Carla Jean Whitley

If we’re all stars in the stories of our own lives, then the people we pass on the street, in the elevator or in the park are extras. And when those stories are lived out in the apartments, coffee shops and streets of New York City, there are an awful lot of extras. Although New York residents often feel anonymous among the city’s millions, proximity means their lives repeatedly brush against one another’s.

That proves to be the case in Visible City, the charming new novel by best-selling writer Tova Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary, The Outside World). Nina, a mother of two and a former attorney, often checks out of her own story and into those of others by observing a couple whose apartment is visible from her own Upper West Side flat. The older couple’s calm interactions enchant her—until one evening she spots a quarrelsome young couple in their place. Who are these people? How do they relate?

Nina’s curiosity is satiated after she meets the male half of the older couple at a neighborhood Starbucks. And as she continues to encounter Leon around the neighborhood, her veil of anonymity slips away. “[I]f you kept talking to strangers,” Leon realizes, “eventually they became friends.”

That friendship gradually reveals parallels between these two families on opposite sides of the street. Leon’s wife, Claudia, an art professor, has lost the motivating thirst for her work, just as Nina has. But therapist Leon and attorney Jeremy, Nina’s husband, continue to hide themselves away in their occupations. Meanwhile, Leon’s daughter Emma, who is half of the young couple Nina spotted, begins to babysit for Nina’s children.

As the neighbors’ paths continue to cross, the metaphorical walls behind which they hide fall away. “Even in this city of so many people, there was no escape from the expanding web of intersections,” Leon realizes.

In Visible City, Mirvis steps away from the Orthodox Jewish society that has populated her previous work to explore these entanglements of big-city life. As the lives of Mirvis’ three couples become increasingly intertwined, readers’ curiosity will be piqued, just as Nina’s was when these neighbors were merely strangers.

Rachel Joyce’s masterful second novel, Perfect, explores how one event can unravel a life. Byron Hemmings is an ordinary British schoolboy in 1972. He’s not the most sociable child, but Byron has a best friend in James Lowe. Like many adolescents, he’s got a curious mind. And so, when James reads in a newspaper that two seconds will be added to time, Byron becomes fixated on how, when and what the ramifications might be.

And then one morning, as his mother drives him and his sister to school, Byron sees his watch pause. In those two seconds everything changes for Byron.

Byron has witnessed an accident that no one around him, including his mother Diana, seems to have noticed. After careful deliberation, Byron mentions the accident to his mother and releases himself from the torment of carrying the secret—only to pass that torment, and then some, along to her.

Byron’s story is juxtaposed, often in alternating chapters, with the present-day experiences of a man named Jim, a former psychiatric patient who has been forced to make his way in the world after his residential facility closes. His obsessive-compulsive disorder and an unwillingness to discuss his past make it hard for some people to understand him.

It isn’t immediately clear what ties the story of an 11-year-old boy to the parallel narrative of a 55-year-old former psychiatric patient, other than geography. But as their stories unfold, they begin to intertwine in surprising, heartbreaking ways. Thanks to Joyce’s skilled character development and storytelling, readers will find it easy to lose themselves in this emotional tale.

Dr. Robert Heller understands cats. And dogs. Heck, and snails—whatever animal you call your own, “Dr. Bob” can take care of it. In fact, his veterinary skills are so cherished that Dr. Bob is truly living his dream: He works in a small, New York City-based veterinary practice where his patients’ owners have come to trust him, reports to a vet whom he has long admired, writes an advice column in one of the city’s newspapers and has married a woman who is nearly too good to be true.

Just don’t turn to him with people problems. Those aren’t his forte. Maybe it’s because of Bob’s family—his brother Ted, for example, is driven by appearances and willing to step on anyone to get what he wants. It’s behavior that Bob’s parents enable. “In truth, most humans were complete ciphers to me,” Bob explains. “But I could pet the head of a horse, look into its eyes, and absolutely understand what he wanted, what was pulsing through that insanely strong body.”

After they’ve married, Bob’s wife Anna asks him why, of all the people out there, he decided to trust her. That’s a question Bob can’t quite answer; all he knows is that when he found her, he found a piece of himself.

But Bob can’t live his life in communication with only animals, and when tragedy strikes, he’s forced to cope with the consequences. Although Ask Bob appears at first to be a story about a man who understands animals at the expense of human relationships, it’s actually a story about family—human, feline, canine and otherwise. And as Bob explores the similarities between humans and animals, he realizes that familial relationships can affect who you become, but a person can also triumph over his or her past. In Ask Bob, author Peter Gethers (The Cat Who Went to Paris) has created a story with immense heart.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Peter Gethers for Ask Bob.

Rosemary Cooke is, in many ways, an ordinary girl raised in an ordinary family. Her father is a behavioral psychologist who always brings his work home, and her mother is his supportive better half. As the youngest, Rose admires her older brother, Lowell, and is jealous because she thinks he loves her sister, Fern, the most. In fact, Rose thinks everyone would pay more attention to her if Fern weren’t around.

But that’s where the Cookes are different from most families. Rose and Fern are their father’s work: Fern is a chimp, being raised as a daughter in a human family.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, author Karen Joy Fowler (Wit’s End, The Jane Austen Book Club) offers a masterful account of a woman unraveling a tangle of family history, memory and the complex emotions that arise from the way she was raised.

As a girl, Rose’s identity was forged against her will, leaving her marked as “monkey girl”—like most siblings, Rose’s movements and attitudes mimicked her sister’s. Rose wanted to know life without Fern.

And then she did. One summer, Rose was sent to her grandparents’ house while the family moved. When she returned home, Fern had been sent away for good. And Rose quickly discovered life wasn’t as she had expected it would be. “If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting everyone, I found quite the opposite,” she says. Years later, Rose is left to explore the balance between memory and fiction. Are her recollections of her sister’s departure and the days preceding it accurate, or has she repressed some events and adjusted those memories with time? Could her parents be trusted after promising to love Fern and Rose just the same, but giving Fern away? Why was her sister forced to leave?

Fowler’s extensive research into chimp behavioral studies and her understanding of psychology (like her character’s dad, Fowler’s own father was a behavioral psychologist) show up throughout this thoughtful novel. In the end, readers are left to ponder with Rose perhaps the most important question raised: What makes us human, anyway?