A Pure Heart grapples with the question of how to be many things at once—a condition that afflicts everyone but requires only some to justify their complexities.

Rajia Hassib’s novel follows the divergent lives of two Egyptian sisters, Rose and Gameela Gubran. Rose, an Egyptologist, falls for an American journalist and moves with him to New York. Gameela remains in Egypt, embraces Islam and marries a much older man. The story begins in the aftermath of Gameela’s death due to a suicide bombing during the chaotic years following Egypt’s failed revolution. Slowly, Hassib charts the events leading up to this conclusion, working her way backward through a series of intertwined lives in both Egypt and America. 

Hassib is especially talented at rendering the small details of daily Egyptian life—not in some exoticized fashion but rather as a foundation on which to lay the wide variety of experiences, ideologies and aspirations of the country’s citizenry. These details, found throughout the book, shine. A description of habitual lateness, for example: “What are a few minutes here or there in a country that’s been around for seven thousand years?” There is some hand-holding—not a single Arabic phrase or idiom goes unexplained for the benefit of the Western reader—but for the most part, it works.

What’s most impressive about A Pure Heart isn’t the central tension—how Gameela’s death comes about—but rather the novel’s meditation on the nature of multiple identities. Both sisters struggle to find their places in the world amid their sometimes-warring allegiances to different nations, different professional and personal aspirations and different views of religion. There is a tenderness and honesty in the way Hassib describes the relationship between the two women, and it is in this relationship that the novel is most nuanced.

Some people work to live, but Cassie Hanwell lives to work. Her job as a firefighter—and an extremely good one at that—gives her a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. With grit and unwavering determination, Cassie has worked her way up the ranks of the Austin, Texas, fire department, earning the respect and admiration of her male colleagues. She’s even the first woman to win the department’s prestigious Valor Award. But on the evening of the award ceremony, an impulsive decision, triggered by an encounter with a blast from her past, may jeopardize everything for which Cassie has worked so hard. With her career on the line, Cassie agrees to transfer to an old-school fire department on the outskirts of Boston, where she’ll have to prove herself to her new squad, who have made it clear that there’s no room for a “lady” in their fire station. 

The only person who doesn’t ignore her or treat her with outright hostility is a fellow newcomer, known as the Rookie, who proves to be a different kind of problem—because Cassie decided a long time ago that she would never fall in love, no matter how considerate or attractive or good a cook he might be. There’s no way her career can survive another scandal, but as she spends more time with the Rookie—and begins reconnecting with her estranged mother—Cassie can’t help but wonder if she should let her past go up in flames and make room for something new.

Katherine Center’s latest novel is an emotionally resonant and deeply satisfying love story that features a resilient and courageous heroine with legitimate traumas and obstacles to overcome. Center is a pro at creating characters that readers will root for every step of the way. While Cassie’s happy ending is never truly in doubt, she puts in the work to get there, and it feels well-earned and richly rewarding. 

Hopeful and heartwarming, Things You Save in a Fire is a moving testament to the power of forgiveness and love’s ability to heal, even in the face of life’s worst tragedies.

While the condition generally known as “Minnesota Nice” might seem to imply an unmitigated kindliness, it is more aptly described as passive aggressiveness made palatable by a virtually transparent veneer of civility. This is not to say that hearts of gold fail to beat beneath that veneer, but it might take an ice drill—or a clever wordsmith—to bust through the permafrost.

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal ventures back into the kind of kitchen that made his debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, a success—and from there into the ever-evolving world of beer culture. Early on, the reader gets the sense that sisters Edith and Helen Magnusson were not particularly close during their youth, and that condition is dramatically exacerbated when their inheritance favors one over the other. Hopscotching back and forth between the sisters’ stories over the years, Stradal lays out the triumphs and tragedies that have kept the siblings apart, as well as the story of the granddaughter/great-niece who might be their bridge to reconciliation. 

Elder sister Edith comes across as an archetype of Midwestern sense and sensibility: modest, hard-working, self-deprecating, stoic and just a bit too straight-laced to enjoy life to the fullest. When her pies are touted in the press as the best in the state, she regards the ensuing notoriety as a distraction, if not an impediment. Helen, on the other hand, plays grasshopper to her sister’s ant and revels in her ability to transform her parents’ estate into a brewery that markets “the second-bestselling Minnesota-brewed beer in Minnesota.” Her husband, in a moment of inspiration, crafts the tag line that propels the brand to stardom: “Drink lots, it’s Blotz.” But as fans of Falstaff, Rheingold, Schmidt, Esslinger’s, Jax and others have ruefully noted, chilled and frothy heads oft turn warm and flat, and the fictional Blotz goes plotz. 

With decades of silence and unspoken resentment separating Edith and Helen, it may take something stronger than a stein of stout to reunite them, and Stradal artfully keeps the suspense brewing for over 300 pages.

With apologies to McCann-Erickson’s wildly successful campaign for Miller Lite (you know the one: “Tastes great, less filling”), this book tastes great, is quite filling and never bitter. 

Some fictional worlds have a high threshold for entry, but once entered are sharply and mysteriously illuminating. That’s the truth about CJ Hauser’s second novel, Family of Origin.

In this novel, two estranged half siblings, children of a brilliant but erratic scientist named Ian Grey, meet at a privately owned Gulf Coast island—a former 1960s commune named Leap’s Island. They are there to retrieve Ian’s personal belongings and his secretive scientific research after he drowned swimming in the Gulf. Elsa, a mid-30s grade-school teacher who lives with her mother in Minnesota, and Nolan, her younger half sibling who works in online PR for the San Francisco Giants, enter a disorienting world where Baby Boomer-era scientists and a cultish science-fiction writer have come to investigate “Reversalism,” a theory about the undowny bufflehead, a duck that seems to be devolving, surrendering its evolutionary advantage. They hope to prove that evolution has started running backward.

Elsa and Nolan have a difficult, charged—even sexually charged—relationship that resolves into clearer focus as the narrative moves alternatively from the present into memories of the past and back again to the present. Her father divorced her mother when Elsa was 8, and she has always felt abandoned and resentful of her younger sibling because of how she was displaced. In a scene from their early history, she crawls behind 4-year-old Nolan into a brushy wilderness and then abandons him in a dry, shallow well he is too small to climb out of. As an unhappy adult, she plans to escape the misery of her current confusion and join a program to colonize Mars. Nolan, whose history we learn less about, arrives on the island with a kind of rational passivity, feeling dismissed and dominated by his older sister. Both feel alienated from each other and the adult world, less capable than their parents and trapped by their histories. In the week they spend on the island, they do come to at least a partial resolution—maybe even a sense of being freed from the past.

At times the storyline of Family of Origin creaks and groans and seems overly intricate. But sentence by sentence, Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future.

In the end, Family of Origin is worth a serious read and some serious thought.

Bruce Holsinger is an English professor at the University of Virginia, a medievalist whose first two novels were set in 14th-century London. With his new novel, Holsinger has moved forward seven centuries and across an ocean. The Gifted School is a contemporary story about high-stakes parenting, set in an affluent Colorado suburb.

The novel’s four moms—Rose, Azra, Samantha and Lauren—have been best friends for a decade. Together, they’ve weathered death, divorce, addiction and travel-team sports. When they learn that a charter school for gifted middle and high schoolers will open in Crystal (a fictionalized Boulder), they respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But before long, they’re caught up in the school’s competitive admissions process, each trying to find a hook for her kid.

Although the novel’s point of view shifts with each chapter, Holsinger has made an interesting and smart decision to offer the perspective of only one of the four moms. That’s Rose, an ambitious neurologist who’s exasperated with her husband, Gareth, an underachieving novelist. Other point-of-view characters include Beck, the soccer dad ex-husband of Azra, and Ch’ayña, an immigrant grandmother who cleans houses. We also get the perspectives of three kids: Emma Z., daughter of Samantha, the most affluent mom; Xander, an 11-year-old chess whiz on the autism spectrum; and Tessa, Xander’s troubled 16-year-old sister.

Yes, it’s a lot of characters to keep track of. But the novel’s frequent perspective shifting, interspersed with faux newspaper articles, texts, Facebook posts and video narration, keeps the story moving through the months leading up to the gifted school’s opening. As the story unfolds, we learn that most of the characters harbor secrets, not all of them having to do with parental ambition. These secrets, compounded by a devastating project undertaken by one of the kids, are revealed in the novel’s climactic final act at the school’s open house. An astute reader may predict part of the outcome, but the story still offers satisfying surprises.

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”

Meet the Sorenson sisters.

Wendy, the eldest sister, has always been headstrong. Even as a baby, her powerful will sometimes overwhelmed her mother. Now she’s a young widow, adrift years after her husband’s death and quick to turn to alcohol in an attempt to hide from discomfort.

That discomfort often arises when her sister Violet arrives. Violet is Wendy’s Irish twin. Her picture-perfect family provides glaring contrast to Wendy’s aloneness.

Liza is a tenured professor whose accomplishments are overshadowed by her boyfriend’s depression. She isn’t sure she can help him—but shortly after attaining tenure, Liza learns she’s having his child.

Grace is the baby of the family—a fact she’s acutely aware of even as she faces postgraduate life. She has always felt coddled, as though she isn’t capable of facing the world alone. Grace is trying to find her way in Oregon, hundreds of miles from her family’s Chicago home. But the distance leaves her just as isolated as her youth always has.

The sisters inevitably compare themselves not only to each other but also to their parents, Marilyn and David. The couple met in college in the 1970s, and their ongoing love story is so vibrant that many assume it’s easy. It isn’t. But they continue to turn to one another for love and support, even as they worry about their adult daughters—and the grandson one of the girls gave up for adoption 15 years earlier. Jonah Bendt’s arrival upends what Marilyn and David knew about their daughters, one of whom helped hide another’s pregnancy.

Throughout The Most Fun We Ever Had, debut novelist Claire Lombardo’s characters challenge their self-defined roles and the assumptions they’ve made about their family. This family drama tracks the Sorensens through 40 years, examining the way family ties affect each person’s identity. Lombardo’s tale is an immersive account of family, identity and the tensions that can arise from both.

As a child, Sylvie Lee had a lazy eye, a crooked tooth and a peculiar birthmark that she’s retained into adulthood. Now grown, she’s brilliant and successful. She is cold and even punitive toward people she doesn’t know, but she is capable of passionate love for the few who are close to her. She spent the first nine years of her life in the Netherlands with her grandmother; her mother’s rich cousin, Helena Tan; Helena’s husband, Willem; and their son, Lukas. After that, Sylvie was shipped back to the cramped Queens, New York, apartment of her Ma, Pa and adoring younger sister, Amy.

When Jean Kwok’s latest novel opens, Sylvie has returned to the Netherlands to tend her dying grandmother’s funeral, then vanishes. No wonder: If you were Sylvie, you’d probably want to get as far away from the Dutch branch of your family as possible. Helena hates her, and Willem is handsy. Friends Estelle and Filip, whom Sylvie meets when she returns to the Netherlands, are duplicitous. Sylvie falls in love with Lukas, but it’s an impossible union, not only because they’re second cousins but also because she’s already married to an unfaithful man and Estelle is Lukas’ girlfriend. After Sylvie’s disappearance, Amy burns up her savings to fly to the Netherlands to find her.

On top of the turmoil surrounding Sylvie’s disappearance, Kwok throws in the racism experienced by the Lees in America, and the less expected but often cruder racism the Tans experience in the enlightened Netherlands. Throughout the novel, women struggle to cope with the misogyny found in Chinese, American and Dutch societies, language barriers, class differences, amusing customs (such as the Dutch traditions of giving three kisses in greeting and riding bicycles absolutely everywhere) and irresistible cuisine. Kwok is unafraid to fully translate her characters’ flowery Chinese and contractionless Dutch, which gives the book an unexpected Pearl S. Buck-style flavor. There’s even a cache of valuable jewels passed from mother to daughter that everyone thinks everyone else wants to get their hands on.

The result is a book that is busy, compelling and not a little wild. When you think of it, it is very much like Sylvie herself.

For the first quarter of Oscar Cásares’ quiet, deeply human novel, the reader can be forgiven for believing that the story is a thriller of sorts—a cops-and-robbers narrative about smugglers and federal agents along America’s southern border. Instead, Where We Come From does something altogether different. What begins as a story about Nina, a Mexican-American woman who does a “favor” for her housekeeper by letting smugglers house their human cargo on her property, slowly transforms into a story about the meaning of family and home.

Eventually the smugglers are forced to disband, but one person remains: a small boy, stranded many miles away from his father to the north and his mother to the south. The child, Daniel, comes to befriend Nina’s godson, Orly. Even as Daniel is forced to hide away for fear of deportation, the children form a bond, and much of the novel centers on that bond.

There are many moments of quiet power in Cásares’ story. Among them are short asides in which the fates of minor characters are explained—the small fortunes and misfortunes of their lives—even as these characters pass inconspicuously through the narrative. The novel’s depiction of children’s daily lives is particularly well done, especially that of Orly, who is forced to navigate a world full of adults who either seem to trust him but not care for him, or care for him but not trust him.

Where We Come From is not the kinetic, suspenseful novel its opening pages will make many readers believe it is. This is a good thing. It moves instead at a slow, deliberate pace, much more concerned with what it means to make a life in a place where so many systems and institutions are designed to make you feel precarious and, in some way, permanently unrooted.

It’s easy for an author to get sucked into familiar tropes when writing about families; like venturing into a blind canyon, writers can stumble into cliches and have difficulty finding their way out. But with her latest novel, There’s a Word for That, Sloane Tanen is evidently undaunted by these common pitfalls, as she presents us with not one but two families with serious issues.

We first meet the Kesslers through Janine. A former child star on a wildly popular sitcom, she’s now in her early 40s and washed up. She’s still dependent on her beloved father, Marty, a just-as-washed-up Hollywood producer, and has no prospects. We first find her signing on for a cartoon-drawing class even though she can’t draw. Indeed, the class leads to one of her nastier humiliations in a lifetime of humiliations. Janine may have been the child star, but her late mother always preferred her beautiful sister, Amanda, now the soon-to-be-divorced mother of twins Jaycee and Hailey, who are replicating the same toxic sisterly dynamic as their mother and aunt.

Marty is a heroin addict. He doesn’t do anything as scuzzy as shoot up, but he does need his bumps once in a while, the same way he needs women. The latest is Gail, who is more of a minder than a lover and who probably isn’t as greedy as Janine thinks she is. Marty is Tanen’s great creation. Funny, big-hearted and still vigorous enough to make the reader imagine what he was like when he was firing on all thrusters, Marty is so charismatic that he can convince an attendant at the rehab center to sneak him a bottle of booze.

Speaking of rehab, the Directions Rehabilitation Center is where most of the novel takes place. With its beautiful landscapes, deluxe rooms, countless statues of the Buddha, simpering counselors and squillionaire clientele, the joint could only be in California. 

One of the squillionaire clientele is Bunny Small, a bestselling British author with an oxymoronic name. The opposite of sweet and fluffy, Bunny is a lush and a harridan who’s alienated nearly everyone, including her brittle son, Henry. Only her devoted agent is left standing, and it is he who packs her off to Directions. And what d’you know, she’s there at the same time as her ex-husband, Marty Kessler. Not only that, but Henry and Janine meet and, rather too quickly, mate. (Rest assured, they’re not half-siblings.)

Like so many other books that capture the foibles of good-hearted but misguided folk, There’s a Word for That is often uproariously funny. Tanen’s skill is that you don’t laugh at the characters. Janine and Marty and Hailey and Henry and even Bunny know how messed up they are. All you, and they, can do is laugh at the straits they find themselves in and soldier on.