Elizabeth Strout, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (2008), says she thought she was done with Olive—until her beloved character “just appeared” to her again. And how grateful Strout’s readers will be that she did.

In 13 interlocking stories set in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine, Olive travels through old age in her own inimitable style. She’s called an “old bag” by more than a few townsfolk, but she is loved by those who have, over the years, come to appreciate her honesty and complete lack of pretense.

In one story, Olive shares her fear of dying with Cindy, who cared for Olive’s late husband, Henry, and who may be dying of cancer herself. Olive reminds her that Cindy’s husband and sons, as well as Olive, will be “just a few steps behind” her if she does die. 

A few years after Henry’s death, Olive befriends widower Jack Kennison. Each has a child who doesn’t really like them, and both are lonely. They marry—to the dismay of Olive’s son, Christopher—and go on to enjoy eight years together.

Olive lives through some health scares, first totaling her car after confusing the accelerator with the brake, then suffering a heart attack in her hairdresser’s driveway. When Olive is assigned round-the-clock nurse’s aides—the story “Heart” poignantly portrays Olive’s growing dread of being alone—two of the aides are especially kind to her. One is the daughter of a Somali refugee, the other is a Trump supporter, and Olive surprises herself by befriending them both.

Strout possesses an uncanny ability to focus on ordinary moments in her characters’ lives, bringing them to life with compassion and humor. Her characters could be our own friends or family, and readers can easily relate to their stories of love, damaged relationships, aging, loss and loneliness. Each phase of Olive’s life touches on a memory, real or imagined.

Olive, Again is a remarkable collection on its own but will be especially enjoyed by those who loved Olive Kitteridge. It’s a book to immerse oneself in and to share. 

Acclaimed author Alan Lightman is the founder of the Harpswell Foundation, an organization that works to advance a new generation of female leaders in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. His time spent in Cambodia is apparent through the beautiful and unforced descriptions in Three Flames, his first work of fiction in six years.

The titular Three Flames is a code of ethics that binds a struggling Cambodian farming family together. This code is not conducive to growth or improvement, as each member wrestles to uphold these values amid the strife of living in an oppressive and violently patriarchal environment. As time passes, it is not the upholding of the Three Flames but rather a conscious unraveling that brings the family closer.

Each nonlinear chapter spotlights a different family member and adds depth to their collective story. Ryna, the mother, had her life upended after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime murdered her father. When she sees the man who killed her father 33 years before, she plans to exact revenge. Pich, the authoritative father, has known nothing but poverty his entire life. Exiled by his family as a teenager, he has never known a loving and forgiving home. As he controls his family, he receives disdain in return. Pich sends his 16-year-old daughter, Nita, to marry a rubber merchant, and she is forced to leave home against her will. Kamal, the only son, is disillusioned by the prospect of following his father’s career and sets his sights on a free-thinking woman. Pich pulls Thida, his oldest daughter, out of school to work in a garment factory to send money back home. Sreypov, the youngest daughter, is unique. She is a thinker, a poet. Preserving her education becomes the goal of Ryna and Thida, and the women finally stand up to Pich.

Lightman illustrates generational family trauma in a way that is succinct (at a slim 208 pages, Three Flames can be read in the better part of a day) yet leaves just the right amount of speculation to the reader. Three Flames is moving and beautifully written—an unforgettable embodiment of the resilience of the human spirit.

It’s complicated—that’s a good summary of Regina Porter’s sensitive journey through a network of family relationships and friendships in her debut novel, The Travelers. Moving from rural Georgia in the 1960s to Manhattan at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, with side trips to the Vietnam War and Germany both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel is a subtle exploration of issues of race and gender in the past half century of American life.

At the heart of this story are two African American women, Agnes Miller Christie and Eloise Delaney. Their story begins as they grow up in Georgia in the early 1960s. After a fire destroys her home, Eloise moves in with her Catholic school classmate Agnes, whose life is later scarred by an act of racial violence. Their friendship turns romantic, but when Agnes ends it, Eloise embarks on what will turn out to be a lifelong quest to find another relationship as deep or satisfying.

Eloise’s own evolution is spurred by her fascination with the real-life story of Bessie Coleman, who became the first African American woman to obtain a pilot’s license in 1921. Coleman’s fierce independence and determination inspire Eloise, as she becomes an intelligence analyst in Vietnam and eventually settles in Germany in the 1970s, learning to fly along the way.

Agnes’ marriage to Eddie Christie, a Vietnam veteran and Shakespeare-quoting janitor in the Bronx who develops a passionate attachment to Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, produces a daughter, Claudia, herself a Shakespeare scholar, whose marriage to Rufus Vincent, a fellow academic, unites the Christie family with the Irish-American Vincents. Porter, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, deploys a light touch in exposing the personal and cultural tensions that surface as two families—one black, the other white—merge.

The Travelers is at times a challenging reading experience, owing to its chorus of narrative voices, its ambitiously large cast of characters and its decidedly episodic structure. Meaningful connections emerge—sometimes slowly, other times unexpectedly—but rather than straining to find them, it’s more pleasurable to yield to Porter’s ample storytelling talent and simply enjoy the ride.

Juliet Grames’ entrancing multigenerational family saga is based on the life of her grandmother, Stella, who was born in 1920 in the small Italian village of Ievoli and, 16 years later, immigrated with her family to Connecticut as World War II loomed over their homeland. Throughout The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, the author inserts fictional details into the life of her ever-stoic grandmother while focusing on her near-death experiences, which were well documented by family members and passed down over the years, including severe burns from cooking oil, an attack by a hungry pig, almost dying in childbirth and falling down basement steps at the age of 68.

Just as compelling as Stella’s story is that of her mother, Assunta, who was born in Ievoli in 1899 and was married at age 14 to a domineering and abusive husband. At first, Assunta’s sad marriage convinces Stella to remain single, but eventually she gives in to traditional mores and weds Carmelo Maglieri, another Italian immigrant. Stella’s independent spirit is stifled, finally, and she ends up raising 10 children, the last one coming when she’s 44.

The final 30 years of Stella’s life, following a partial lobotomy after her fall, are lonely ones. Estranged from her younger sister, whom she blames for her “seven or eight deaths,” Stella lives by herself, her grandchildren knowing her only as “an unintelligible crocheting grandmother engaged in a blood feud with her sister.” They have heard the facts of her many near deaths but know nothing of her feisty, independent spirit, now long gone.

Embellished with details of the extreme hardship experienced by Italy’s poor throughout two world wars and the bigotry encountered by those who immigrated to the U.S., Grames’ debut will find broad appeal as both an illuminating historical saga and a vivid portrait of a strong woman struggling to break free from the confines of her gender.

In her third novel, America Was Hard to Find, Kathleen Alcott writes with pulsating, intense prose, delivering an account of how lives can be meshed and torn apart, tangled and devoured by each other and by the times in which they play out.

For almost three years in the late 1950s, Fay and Vincent are diversions for each other in a carefree affair. His life is regimented and delineated by the Navy and aeronautics and underlined by a miserable marriage. Her life is free and clear of any ties to the American wealth into which she was born or the rules on which her parents insisted.

Nine years later in Ecuador, Fay and her son, Wright, do not watch as Vincent becomes the first man to walk on the moon. Fay has joined Shelter, a violent, underground activist group protesting the Vietnam War. The same group, along with many Americans, believes that the space program was created by the government to divert attention away from wide-sweeping poverty in the U.S. and war crimes in Vietnam.

Vincent retreats into solitude after his exploits; no more programs, calculations and problem-solving. Fay’s focus becomes more violent as she finds herself the leader of Shelter and a woman on the FBI’s most wanted list. Wright, on the cusp of manhood, grows more disheartened by his mother’s chosen lifestyle and soon finds himself alone to face her mistakes and determine how he feels about himself and his country.

The voices of Fay, Vincent and Wright are marvelously crystal-clear, their thoughts are sometimes believably jumbled, and their actions are often self-destructive. Alcott has a powerful ability to separate these three characters into equal and opposing forces whose stories collide for 31 years. Her extensive research into the Apollo program, the Weatherman underground protest group and the AIDS crisis in America serve her well as she intertwines facts with fiction.

America Was Hard to Find leaves readers wanting more of this story and everything else Alcott has written.

In Leah Hager Cohen’s elegantly abbreviated family saga, Strangers and Cousins, we meet the Blumenthals as they are busy preparing their homestead and hearts for a momentous event that is to take place at their home in Rundle Junction, New York. Clem, the eldest Blumenthal child, “is planning, at the ridiculously tender age of twenty-two (never mind that Bennie was a bride at that very age), to wed her college girlfriend in four days’ time.” Amid the hubbub, she and patriarch Walter are sitting on two very big—and consequential—secrets.

Walter is bringing Bennie’s Great Aunt Glad to stay for the weekend. Glad Erland had lived in the Blumenthal home as a child, and the shiny pink scars on her face date back nearly nine decades to a horrific tragedy that struck Rundle Junction during the Spirit of Progress Grand Community Pageant. What none of the Erland-Blumenthal clan knows is that Glad has carried a tragic secret of her own since that storied disaster.

But Strangers and Cousins is framed by not one but “two pageants, eighty-seven years apart. The first scripted to fortify the myths upon which the institution of this nation was built. The second scripted to dispel the myths upon which the institution of marriage was built.” For unbeknownst to her family, theater-major Clem has planned a wedding that is as much performance art as ceremony—and has even made it her senior thesis. Like Cohen’s novel, the wedding will superimpose ultra-modern sensibilities over eons of stasis and tradition, encroached upon by both human and metaphorical intruders at the gate.

Strangers and Cousins takes place over only four days, while simultaneously spanning epochs. As crammed full as it is of family history, it nevertheless glimpses far into the Blumenthals’ future, with flights of omniscience and various existential meanderings. Cohen’s characters are familiar in their failings and lovable in their tender quirks. Her writing style and tone lend a lightweight grace to at-times heavy subject matter—a levity not flippant or callow but held aloft by a sense of time’s two-dimensional circularity and history’s Faulknerian indefatigability. Cohen’s gentle philosophizing reminds us that while the past may not even be past, and the future often feels dangerously obscure, the present—bountifully populated by both strangers and cousins—offers its own rewards, if we choose to embrace them.

In Stewart O’Nan’s latest engaging and immersive novel, he revisits the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh—a family his readers have come to know well from two earlier novels, Wish You Were Here (2002) and Emily, Alone (2011), which chronicled the early years of Emily Maxwell’s widowhood. This latest Maxwell family portrait returns to the year 1998 and focuses on 75-year-old Henry—retired and feeling somewhat purposeless—filling his days with garden chores, errands and repairing small appliances in his basement workshop.

One of O’Nan’s gifts is his ability to craft his characters with such uncanny attention to detail that the reader comes to care for them as the author does. So it is with Henry, whom we get to know more intimately as each chapter chronicles an event in his past or one aspect of his now circumscribed life.

In one, he reminisces about his dislike of piano lessons as a child until he developed a crush on his second teacher. (The annual recital will bring back memories for many readers.) Henry’s ritualized rotation of garden jobs according to the season—pruning, leaf-raking, taking down birdhouses, hanging up feeders—helps fill his days, as do the spring and summer golf outings with his three buddies.

Thanksgiving is the same each year as well. Henry and Emily’s son and daughter and their families arrive Wednesday night, when lasagna is served, and the next day’s feast always starts with shrimp cocktail and spinach dip. Several chapters chronicle the annual vacation spent at the family cabin on Lake Chautauqua: Henry and Emily open it up a few days before the kids and grandkids arrive, and then everyone pitches in with cleaning the porch, installing screens, painting the weathered window sills, stocking the refrigerator, etc. Henry is in his glory during these days—assigning everyone a job and checking on their progress. 

It isn’t necessary to have read the other novels in O’Nan’s Maxwell family saga to enjoy Henry, Himself. But readers who enjoy this poignant, everyman story will surely want to read them next. His stories of one upper-middle-class Pittsburgh family will resonate with many readers, especially fans of Anne Tyler’s character-driven novels set in Baltimore. 

If Gingerbread is your first Helen Oyeyemi novel, then there is something you need to know. You are about to love a story that you may or may not understand. It straddles the familiar and the world of make-believe so remarkably well that you may be left believing in that which doesn’t quite exist, while questioning what you consider to be facts about family, friendships and, of course, gingerbread.

We follow the life of a girl named Harriet Lee, daughter of Margot and Simon, who grows up in the land of Druhástrana amid the idyllic wheat fields, in a life of serfdom to the wealthy and legendary Kercheval family. But Druhástrana, once a powerful small nation, seems to have fallen off the map, and now only exists as a myth for the rest of the world. No way in. No way out.

Or so it seems—until Margot gets a message via a homing pigeon from a very distant cousin in Britain (also a wealthy Kercheval), who somehow comes across a video clip of Harriet and sees promise in the young girl. He wants to rescue the Lees, so to speak, and thanks to Margot’s magical gingerbread, Harriet and Margot are able to leave Druhástrana, but with a new debt to the Kerchevals.

That was then, and this is now. Living in a seven-story walk-up apartment, Harriet is now 34 years old and a mother to a very curious 17-year-old named Perdita. Will Perdita be the reason that Harriet and Margot are finally forced to revisit their Druhástranian roots? And were they really able to escape their history while forging a new life in Britain?

Thoroughly strange yet absolutely mesmerizing, the sixth novel from award-winning Oyeyemi is the perfect escape.

The effervescent opening scene of Snowden Wright’s second novel, American Pop, which brings readers to New Year’s Eve in 1940 at Mississippi’s Peabody Hotel, never goes flat—and the same goes for the rest of the novel, which unravels a mogul soda family’s rise and decline.

In the early 1900s, Houghton Forster sells his homemade soda as a remedy to common ailments at his family’s store in Panola County, Mississippi. By the 1920s, PanCola is the top American brand and is becoming popular worldwide. While Houghton encourages each of his four children to track down his or her own secret ambition, an ad campaign sparks a manic hunt for PanCola’s secret ingredient. Business falters in the ’60s after Houghton turns the company over to his grandson, much to the resentment of his economist sister. In the ’80s, Harold, the sole remaining Forster, passes on stories, dusty memorabilia—and possibly the secret ingredient—to a newcomer to the tale, Robert Vaughn.

In Robert’s obituary for Harold, he writes, “One emotion twined his family members together, the same one that led to the creation of a product that made them famous, and that emotion wasn’t hatred.” Like the secret ingredient, the key to this family remains a mystery, better named by what it isn’t than what it is. In the vein of To Kill A Mockingbird and more recent classics like The Twelve-Mile Straight and Miss Jane, American Pop explores the South’s dark side. A probing cultural history, the book is also a literary innovation: The time and place shift from paragraph to paragraph, and its main characters are all antiheros, cathartic and prophetic more than admirable, while the outliers, the family’s dark-skinned “help,” become heroes.

In its fluid sense of setting and unorthodox cast, the novel rebuffs nostalgia with a fresh perspective. A bubbling satire, American Pop explodes into more than a family portrait; it is our continuing American saga.

Whiskey reads as cool as a Western and as fundamental as the Bible. Reminiscent of stories by Cormac McCarthy or Annie Proulx, the novel begins in a bar in Electric City, Washington, where Andre is served divorce papers and his brother, Smoker, enlists his help in retrieving Smoker’s missing daughter, Bird, from a religious mountain sect.

The events of Whiskey unfold through sections with biblical titles: The “Exodus” chapters cover the continuation of the opening scene in 1991, as the brothers search for Bird while accompanied by a captured bear. “Lamentations” is the story of Andre, the more reserved and sensitive of the two, and his wife, Claire, who meet in 1983 at the high school where they both teach. Andre remains sober as long as he and Claire are together, but dissolves into drink when their relationship is threatened. “Genesis” follows Andre and Smoker’s alcoholic parents: Peg, a bronze-haired sex-crazed beauty, and Pork, a Native rancher, from 1950 to 1971. Pork “wanted [Peg] as some want to be devoured by their God. It is why she married him and why she divorced him, too.” They both make and break each other.

Author Bruce Holbert alternates between these threads, breaking the plot apart instead of building it up. As the characters run from their lives, they speak in clipped dialogue, the sentences sparse, as though there’s no patience for long-windedness or hope. “Animal ain’t ever been as alive as when it is dying,” Smoker tells Claire, and similarly, Andre, Smoker, Peg and Pork are most vividly portrayed when each is at his or her lowest.

What they’re running toward—the stability that eludes them—defines who these characters are. Is death the only resolution? Whiskey punches you in the gut, a blow that lands right at your core.