Any story told quickly, without the chill or warmth of accumulated details, becomes a cliche. For example: After 30 or so years of a relatively happy marriage, a woman wakes to find her husband dead beside her. Her grief is nearly unbearable until, at his memorial, she discovers he had been having an affair. She becomes angry. What then? We’ve heard this tale a couple of times, and that is one way to summarize the story Sue Miller tells in her 11th novel, Monogamy. The best approach to this unbelievably good novel, however, is to avoid summary altogether and simply urge readers to read—and reread—the book itself.

Here is a taste of what a reader will find: The long marriage of Annie and Graham is a second marriage for both. Each has a past that captured and shaped them. Graham, who co-owns a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a passionate, needy, generous man who clasps his past—his ex-wife, for example—more closely than Annie does hers. It’s not irrelevant that Annie, a thoughtful person and a good-not-great photographer, views the world through her own lens and keeps any boisterous turbulence at a bit of a distance. Annie and Graham really do love one another. But the past is always up for reevaluation. So is our understanding of ourselves and others.

Miller is excellent at conveying and illuminating the inner lives of her characters, and she remains one of the best writers at depicting the day-to-day normality of sexual desire. Events occur in this novel—normal sorts of things—and Miller’s attention, her descriptions and the tempo at which she reveals them help us feel these events truly and deeply. She has found in Monogamy probably the best expression of her longtime interest in sociograms, an exercise to demonstrate how lives intersect and influence each other. Among the relationships of the characters in Monogamy, there are reverberations upon reverberations.

How great is Monogamy? If this is not Miller’s best novel, it is surely among her very best. One measure of that is how the experience of it deepens with each reading.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Sue Miller on our ever-changing perceptions of ourselves and each other.

Daisy Johnson’s control of language keeps the reader utterly engaged in her new novel, Sisters, from the story’s opening words—a list in which each item begins with “My sister is” and ranges from “a black hole” to “a forest on fire”—all the way to the final searing sentences.

July and her older sister, September, have moved with their mother to the coast of England and into the old, deteriorating home where both September and her father were born. In this house, we see the ways that setting shapes everything that can, or might, unfold. We see where boundaries are and where they all but disappear. 

The concept of boundaries is at the center of July and September’s relationship. So much of their interaction is predicated on September’s control. Interesting, too, is the mother’s voice and perspective in this story: when we hear from her and when we don’t; what she knows and what is hidden from her view.

As the novel unfolds, Johnson brings readers more fully into the complexities and contradictions of the sisters’ relationship. Where does one girl stop and the other begin? How does biology bind us? How do our actions impact someone else’s life? And how does a person find their own voice? The novel raises many questions, and even as it poses some answers through July and September’s story, many other curiosities—delightfully—remain.

Sisters casts a spell, and Johnson’s ability to make her language twist and turn, to hint and suggest at something much larger, is truly remarkable.

As much as we love our families, they tend to complicate things. Nessa Rapoport’s new novel finds aimless, passionate 30-something Eve grappling with the tragic death of her twin sister, Tam. Exploring the layers of dysfunction present in all families, Evening spins a complicated web of loving, twisted relationships in which the ties that bind are weakening and there is no center.

Upon returning home to Toronto to mourn the family’s loss, Eve is hit with that all-too-familiar feeling—a mix of nostalgia and dread, like the past is coming back up to hit her in the face. While the family sits shiva in their home, grieving the loss of Tam, Eve struggles with her relationships. Now that her sister is gone, she is finally forced to revisit her childhood. Even in death, Tam is a major part of Eve’s life, and as the novel unfolds, we discover the intertwined nature of their relationship. Tam acts as an antithesis to Eve; while Tam found success and love, Eve struggled with these ambitions.

By the second day of shiva, it becomes apparent that Eve and Tam’s childhood was not as it seemed. Eve and her family are forced to confront their history as they teeter on the edge of complete decompensation.

This is Rapoport’s second novel, and she has previously explored womanhood, grief and Jewish life in America and Canada, all of which spin together in Evening. She limns the emotion of every action, cutting straight to the heart. Eve’s inner life is on full display, but the novel’s real drama and magic comes from Eve’s relationships with others. How can we truly understand and love someone when we are so stuck in our own lives? Though Rapoport does not get quite so philosophical, the power of Evening is that she forces you to do that thinking yourself.

Margot Louve is the product of a two-decades long affair between a married public figure and a well-known actress. In the final year of high school, Margot concludes (perhaps in part due to some clever persuasion by an attractive male journalist) that she is ready to expose the lie that is her life and go public with her story—anonymously. From there, The Margot Affair goes on and on—in a good way.

Sanaë Lemoine is a writer who trusts her readers. Her stark prose, which readers may need some time to get into its rhythm, is minimally descriptive and relatively unadorned, letting the complexity of the story shine through the characters’ interactions and not so much through acrobatic wording. Lemoine zooms in on ugliness, hurt and deceit, such as when Margot stars in a friend’s short film and someone comments about the size of her pores on screen, how her skin looks like the surface of the moon. In fact, much of the novel has a very cinematic quality to it, in the vein of classic French cinema. The anecdotal nature of the dialogue is very filmlike as well, and we are treated to an amazing vantage point to witness the characters inspire action from one another.

These are the female characters we’ve been waiting for. These women are complicated, nuanced, hypocritical—not the “strong female lead” we’re always being talked into tolerating. These women are dealing with intergenerational suffering, narrated by an astute 17-year-old on the cusp of adulthood. Margot’s forays into the adult world are both fascinating and nail-biting.

While there are a few jaw-dropping moments of plot advancement, this is not a suspense or mystery novel. Paris is not portrayed through a particularly romantic lens but instead as the only place Margot has ever lived. The Margot Affair is perfect for Francophiles, fans of literary fiction and explorers of interpersonal relationships.

It isn’t a mystery, yet in many ways, Jill McCorkle’s Hieroglyphics builds like one as characters appear, slowly reveal more of their pasts and secrets and eventually expose their connections and how the story fits together. Overlapping memories—of the things one tries to bury or make sense of—create layers of meaning for the characters and their children, whose voices compose the story with a range of experiences and perspectives. The prose is magnetic, drawing you in and holding your attention as questions slowly turn into answers.

Place functions as a link across time and between seemingly disparate lives as retirees Lil and Frank return to the site of their earlier lives in North Carolina. The early deaths of parents haunt them both. Lil dives deep into her memories, exploring moments that, perhaps, might best have been left alone. Frank keeps visiting their former home, and his presence impacts Shelley, who now lives there, in unimaginable ways as she cares for her sons and goes to work as a court stenographer each day. Shelley’s life is full of her own secrets and the stories she tells herself to make sense of them.

Each of these adults—Shelley, Frank and Lil—focuses much of their energy on making an effort to communicate with and care for their children. As the parental figures struggle with their histories, choices and actions, it is through the lens of the children that these secrets find power and meaning. This echo, this sense of connectedness, of how we care for and hurt each other, gives the novel a clear resonance.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jill McCorkle shares how one of her father’s memories became her own.

The discovery of a random crime leads to an empathic exploration of family, connection and creativity in Margot Livesey’s ninth novel, The Boy in the Field. 

Walking home from school outside of Oxford, England, siblings Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang find Karel Lustig lying in a field, stabbed and left for dead. Their intervention saves his life, but it also sends each of them on a voyage of self-discovery. The oldest, Matthew, avidly follows the police investigation but also seeks out Karel’s family and is discomfited by their complicated dynamic, especially when Karel’s hostile older brother demands that Matthew assist him in finding his brother’s assailant. At 16, Zoe is discovering the potency of her own sexuality and is bored by boys her own age, so she pursues an American Ph.D. student at the neighboring college. Adopted as a baby, 13-year-old Duncan announces that he needs to find his birth mother and seeks permission from everyone in the family before trying to contact her. As the young people pursue their separate paths, their parents, Betsy and Hal, have their own problems, as their marriage is strained by Hal’s affair and Betsy’s withdrawal into her studies.

From her earliest work, Livesey has displayed an interest in how individuals cope with the physical and psychic space left by missing family members. Livesey’s excitement over her own discovery of family in Australia, after she believed she had no living relatives on her mother’s side, is reflected in Duncan’s search for the woman he calls his “first mother.”

It’s not the solving of the crime that moves the plot along—the discovery of Karel’s attacker is anticlimactic at best—but rather the quiet way Livesey explores the enduring and, in this case, elastic bonds of family love, even in the most stressful situations. Filled with detailed observation and a precisely delineated plot, The Boy in the Field will please readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories written with psychological precision and empathy.

In Akwaeke Emezi’s brief, remarkable second novel for adults, the reader knows from the start that the central character, Vivek Oji, is dead. After riots in the marketplace of their Nigerian town, Vivek’s mother discovers his naked body placed “like a parcel, like a gift” at the family’s doorstep. Why was he killed? Who killed him? Who was he? Answers emerge incompletely, surprisingly and in fragments as the novel progresses and casts its spell.

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was,” Vivek says from somewhere outside life. “Every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them.”

One of the brilliant aspects of this novel is how Emezi makes a person’s invisibility visible. As a child, Vivek is bright, beautiful and by turns violently angry and girlishly shy. He is often beset by fugue states during which his body is present and his consciousness vanishes. Vivek’s family is loving but unable to comprehend him. His extended family is populated by “Nigerwives,” women from India, the Philippines or Sweden who are married to Nigerian men. Outdated sexual traditions and identities—multiple wives for Nigerian men and a sanctified horror of gay people, for example—still prevail in these families. After being forced to leave university, Vivek spends more and more time with the daughters of his extended family. These daughters are of a new generation and seem to understand and protect him.

Yes, it takes a village to raise a child. But, Emezi implies, it takes a culture and its mythologies to erase a child. The Death of Vivek Oji is a profound exploration of the boundaries of personal, sexual and cultural transition.

Leah Franqui knows a thing or two about straddling different cultures and identities. She is a Puerto Rican Jewish American who lives in Mumbai with her Kolkata-born husband, and her perspective informs her latest novel. Set in the busy, noisy and chaotic world of modern Mumbai, Mother Land is the story of an expat, Rachel Meyer, who knows she’s living the dream—but whose dream exactly, she isn’t sure.

Upon meeting her now-husband Dhruv in a Manhattan bar, Rachel instantly fell in love with his boyish charm and assertiveness. His sense of purpose was a welcome change in her listless life, so she married him and followed him to India to make a home together.

To Rachel, Mumbai is mesmerizing—at first. Then cultural expectations, language barriers and mounting loneliness start revealing all the voids that can’t easily be filled. Things get even more confusing when Swati, Rachel’s mother-in-law, arrives unannounced one day from Kolkata with the intention of leaving her husband and moving in permanently with the newlyweds. The shock of it all, coinciding with Dhruv’s departure for a monthlong business trip, leaves Rachel paralyzed with fear. Thus, Franqui resurrects the age-old struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—and topples it with a spot-on exploration of what it means to stand up against other people’s expectations.

Mother Land is unexpected. It’s funny and relatable even if your mother-in-law isn’t anything like Swati. It’s a tender tale of two women who are lost and alone, but who eventually become allies and each other’s biggest champions.

Rachel Beanland’s debut novel opens in 1934 Atlantic City. It’s a blue-sky June day, and most of the Adler family is enjoying the beach: 7-year-old Gussie; Gussie’s grandparents Esther and Joseph; Anna, the young German Jewish woman the family has taken in; and Florence, Esther and Joseph’s younger daughter, a Wellesley College student and star swimmer. Florence is such a competitive swimmer that she’s training to swim the English Channel later that summer. One family member who is not on the beach is Fannie, Florence’s older sister and Gussie’s mom, who is pregnant and in the hospital on bed rest, determined not to lose this baby as she lost the last one.

By the end of the day, the Adler family’s world has changed forever. Florence inexplicably drowns, and Esther decides that the family must keep this secret from Fannie, for fear that Fannie will go into early labor. There will be no funeral, no sitting shiva, no outer mourning for Florence.

But that’s not the only secret in this family novel. Each character has reasons to hide something important, which in turn affects their own happiness and relationships. The novel rotates through the perspectives of Gussie, Esther, Joseph, Anna, Fannie, Fannie’s husband and Florence’s devoted young swim coach, Stuart. It’s an ambitious balancing act that occasionally requires a little double-checking as to whose point of view we’re following. As the novel moves forward through the summer, the stress of secrets increases the pressure on each of the characters.

Florence Adler Swims Forever beautifully brings to life Atlantic City in the 1930s, offering the sights, sounds and smells of the beach and the boardwalk, as well as the daily life of Atlantic City’s Jewish community. It also foreshadows, through refugee Anna’s plight, the coming catastrophe of the Holocaust.

Beanland loosely based the novel on the story of her great-great-aunt Florence, who, like Florence Adler, was a competitive swimmer who drowned off the coast of Atlantic City. It’s a worthy tribute and a satisfying historical family drama.

There’s nothing like a great New York City novel, and praise be to the novelists who take us there: Think Cathleen Schine, Elinor Lipman, Emma Straub, Jennifer Egan and now Lee Conell, whose exquisite debut gets to the heart of the city via the super of an Upper West Side co-op and his frustratingly underemployed daughter.

Martin lives in the building’s basement apartment with his wife, Debra, and 24-year-old daughter, Ruby, who has just moved home with an art history degree but no way to pay her student loans. Ruby’s friend Caroline, whose affluent family lives in the co-op penthouse, is also back home, but her wealth has cushioned the transition from college to what-comes-next. Though the girls have been friends since childhood, Ruby has grown increasingly discomfited by Caroline’s obliviousness to how her wealth brings her certain advantages.

The Party Upstairs is told over the course of a single day, beginning with an argument between father and daughter when Martin tries to get Ruby to meditate with him before work. Ruby readies herself for a job interview at the Museum of Natural History and plans to attend Caroline’s fancy penthouse party that night. Meanwhile, Martin’s anxiety is through the roof after dealing with needy tenants and his grumpy daughter, and now vivid memories of a recently deceased tenant are starting to trouble him. 

After a disheartening job interview, Ruby is further provoked by flashbacks of the decades of inequities between herself and Caroline and by an unfortunate run-in with a neighborhood photographer. By the time of the party, Ruby is moved to act out in a way that dramatically disrupts the course of her life and the lives of her parents.

Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, The Party Upstairs will make you laugh even as you grapple with how money defines many of its characters’ most significant choices. As chapters alternate between Ruby’s and Martin’s perspectives, Conell’s realistic dialogue and thoughtful plotting take us deep into the often unexpressed shame linked to financial uncertainty. The Party Upstairs is an on-the-nose, of-the-moment dark comedy that delves deep into issues of wealth, gender and privilege in the most iconic of American cities.

As problems go, a surfeit of money is a nice one to have. Some might argue, however, that wealth is like a set of weights: Those who have it will likely be stronger than those who don’t. But mishandle it, and the self-imposed strains can be painful.

The clash between rich and poor animates Friends and Strangers, J. Courtney Sullivan’s quietly perceptive new novel about two women on different sides of America’s economic divide: a new mother and the college-age nanny she hires for her son.

Elisabeth Ronson, a former New York Times journalist and author of two bestselling books, has moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York with her husband, Andrew, and Gil, their baby conceived through in vitro fertilization. The move was precipitated by the fellowship Andrew received from a nearby college to develop a solar-powered grill. Elisabeth won’t accept money from her rich, philandering father and insists that her needy sister, Charlotte, eager to build a lifestyle brand on Instagram, do the same.

As Sullivan skillfully shows, family is not Elisabeth’s only problem. Another is loneliness in her suburban neighborhood of stay-at-home mothers. Elisabeth also needs help caring for Gil as she struggles to write a third book, so she hires Sam, a senior at the town’s women’s college, to watch him.

Sullivan does a fine job depicting Elisabeth’s and Sam’s respective dilemmas, as Elisabeth learns to live on less money and Sam deals with her family’s meager finances. Among the well-drawn supporting characters are Clive, Sam’s English boyfriend who’s a decade her senior, and whom Elisabeth suspects may be taking advantage of her; George, Elisabeth’s father-in-law, who rails against the inequities of society; and the poorly paid staff at the college kitchen where Sam also works.

The tension sometimes wanes, but Friends and Strangers is at its best when Sullivan emphasizes the widening class difference in America between people who can afford $46 peony-scented hand soaps and those worried about meeting basic needs. Sullivan dares to further complicate her narrative by showing that financial security doesn’t guarantee happiness. The result is a poignant look at the biases of modern society.

Sky is only 10 years old, but she’s experienced as much pain and confusion as someone three times her age. Although she was abandoned at a fire station as a newborn, she found a home with her adoptive parents. Now she’s starting over again, and this time she’s old enough to be aware of the pain. Sky’s adoptive parents have died in a car crash, and their will designates that Leo, Sky’s father’s best friend from childhood, would become her guardian.

Leo is torn up at the loss of his friend, and now he must create a loving home for Sky. Her presence sends Leo and his husband, Xavier, into a tailspin. The couple never wanted children, and Xavier is committed to their life in Boston. Leo doesn’t understand why he was named Sky’s guardian, but he loves the girl and the Massachusetts island where he was raised. He relates to her; they are some of the only dark-skinned people on the island, and they’ve both worked to find the people whom they can call home.

In My Kind of People, novelist Lisa Duffy paints a portrait of a community of people trying to find out who they are—and with whom they can be themselves. As neighbors jump in to help raise Sky, or to weigh in on what Leo could do better, Sky and Leo wrestle with their understanding of their changing circumstances. What caused the crash that killed some of the most important people in their lives? And can they form a new family with each other?

Duffy’s story is sweet but never cloying, and she’s unafraid to depict uncomfortable circumstances as the tale unfolds. My Kind of People is an emotionally complex tale that leaves some threads dangling—much like life—but still comes to a satisfying and hopeful conclusion.