Reese, Jenna, Oprah, Katie and SJP Recs and More…
There is no doubt everyone can find something they like on this list below. Kin, Black Bag, London Falling, The Plunge, Lake Effect and The Rest of Our Lives rise to the top for me!
The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave (thriller)
How far would you go for a second chance?
Five years after her husband, Owen, disappeared, Hannah Hall and her stepdaughter, Bailey, have settled into a new life in Southern California. Together, they’ve forged a relationship with Bailey’s grandfather Nicholas and are putting the past behind them.
But when Owen shows up at Hannah’s new exhibition, she knows that she and Bailey are in danger again.
Hannah and Bailey are forced to go on the run in a relentless race to keep their past from catching up with them. As a thrilling drama unfolds, Hannah risks everything to get Bailey to safety—and finds there just might be a way back to Owen and their long-awaited second chance.
A gripping, rich, and deeply moving novel about the power of forgiveness, The First Time I Saw Him picks up right where the epilogue for the “genuinely moving” (The New York Times) The Last Thing He Told Me left off, giving readers the eagerly awaited and absolutely exhilarating sequel to Dave’s global blockbuster.
In Her Defense by Philippa Malicka (thriller)
As a sensational celebrity libel trial unfolds, a young woman at the periphery secretly wields the power to make or break the case. But with her own hidden past, will she dare to speak up?
Everyone is watching. Only one person knows the truth.
The whole country has been riveted by the trial: Beloved TV star and national treasure Anna Finbow, standing in court, accusing her daughter’s therapist Jean Guest of brainwashing her daughter Mary for her own financial gain. Jean insists Mary’s traumatic memories arise from her upbringing and her time studying at a prestigious art school in Rome; wounds only Jean’s therapy can heal. But as the trial unfolds, it’s Augusta “Gus” Bird, Anna’s former employee—a seemingly insignificant bystander, a nobody—who holds the key to unraveling the tangled web of lies and deceit.
What really happened to Mary in Rome? And if her memories can’t be trusted, how will they ever uncover the truth behind her estrangement? Twisty and propulsive, In Her Defense is a compulsively readable debut for fans of Lucy Foley and Laura Dave.
Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochauser (fiction)
Twice-widowed, Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband’s title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters’ future through marriage.
When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters―only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the wellbeing of the stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.
As if Bridgerton met Circe, and exhilarating to its core, Lady Tremainereimagines the myth of the evil stepmother at the heart of the world’s most famous fairy tale. It is a battle cry for a mother’s love for her daughters, and a celebration of women everywhere who make their own fortunes.
Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns (fiction)
From the author of Mercury and Shiner comes a novel about the bond between two female folk singers, the love stories that haunt them, and the music that brings them together to burn bright.
Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess in 1973, with two wildly beloved albums to her name and a hidden history of impossible heartbreak. When she sets foot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage, a far cry from the mountain that raised her, Elle gives the biggest performance of her life. Then, to the dismay of shocked fans, her producer, and the man who still loves her, she vanishes.
Almost two decades later, eighteen-year-old Marijohn Shaw is spending her summer pumping gas, writing songs on her broken mandolin, and longing for a mother. Her father, Abe, has always sworn he was the last person to see Elle Harlow alive, but when a meteor strikes the woods of their sleepy Pennsylvania town and a piece of Elle’s past emerges from the wreckage, the truth of her disappearance sets fire to everything Marijohn believes about herself, her music, and her ability to love with abandon.
Wait for Me exalts the lush hills of Appalachia and the bright lights of Nashville as it reveals the legacy of Elle Harlow, the bold voice that defined her, the intimate betrayal that undid her, and the unexpected faith of another young woman determined to resurrect her.
One and Only by Maureen Goo (women fiction)
She knows what her happily ever after looks like. And it’s not him.
Cassia Park believes in soul mates. Fated love stories. It’s her family business, after all—for centuries, from Korea to Los Angeles, Park women have peered into clients’ past lives to find their one true love, their fated. This magical secret is why One & Only Matchmaking has a 100% guarantee…for everyone but Cassia.
For ten years, Cass has been searching for her fated, a man named Daniel Nam. But he’s still nowhere to be found.
And so, on the eve of her 40th birthday, Cass decides to do something for herself. She impulsively has a fling with Ellis. He’s twenty-eight, indecently handsome, and not destined to be the love of her life. But she’s surprised by their connection and their fling feels like something more—up to the moment he introduces her to his boss…Daniel Nam.
As she battles between fate and chance, head and heart, a family secret is revealed that will make her question everything she’s ever known. Cassia will have to decide if she’ll follow her fate…or make her own.
Homeschooled by Stefan Merril Block (memoir)
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son’s early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.In this “stunning debut memoir” (Jenna Bush Hager, The Today Show), Block beautifully reflects on his experiences in both traditional and at-home education systems, delving into:
Kin by Tayari Jones (literary fiction)
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
More than Enough by Anna Quindlen (women fiction)
A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life—from the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of After Annie
No one knows you like your book club.
High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.
But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.
Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (fiction)
“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
Room 706 by Eli Levenson (thriller)
A married woman is trapped with her lover in a hotel under siege: If she knew it would end this way, would it ever have begun?
Kate’s children and her husband are her whole world. Since marrying young, she’s dedicated her life to making her little family grow. But in the last few years, she’s carved out something just for herself: hours stolen away with another man. After one midday tryst with her lover, Kate’s double life is thrown into chaos when she turns on the TV to find their hotel has been overtaken by an unnamed, dangerous group. As Kate’s life hangs in the balance, she is faced with “a gripping exploration of the murky grey areas of marriage, relationships, and womanhood” (Hazel Hayes).
Room 706 is a “tense exploration of desire” (Alina Grabowski). Raw, unsettling, and deeply human, it compels you to ask: Would I feel guilt, regret . . . or relief?
“Poignant, immersive, and utterly human, I adored this brilliant novel.”
—Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit
Tokyo Express Seicho Matsumoto (mystery)
From “Japan’s Agatha Christie” (The Sunday Times): A secluded bay. An apparent lovers’ suicide. And a pair of detectives with a nagging suspicion that the pieces don’t add up. Can you solve one of the most astonishing literary puzzles ever written?
“An irresistible Hitchcockian gem: a fiendishly plotted crime novel told in crisp, elegant prose.”—Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
In a rocky cove at Hakata Bay, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Standing on the cold beach, the police see nothing to investigate: The flush of the couple’s cheeks and the empty juice bottle speak clearly of cyanide, of a lovers’ suicide. But in the eyes of two men, senior detective Torigai Jutaro and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.
Now widely available in English for the first time, Tokyo Express is celebrated around the world as Seichō Matsumoto’s masterpiece.
Black Bag by Luke Kennard (fiction/satire)
“Tremendously deft . . . it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world.” —Emily Nemens, bestselling author of The Cactus League
An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?
In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
“A genre-defying, big-swing of a novel . . . a sharply funny meditation on masculinity, academia, the modern attention economy, and the quiet desperation of everyday life.” —Andrew Boryga, author of Victim
I Am You by Victoria Redel (historical fiction)
This “lush, sexy, absorbing novel” of historical fiction “brings to life two artists who are inextricably linked in passion and competition” (Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood)
A “captivating” lesbian romance set in the “wonderfully atmospheric” art world of 1600s Amsterdam (Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit)
At eight years old, Gerta Pieters is forced to disguise herself as a boy and sent to work for a genteel Dutch family. When their brilliant and beautiful daughter Maria sees through Gerta’s ruse, she insists that Gerta accompany her to Amsterdam and help her enter the elite, male-dominated art world.
While Maria rises in the ranks of society as a painting prodigy, Gerta makes herself invaluable in every way: confidante, muse, lover. But as Gerta steps into her own talents, their relationship fractures into a complex web of obsession and rivalry—and the secrets they keep threaten to unravel everything.
A mesmerizing historical novel, I Am You is a meditation on gender, an ode to artistic creation, and an unforgettable love story that reimagines the life of renowned still life painter Maria van Oosterwijck during the Dutch Golden Age.
The Optimists by Brian Platzer (humorist fiction)
A beloved schoolteacher chronicles the meteoric rise of his most dazzling student in this ambitious, big-hearted story of learning and legacy.
Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He’s a magician, able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara goes from kindergarten thief to a high school genius, Silicon Valley celebrity, and, finally, animal rights activist turned terrorist.
But to tell Clara’s story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan and his rivalry and friendship with his head of school, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows.
Fiercely original, The Optimists is a love story, a joke book, and a meditation on the meaning of life and death. Tender and insightful, it’s a profound testament to the lessons that reach far beyond the classroom.
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (nonfiction)
From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothingand Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface
In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.
In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.
In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.
The Promise by Damon Galgut (fiction)
WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family’s Black maid. This promise will divide the family—especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history, sure to leave its readers transformed.
“Simply: you must read it.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
★ “This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
A Hymn to Life by Gisele Pelicot (memoir)
The sexual assault that stunned the world. A courageous woman’s rallying call for shame to “change sides.” For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story.
In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her ex-husband and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her, a courageous decision that inspired millions of people around the world. Only four years prior, Gisèle had made the shattering discovery that her partner, Dominique Pelicot, had been secretly drugging and raping her, and inviting strangers to also abuse her in their home for nearly a decade. “Shame must change sides,” Gisèle bravely declared at the opening of the trial in Avignon, France, and the dictum soon became an international rallying cry to radically transform public sentiment and legislation surrounding cases of sexual violence. By the time Dominique and the dozens of men accused were found guilty three and a half months later, Gisèle had become a global figure, and her message—that she and other victims of sexual abuse have no reason to feel ashamed—galvanized a movement that triggered protests and demonstrations around the world.
In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle tells her story for the very first time, not as victim, but as witness. Beginning in 2020, when she received the first phone call from a local police station, Gisèle recounts the fateful investigation that turned her life inside out. With unwavering honesty and devastating grace, she retraces the steps of a life built over the course of five decades, the final decade of her marriage and its hidden abuse, and the long path of emotional healing that ensues. As Gisèle transcends the unfathomable traumas of her past, against all odds, she emerges with a renewed sense of passion and reverence for her life. Part memoir, part act of defiance, A Hymn to Life is a moving story of survival, testimony, and courage, and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who broke her silence, reclaimed her voice, and forced a reckoning.
Trash by Simon Pare-Poupart (memoir)
A Montreal garbageman’s sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to “stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears” . . .
This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean.
Paré-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more “respectable” fields, he is still on a truck — out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.
Includes eight black and white photographs of the author on the job.
His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan.
Trash! — the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada — explains and questions efforts to “clean up” a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else.
Aligned with great books about work from Zola to Orwell to Lucia Berlin, and in dialogue with societal critiques like How To Do Nothing, Trash! will change how you think about your waste and the people who handle it.
The Plunge by Lila Raicek (psychological fiction)
A searing suspense that follows a grieving young woman as she is pulled into a seductive love triangle. As secrets from her past begin to resurface, she is forced to question who’s lying, who she can trust—and whether, in the end, she can trust herself. Perfect for readers of Emma Cline’s The Guest and Raven Leilani’s Luster.
I had become good at hiding things, and most of all from myself.
In the wake of her fiancé’s shocking death, Liv flees to New York where she seeks refuge in the apartment of an old mentor. Broken and lonely, she ventures to a party one night and sees him: Damon, her magnetic former neighbor. At his side is Isabel, a beguiling older widow whose presence intrigues and unsettles her. Desperate for escape, Liv is drawn into their charged dynamic and becomes entangled in their dazzling lives.
But when an investigative journalist invades their circle, threatening to expose a shattering secret from her past, Liv begins to unravel. She embarks on an all-consuming affair with Damon, complicated by her deepening bond with Isabel. Over the course of one scorching summer – moving from Manhattan to the North Fork to Lake Como – their lives collide in a dangerous game of desire and betrayal that pushes them to an explosive edge.
Searing, taut, and propulsive, The Plunge plumbs the depths of obsession and the ravages of grief. Told with razor-sharp prose and emotional precision, it offers an unflinching examination of the deceptions that undo us, and marks the arrival of a resonant and provocative new voice in fiction.
The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman (fiction)
For fans of The Bear, Elizabeth Strout, and Jennifer Egan, The Reservation explores the loves and labors of an ensemble of more than a dozen restaurant workers as they strive to get a perfect meal to the table. On the morning of the most important booking in the long history of the celebrated restaurant, Aunt Orsa’s erupts into chaos with the discovery that twenty-two rib eye steaks have been stolen. Hers is the most august of fine-dining establishments in this Midwestern college town, and tonight Orsa is set to host a large party honoring a very special guest–a bestselling author of national renown. And what’s up with the recent spate of online reviews, from insulting to frankly terrible? Is Orsa, who wants only to be loved, being sabotaged on several fronts? No one is above suspicion, not the Mennonite baker nor the tattooed hard-ass chef de cuisine. Could the culprit be among the servers, or even the inexperienced undergrad working as hostess? Who aside from Rebecca Kauffman–with her talent for portraying such abundant and sympathetic characters–could write with the wit and energy needed to launch all these various individuals whirling through their days with such complex and interactive choreography? Like the works of the mystery guest, The Reservation is a dynamic and captivating story that shows us what it takes to get a beautiful meal to the table.
The Keeper by Tana French (suspense thriller)
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Oprah Daily, Today, BookPage, Goodreads, and more
From the iconic crime writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, comes the third and final book in the million-copy-bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy.
On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.
In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.
“One of the greatest crime novelists writing today” (Vox) crafts a masterwork of atmospheric suspense that brings the story of one of her most beloved characters to a spellbinding conclusion.
The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle (psychological fiction)
“A showdown between mother and daughter that is about as emotionally painful as it gets.” —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times
A powerful, moving mother-daughter story filled with struggle and redemption by Booker-Prize winning author Roddy Doyle
At sixty-six, Paula Spencer—mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor—has finally started to live her life. She has a job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, her boyfriend Joe is a text away when she needs him, and her four children now have the healthy families and petty dramas that Paula could have only hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.
That is until her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day. Nicola is everything Paula wasn’t—independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, a “success”—but now she is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. She has left her family and come to stay. As Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter must untangle past memory, trauma, and revelations to confront what they mean to each other—and who they want to be.
A timely and powerful novel of regrets, reparations, and reconciliations, The Women Behind the Door is a delicately devastating portrait of shame and the inescapable shadow it casts over families. Many readers will welcome the chance to reconnect with this strong, singular character whom we have seen in The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, but all readers will be glad to have Paula in their life now.
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (fiction)
Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar is a searing literary debut novel set in India about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal.
“I would be lying if I say my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” says Antara, Tara’s now-adult daughter.
This is a love story and a story about betrayal—not between lovers but between a mother and a daughter. . . . In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, embarked on a stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing a disheveled, homeless “artist,” all with little Antara in tow.
But now Tara is forgetting things, and Antara is an adult—an artist and married—and must search for a way to make peace with a past that haunts her as she confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter: Is Tara’s memory loss real? Are Antara’s memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Avni Doshi tells a story at once shocking and empathetic of a mother-daughter relationship and a daughter’s search for self. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is the stunning and unforgettable debut of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Cave Mountain by Benjamin Hale (religious cult/memoir)
“The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read. The original Harper’s article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable.” — Patton Oswalt
With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.
This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.
Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (fiction)
A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about marriage, middle-age, and a man at a crossroads in his life.
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.
So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.
Good People by Patmeena Sabit (psychological fiction)
Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.
The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Prosperous, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.
When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?
Like a literary game of ping-pong, Good People compels the reader to reconsider what might have happened even on the previous page. Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, it is a riveting, provocative, and haunting story of family—sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and the communities that claim us as family in difficult times.
Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (literary fiction)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company comes a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades.
It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.
Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.
Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (literary fiction)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company comes a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades.
It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.
Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.
Whidbey by T Kira Madden (fiction)
A portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—a stunning literary achievement and the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved award-winning memoirist T Kira Madden. Presented as a multicast recording, this production brings each voice vividly to life, deepening the novel’s exploration of varied perspectives and interconnected lives.
Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution and plan for revenge.
But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.
Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?
All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun (fiction)
Let the Great World Spin meets My Name Is Lucy Barton in this novel set aboard an aging cruise ship bound for Bermuda, where growing tensions lead three strangers to confront their past regrets and imagine different futures.
It’s Sunday, September 16, 2001. Franny and her husband have traded in their elegant Park Avenue co-op for a suite on board the Sonata, a once-glittering cruise ship with a complicated history now long past its prime. Though they’re not “cruise people,” Franny is determined to host the trip as planned because it’s her mother’s seventieth birthday, or chilsun, a major rite of passage celebrated by Korean families. But as her husband keeps pointing out, Franny and her mother aren’t close, and it is surreal—even wrong—to be on a cruise as the death toll from the attacks on 9/11 continues to rise.
Also on board is Doug, an aging actor and former star of Starlight Voyages, the hit Love Boat–style television series famously filmed on the Sonata. With few professional prospects, a now sober Doug has reluctantly joined his former castmates on a reunion cruise for fans of the show, but he dreads the dark specter of his past misdeeds. Meanwhile, Lucy, the only Black female graduate student in her department at MIT, has uncharacteristically accepted an invitation to join her roommate on the cruise during the height of recruitment season. Lucy’s impulsive decision reflects her growing ambivalence about the tech companies that are trying to hire her, including a new one with a strange-sounding name, Google.
All the World Can Hold beautifully explores how we balance our needs and our wants, as well as the regrets we live with and the chances to set them right. And though it’s not a 9/11 novel, it does remind us that while the great world spins, the interpersonal dramas don’t cease, even as more dire ones play out in the larger world.
Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (dark humor/fiction)
Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.
