forms with a Turkish boy she meets at the beach further imperils her prospects for peace of mind. This spare, quietly disturbing novel is the third installment in Vendela Vida’s loose trilogy about women in crisis: even its concluding epiphany is set in a sandstorm.  WORK SONGBy Ivan Doig275 pages. Riverhead Books. $25.95.  It’s 1919 in bustling Butte, Mont., the copper capital of the world, when Morris Morgan steps off the train and into a fiery labor dispute involving the Anaconda mining company, the radical Wobbly agitators and the local union members. A charming intellectual with a dangerous secret, Morrie endears himself to Grace, a young widow who runs a boardinghouse, and to a rancher turned librarian, Sam Sandison. But after a chance encounter with his former student Rabrab (who along with Morrie was last seen in Mr. Doig’s 2006 novel “The Whistling Season”), he is catapulted into the nerve center of the mineworkers’ union and the crosshairs of Anaconda’s thugs. World War I has just ended, but evergreen themes abound: environmental catastrophe, mine safety and corporate corruption.
Novels on family subjects by Ayalet Waldman, Lily King, Carey Wallace, Justin Kramon, Vendela Vida and Ivan Doig.