Rebecca Shapiro

It’s a common comparison: Your odds of being struck by lightning are far better than those of winning the grand jackpot in the lottery. But they’re still quite low, at around one in one million for someone living in the U.S. in any given year (the odds increase over a lifetime). Man Alive!, an intriguing novel by Mary Kay Zuravleff, tells the tale of one man who beats these odds with dramatic consequences.

Dr. Owen Lerner is a successful psychiatrist with a workaholic-like focus on his practice, specializing in children with neurodevelopment disorders such as autism. Summer weeks spent at a Delaware beach house with his family are one of the few times he allows himself to unwind. It’s on the last evening of one such vacation, when he and his wife and three children are on their way to dinner, that the odds of a lightning strike instantly becomes 100% for Owen. As he places a quarter in the parking meter, all the proper elements align . . . and he is literally knocked off his feet.

The Lerner family’s post-lightning-strike implosion makes up the meat of this tale. And meat actually plays a large role, as Owen, in his recovery, becomes obsessed with the art of barbecue—likely as a reaction to the odor of his own burning flesh following the hit. It isn’t just barbecue that consumes him; the euphoria he experiences immediately after being struck leads to a “chasing the dragon” type journey as Owen strives not only to explain those feelings but to bring them back. Suddenly he is as “neuroatypical” as the patients he’s devoted his life to, and this irony is not lost on him.

Owen’s family watches his transformation with both fascination and fear. Wife Toni’s resentment at having to become an instant caretaker to her physically and mentally altered husband is realistically portrayed, although her angst-ridden passages can become tiresome. His college-age twin sons, Ricky and Will, have their own traumatized reactions: Will in particular experiences a downslide that sometimes strains credulity. Teenage daughter Brooke displays a mix of guilt, revulsion and adolescent self-centeredness that is on the mark, but a subplot focused on her unhealthy high-school romance seems extraneous.

Yes, the Lerner family members can be annoying; but who among us can’t relate to irritating relatives? It’s likely that readers will want to complete the journey with a family that, despite their extraordinary circumstances, may remind them very much of their own.

Author J. Courtney Sullivan made a name for herself in 2009 with a smart, incredibly resonant debut, Commencement, about four unlikely friends during their college years at Smith and the turbulent 20-something years that followed. With her sophomore effort, Sullivan turns from friendships to family, writing with the same warmth and nuance as in Commencement, but pushing her characters further, creating an even more complex and satisfying whole in Maine.

Maine revolves around the Kelleher family, a large Boston Irish-Catholic clan that has been vacationing for nearly 60 years at the same beachfront cottage, which fell into their laps in a bit of uncharacteristic luck. Weather-worn but packed with years of sun-soaked memories, the cottage was once a uniting force for the Kellehers, but in recent years, it seems to have been little more than a nuisance, and the family matriarch is preparing to make a rash decision about its future.

As she did in her first novel, Sullivan oscillates between narrators with a remarkable ease in Maine, capturing the summer from the perspectives of Alice Kelleher; her estranged daughter Kathleen, a recovering alcoholic with a holistic California farm; her revered daughter-in-law Ann Marie, who copes with her fledgling children and disappointing marriage through an obsessive dollhouse habit; and granddaughter Maggie, at a painful crossroads in her own life.

In Sullivan’s hands, the four considerably flawed but deeply sympathetic narrators come to life in a meaningful and believable way. Perhaps even more impressive, though, is Sullivan’s ability to again conjure a place so completely through description and careful attention to detail. Damp, salt-laden air and strong cocktails practically emanate from the pages of this pleasing story, which cements Sullivan’s status as a talented young writer to watch.

Few authors are as synonymous with New York City as Pete Hamill, so it is fitting that the Brooklyn-bred darling of The Post and The Daily News returns with a story as frenetic, complicated, harrowing and alive as his beloved town.

We begin Tabloid City at midnight with Sam Briscoe, an aging editor of a daily newspaper, putting the next day’s afternoon edition to bed. But the night is far from over in the city that never sleeps, and anything could happen before the ink hits the page. In the depths of Brooklyn, a young woman cries out for her mother as she suffers the throes of childbirth alone. A legless veteran of the Iraq War wheels through the Upper East Side looking for a place to sleep. An angry young terrorist plots a desperate, defiant act. A cop heading home to an empty house has the terrible instinct that something is dreadfully wrong. And after an elegant dinner party, a socialite—Sam Briscoe’s girlfriend—and her longtime secretary are ruthlessly murdered.

As the night and following day progress, Hamill weaves these seemingly unrelated stories together in a cohesive narrative, showing both the deep chasms and the uncanny connections between the city’s many threads. He writes with an almost cinematic flair, evoking films like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Paul Haggis’ Crash, and as with those movies, the links in the story can at times feel overwhelmingly coincidental, while characters and neighborhoods border on cliché. But despite these flaws, Hamill is, as always, a consummate storyteller, and his prose vibrates with raw energy. With a little suspension of disbelief, Tabloid City is an exciting, thought-provoking read.

On the surface, Molly Fox’s Birthday, originally published in the U.K. and a finalist for the prestigious Orange Prize, feels miniscule in scope—it takes place over the course of one nearly painstakingly ordinary day, within the walls of a small house, largely occupied by just one character. But within these confines lie a treasure chest of memories, which author Deirdre Madden unpacks with perfect precision and which make this very quiet novel scream with importance.

It is the longest day of the summer—Molly Fox’s birthday—but Molly, a world-renowned stage actress, is not at her Dublin home. Rather, she has swapped with an old playwright friend, the unnamed narrator, who has set up shop in Molly’s cottage to work. Over the course of the day, the narrator is visited by figures important to both of their lives—Molly’s troubled brother, Fergus, and perhaps more notably, the third member of their decades-long friendship, an art historian named Andrew.

As the day progresses, the narrator thinks about her life and those of her friends in an achingly real, relatable way. She struggles with her career, particularly as compared to her more successful friend, and quietly muses on the things she once thought she might have had, like a husband and a child. Art, friendship, politics, family and especially the theater preside as pillars of various strengths in the narrator’s mind, and are dealt with deftly and beautifully. And though the narrator is the only consistent character throughout the novel, others, particularly Molly herself, look on as if from offstage.

Many writers would buckle and fail quickly without a more obvious plotline, but Madden soars, creating a mosaic of memories that is not only insightful and compassionate, but remarkably compelling as well. With much flashier competition on the market, Madden’s subtle hand is a rare and very welcome commodity.