We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

Reviewed by Linda:Local author Catherine Newman has, in her first adult novel, performed a magic trick, describing in heartbreaking scenes the death in hospice of the narrator Ash’s best friend, Edi, a wife and mother of a young child, ...

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He...

Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred ...

Olga Dies Dreaming

by Xochitl Gonzalez

A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots, all in the wake of Hurricane María. It's 2017, and Olga and her bro...

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her ow...

Black Cake

by Charmaine Wilkerson

In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother's death and her hidden past — a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to Cal...

The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being. After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begin...

Unsettled Ground

by Claire Fuller

At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around...

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

Reviewed by Janet:Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, thank you very much. She is quite settled and safe in her routine, keeping herself to herself, moving from work to home and back, with 2 bottles of vodka on the weekend. Yet her carefu...

Call Me American: A Memoir

by Abdi Nor Iftin

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines lan...

Normal People

by Sally Rooney

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at...

Out of Darkness, Shining Light

by Petina Gappah

The captivating story of the loyal men and women who ensured explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone's remains, papers, and maps could be returned home to England.

The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

Reviewed by Linda:Jennifer Acker of Amherst College is editor of the school's literary magazine The Common and organizer of LitFest, which brings distinguished writers to campus each spring. This elegantly written and thought-provoking no...

Five-Carat Soul

by James McBride

An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American ...

There There

by Tommy Orange

Reviewed by Janet:

This powerful novel begins as a series of loosely connected short stories, but turns into something so much more in this exploration of the plight of the urban Native American. Each of the characters follows their own path...

Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

Reviewed by Janet:

When things don’t go to plan in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Elena Richardson finds herself struggling to make sense of it all. The secrets she uncovers about her tenants Mia and Pearl threaten to disrupt her own...

The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

Reviewed by Linda:Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, this novel is for and about writers, teachers of writing, and those who love fine writing. The narrator is a woman who loses her beloved literary mentor to suicide and finds h...

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

by Nicole Chung

Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.

The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

This dazzling debut novel tells a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community — and the things that ultimately haunt us most.

Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

A first novel by an award-winning writer explores the imbalances that spark and sustain dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor's relationship with a famous older writer, an unexpected New York ...

Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents — artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs — Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changi...

A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging. As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadi...

The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts in the early 2000s who, after being swindled by a finanical advisor, feels opportunity passing him by. In the paranoid days after 9/11, a New York money manager, Philip Hadi, moves his ...

They May Not Mean To, But They Do

by Cathleen Schine

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health...

Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

A man bears witness to his grandfather's deathbed confessions, which reveal his family's long-buried history and his involvement in a mail-order novelty company, World War II, and the space program.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Reviewed by Linda:

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, this novel follows three generations of an African American family in Mississippi over the course of a few days. Ward, a two-time winner of the NBA, writes powerfully of how p...

Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows pregnant thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a ...

The Music Shop

by Rachel Joyce

It's 1988. The CD has arrived. Sales of the shiny new disks are soaring on high streets in cities across the country. Meanwhile, down a dead-end street, Frank's music shop stands small and brightly lit, jam-packed with records of every kind...

Walking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

After neurosurgeon Eitan Green hits and kills an African migrant while driving on a deserted road late at night, the victim's wife tracks him down and confronts him, and her price for silence shatters his safe existence.

All Grown Up

by Jami Attenberg

Hiding the truth about her unhappiness and struggles with anxiety from everyone including her family, best friend, and therapist, Andrea Bern joins her loved ones in a reevaluation of family strength in the wake of her newborn niece's hea...

When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

Reviewed by Janet:

Paul Kalanithi was a promising young neurosurgeon on the verge of completing his residency. A talented doctor, he sought to connect with his patients as individuals, not merely problems to be fixed in surgery. Yet a diag...

News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an elderly widower and itinerant news reader, is offered fifty dollars to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, from Wichita Falls back to her ...

Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

From an internationally acclaimed novelist, the suspenseful and heartbreaking story of a family ripped apart by secrets and driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences. Isma is free. After years of watching out for h...

The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

Reviewed by Linda:

I once met a librarian from the Berkshires who told me that many of the new houses in his hometown have helicopter pads in the backyards. I thought of him as I devoured Jonathan Dee’s new novel about a small Berkshire town...

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

This cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story.

Pachinko

by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is sav...

Be Frank with Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

Reclusive literary legend M. M. 'Mimi' Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time ...

Strangers in Their Own Land

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conserva...

Man at the Helm

by Nina Stibbe

When her charmed life is shattered by her father's abandonment, young Lizzie is forced to move to a gossipy, disapproving village where her sister and she resolve to find a new man for their dysfunctional mother.

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

Shocking her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort in 1939 London, socialite Mary teaches evacuated and marginalized children and bonds with her employer, Tom, before their romance is challenged by a painful love tri...

The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeyed to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years. When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar’s fathe...

Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

This debut memoir by an award-winning paleobiologist traces her childhood in her father's laboratory, her longtime relationship with a brilliant but wounded colleague, and the remarkable discoveries they have made both in the lab and during ...

My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

The story begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets, the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow — and as their paths ...

The Summer Before the War

by Helen Simonson

Arriving in the village of Rye, England, in 1914, Beatrice Nash, a young woman of good family, becomes the first female teacher of Latin at the local school and falls in love with her sponsor's nephew.

The State We're In: Maine Stories

by Ann Beattie

An award-winning short story master presents a collection of new, linked tales that impart the diverse perspectives of women orbiting around a disaffected teen who is staying with relatives while attending summer school.

The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

Dreaming of an exotic life in Paris while coming of age in a St. Thomas refugee community, young Rachel is forced to marry a widower before falling scandalously in love and becoming the mother of Impressionist master Camille Pissarro.

Nora Webster

by Colm Tóibín

Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín's superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable, and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man...

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House

by Kate Andersen Brower

An intimate account of White House life from the perspectives of the service staff from the Kennedys through the Obamas details their friendships, marriages, everyday activities, and elaborate state dinners.

Dimestore: A Memoir

by Lee Smith

In her first work of nonfiction, an author recounts her early days in the small coal town of Grundy, Virginia — and beyond.

Three Strong Women

by Marie NDiaye; translated by John Fletcher

The U.S. release of a Prix Goncourt-winning novel follows the intertwined stories of three women who discover the power of saying no, including a French-born lawyer who must save a victim of her tyrannical fathe...

Euphoria

by Lily King

Frustrated by his research efforts and depressed over the death of his brothers, Andre Banson runs into two fellow anthropologists, a married couple, in 1930s New Guinea and begins a tumultuous relationship with them.

A Strangeness in My Mind

by Orhan Pamuk

Selling Turkish spirits on the street and dreaming of becoming rich in a rapidly developing Istanbul, street youth Melvut Karatas elopes with the wrong woman and builds a family over decades marked by a series of dead-end jobs and an endurin...

Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

Reviewed by Linda:

In Amherst author Judith Hooper’s fascinating work of historical fiction it wasn’t hysteria that kept the brilliant Alice James trapped in bed. Sister to the famous writer Henry and psychologist William, she suffered as m...

Deep South

by Paul Theroux

One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked. Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklor...

Delicious

by Ruth Reichl

Working as a public relations hotline consultant for a once-prestigious culinary magazine, Billie Breslin unexpectedly enters a world of New York restaurateurs and artisanal purveyors while reading World War II letters exchanged between a pl...

The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

Life in a West Bank settlement from one of Israel's most acclaimed young novelists, skewering the complex, often absurd reality of life in Israel, the West Bank settlers, and the nation's relationship to the United States.

Dear Life

by Alice Munro

This collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate that turn a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Set in the countryside and towns of L...

Some Luck

by Jane Smiley

An epic novel that spans thirty years in the lives of a farm family in Iowa, telling a parallel story of the changes taking place in America from 1920 through the early 1950s.