| Early morning riser by Katherine HeinyWhat it's about: the ever-evolving relationship between second-grade teacher Jane and the local Casanova, Duncan. Over 17 years, they form an unconventional family that includes his ex-wife and a childlike coworker.
Why you might like it: Buzzing with humor and peopled with characters who are easy to root for, this engaging tale of quotidian small-town life is a heartwarming portrayal of community.
For fans of: Emma Straub's All Adults Here; Amy Poeppel's Musical Chairs. |
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| Caul baby by Morgan JerkinsStarring: three generations of Melancons, a Harlem family of healers who sell their caul only to wealthy white families while ignoring their Black neighbours. Until, that is, a child they're raising as their own starts looking into her own past.
Read it for: the consequences of Harlem's gentrification over 20 years; the intergenerational links among two Black families; the questions of belonging and identity; the touches of magical realism.
Read this next: The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. |
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The fogging
by Luke Horton
Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he hasn’t had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during ‘the fogging’, a routine spraying of pesticide, the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens.
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Just like you
by Nick Hornby
The person you are with is just like you - same background, same age, same interests. The perfect match. And it is a disaster. Then, when and where you least expect it, you meet someone new. You seem to have nothing in common and yet, somehow, it feels totally right. Nick Hornby's brilliantly observed, tender but also brutally funny new novel gets to the heart of what it means to fall surprisingly and headlong in love with the best possible person - someone who is not just like you at all.
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The interpreter from Java
by Alfred Birney
In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew.
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The book of lost names
by Kristin Harmel
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it's an image of a book she hasn't seen in sixty-five years, a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names. The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II, an experience Eva remembers well, and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin's Zentral, und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don't know where it came from, or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?.
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The standardization of demoralization procedures: A novel
by Jennifer Hofmann
On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara's vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, twenty-five years earlier, infiltrated an American research institute dedicated to weaponizing the paranormal. Now, on the day the Berlin Wall falls and Zeiger's mind begins to crumble, his past transgressions have come back to haunt him. Who is the real Lara, what happened to her, and what is her connection to these events? As the surveiller becomes the surveilled, the mystery is both solved and deepened, with unexpected consequences.
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| The night always comes by Willy VlautinStarring: 30-year-old Portland, Oregon waitress Lynette, who's been working multiple jobs to buy the house that she, her mother, and her disabled brother are living in.
What happens: This is a heart-wrenching novel from an author who specialises in the downtrodden, so it will come as no surprise that the initial deal Lynette has worked out fails...and she's moved by desperation to consider other, more dangerous options to secure housing for her family.
Read it for: an exploration of the perils of gentrification; the fully realised and sympathetic characters; Lynette's inner strength. |
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Monogamy: A novel
by Sue Miller
Annie is not the first love of Graham's life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, and yet so well matched: the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham's first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them. Then the unthinkable happens. Now Annie stumbles in the dark: did she know all there was to know about the man who loved her? If no marriage is without its small indiscretions, how great does a betrayal have to be to be to break it?.
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| This close to okay by Leesa Cross-SmithWhat happens: When recently divorced therapist Tallie Clark spots a man standing on the wrong side of a bridge railing, she stops her car and convinces him to join her for coffee instead of jumping.
Then what? The two spend a weekend together, sharing their troubles...but not their heart-wrenching secrets.
Why you might like it: Alternating between the two characters' perspectives, this moving tale is both intense and humorous, and eloquently portrays both hopelessness and hope. |
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| Vanessa Yu's magical Paris tea shop by Roselle LimStarring: Chinese American Vanessa Yu, who's inherited the ability to prophesy the future, just like her talented aunt, who runs a tea shop in Paris.
What happens: After one too many tragic predictions, Vanessa flees to Paris and her aunt Evelyn, to learn how to control -- and perhaps accept -- the gift she considers a curse.
For fans of: Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, Yaffa Santos' A Taste of Sage. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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