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A Better Life
by Lionel Shriver
Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Liberal to the extreme, Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.”
As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general—and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.
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Evelyn in Transit
by David Guterson
Radically open-minded, remarkably strong, and unusually perceptive, Evelyn Bednarz has always felt out of step with the world. Easily bored, restless at school, and drawn to unconventional questions about faith and time, she sees through social norms others accept without thought. In search of authenticity, she hitchhikes across the American West, taking odd jobs along the way.
Half a world away, Tsering grows up as a Buddhist monk in Tibet’s remote mountains, eventually rising to the rank of high lama. Their lives converge when Buddhist lamas arrive at Evelyn’s door, revealing that her young son, Cliff, is the reincarnation of the revered Norbu Rinpoche—igniting family turmoil and a media storm.
Written with luminous precision and subtle humor, Evelyn in Transit explores humanity’s quest for transcendence and what it means to live rightly.
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Departure(s)
by Julian Barnes
Departure(s) is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality.
It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness, accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered?
It begins at the end of life – but it doesn’t end there. Ultimately, it’s about the only things that ever really mattered: how we find happiness in this life, and when it is time to say goodbye.
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| The Hitch by Sara LevineRose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti-racist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six-year-old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister-in-law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules—routine, bedtime, homework—and doesn’t overstep. But when Rose’s Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi’s death, but Nathan insists he isn’t grieving, and the dog isn’t dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she’s living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child. |
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This Is Not about Us: Fiction
by Allegra Goodman
When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.
With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman—whose prior collection was heralded as “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life” (The Boston Globe)—returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.
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| This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.
From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.
In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country. |
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Meet the Newmans
by Jennifer Niven
For two decades, Del and Dinah Newman and their sons Guy and Shep have ruled television as America's favorite family. Millions of viewers tune in every week to watch them play flawless, black-and-white versions of themselves. But now it's 1964, and the Newmans' perfection suddenly feels woefully out of touch. Ratings are in free fall, as are the Newmans themselves. Del is keeping an explosive secret from his wife, and Dinah is slowly going numb--literally. Steady, stable Guy is hiding the truth about his love life, and rock 'n roll idol Shep may finally be in real trouble.
When Del--the creative motor behind the show--is in a mysterious car accident, Dinah decides to take matters into her own hands. She hires Juliet Dunne, an outspoken young reporter, to help her write the final episode. But Dinah and Juliet have wildly different perspectives about what it means to be a woman, and a family, in 1964--
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Cannon
by Lee Lai
We arrive to wreckage--a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape--not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend Trish watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline--two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.
Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself―very uncharacteristically―surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.
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Crucible
by John Sayles
As the Great Depression rocks Detroit, Henry Ford — resistant to change and quick to blame the Jews for the economic collapse — slashes salaries and lays off workers, sparking hunger protests and deepening ethnic tensions. African-American employees, already marginalized, are the first to go, while Ford relies on a private army of ex-cons and mobsters to maintain order.
Meanwhile, his ambitious plan to dominate the rubber industry in Brazil falters, with food riots among indigenous workers and a blight devastating thousands of newly planted trees.
John Sayles populates this epic saga with historical figures — Ford, his son Edsel, Harry Bennett, union leader Walter Reuther, and boxer Joe Louis — while honoring the workers whose toil underpinned Ford’s empire. Crucible is a gripping, incisive portrait of ambition, power, and the human cost behind an American legend.
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George Falls Through Time
by Ryan Collett
Newly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral, all the way to the year 1300.
When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon. Despite the barbarity of a medieval world, a servant named Simon helps George acclimate to a simpler, easier existence—until a summons from the King threatens to send his life up in flames.
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