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All Literary Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary Fiction

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her

Review by Arlene McKanic

In Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, a young British woman ironically named Vita suffers from a ghastly, debilitating condition that doctors have no name for. She calls its worst symptom, a crushing tornado of pain and helplessness, The Pit. Because Vita’s condition is unidentifiable, doctors won’t attempt to treat it. From there comes the diagnosis that gives the book its title.

The reader might think that Vita’s mysterious illness has something to do with the painful events in her past: the deaths of her mother and sister, a wicked stepmother, the boyfriend who got away, a stuttering career in the performing arts. Vita lives in a weirdly laid out basement apartment with Max, a surgeon who cares for her but too often treats her like one of his “really sick” patients. She spends much time contemplating her goldfish, Whitney Houston, and she’s visited now and then by the ghost of Renaissance soldier and poet Luigi da Porto. (He was the author of the original Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare pinched later on. Vita wrote a screenplay about him that went nowhere). Just as Whitney spins in her goldfish bowl, Vita spins in her unhappiness, and Luigi spins in his memories of the woman who jilted him after he came back as broken from war as Vita is broken from her life.

Then, one day there’s a leak from the upstairs apartment. Max isn’t home, and Vita must leave her bed to interact with her neighbors, the ebullient and not-quite-elderly Mrs. Rothwell, and Jesse, an American who helps Mrs. Rothwell around the house. Vita befriends both immediately. Is this her first step on the path to health?

Weinberg, author of The Truants, packs a lot into this slender novel. There’s rage at a medical establishment that won’t take women’s pain seriously, and a cargo ship’s tonnage of familial trauma. But there’s also the life-enhancing, life-saving power of love and friendship, and the strength of Vita’s unquenchable need to be healthy in body and mind. Maybe her name isn’t so ironic after all.

Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants, tells the story of a woman with an illness that doctors can’t identify, with rage at the lack of belief in women’s pain as well as hope for the life-saving power of love and friendship.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

They Dream in Gold

Review by Melissa Brown

Playwright and director Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, crackles. Her prose is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one. Over the course of 400 pages, Sennaar moves swiftly back and forth across continents and generations to tell a vividly realized story of family, identity and love.

Mansour, a child first of Senegal and then of the world, exudes music and wants to make his mark as a musician. Mama Eva, who raised Mansour and keeps her own secrets, aspires to culinary heights. And Bonnie, an only child raised by her grandmother, is entranced by Mansour’s sound on a demo CD before she ever meets him. They all have, as Sennaar writes, “a need for a life of wonder.” After Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, the lives of the women who love him are strung painfully taut as they wait for news: Back in her crumbling mansion in Switzerland, Mama Eva worries as she cooks for her long-awaited restaurant’s opening day, while pregnant Bonnie broods and paces.

They Dream in Gold wends from Mama Eva’s 1940s youth in Dakar to Bonnie and Mansour’s first meeting in 1960s New York City, to a Brazilian music festival in the middle of Carnival where Mansour’s star is born. The novel’s five parts flow in and out of each character’s past and present, examining the people who have shaped them, although some side characters are less compelling. Bonnie, Mansour and Mama Eva have each been orphaned in different ways and are looking for home, a place to stay and belong. Unreserved and confident, Sennaar’s piercing narrative voice reverberates through a novel pulsing with all the intensity it takes to compose a life and make it sing.

Mai Sennaar’s prose in They Dream in Gold is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Modern Fairies

Review by Lauren Bufferd

“Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are to this day some of the first stories we hear as children—and as we learn from Clare Pollard’s witty, sexy, historical novel, The Modern Fairies, they were all the rage in the court of Louis XIV.

The Modern Fairies is loosely based on a group of real-life salonaires who met at the home of Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a woman with a troubled past that included imprisonment and a childhood marriage to a cruel aristocrat. D’Aulnoy and her friends were the original collectors and disseminators of well-known folk tales a century before the Brothers Grimm. Just like the princesses in their stories, they inhabited a world of wicked mothers, murderous husbands, locked towers and poisoned fruit.

The women are joined by Charles Perrault, a wealthy widower and advisor to the king, who went on to great fame as one of the first authors to publish a collection of fairy tales. Over the course of a cold winter, certain details of these contes de fées prove a little too close to the realities of court. There is a spy at d’Aulnoy’s gatherings, and meetings become more dangerous as love letters are misdirected, husbands discover cheating wives, and both the local clergy and the king’s chief of police are put on high alert for any whiff of scandal.

The Modern Fairies is arranged as a series of stories within stories, each fairy tale as light as a bonbon yet cleverly revealing aspects of the teller’s situation, whether a violent husband, younger lover or jealous rival. An all-knowing narrator, perhaps Pollard herself, pops up to offer commentary on the societal restrictions experienced by these noblewomen and to reflect on the subversive ties between tales told and lives lived. An award-winning poet and translator, Pollard has great fun with these stories and with the gossip, the flirtations and the sheer amount of sex at the court of Versailles. She demonstrates, too, how important these women were for documenting, embellishing and preserving a wealth of stories, and like them, plays her part in translating an oral tradition into a written one that we can continue to delight in.

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.
FictionLiterary FictionGothic FictionDebut Fiction

Smothermoss

Review by Freya Sachs

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging curiosities, interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to and understand each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate.

The community shifts when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and  worry arises that the murderer has yet to leave the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. As the novel progresses, the land takes over—the mountains crack and communicate, and the rocks and stones have stories to tell.

In many ways, Smothermoss resembles a Southern gothic fairy tale, with elements—like the invisible rope attached to Sheila’s neck—that require a certain suspension of disbelief, and the setting of the 1980s South, a challenging place to find one’s voice. Ultimately, the story carries you away, with brief chapters, crisp scenes and high stakes. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

Alisa Alering paints the mountains, hollows, moss and quartz of the Appalachian landscape in all their full aliveness in Smothermoss, their gothic debut.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Someone Like Us

Review by Michael Magras

One of the many challenges of being an immigrant is how, as your perception adjusts to life in a new land, it can begin to feel like you’ve lost touch with your homeland. Dinaw Mengestu plays with this dynamic in Someone Like Us, his subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets.

The book’s protagonist is Mamush, a novelist and journalist of Ethiopian heritage who was born and raised in the U.S. He has become well-known for writing articles about “struggling but ultimately tenacious immigrants in America” and other weighty topics such as border conflicts, refugee crises and a militia leader in eastern Congo. He now lives north of Paris with his photographer wife (the book includes some of her photographs) and their 2-year-old son.

Mamush returns to the U.S. for the first time in years when he receives word from his mother, now living in a northern Virginia community “popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her,” that Samuel, a man Mamush knew as a close family friend, has died. He learns that Samuel may, or may not, have been his father.

That’s only the start of the mysteries Mengestu explores. Always the journalist, Mamush travels to Chicago to investigate Samuel’s past, including time spent in jail and a scheme for “building a cab company for people trapped in the wrong place.” And Mengestu adds an additional, beguiling wrinkle: While Mamush conducts his inquiries, he has imagined conversations with the deceased Samuel, a fabulist touch that allows for philosophical discussions on the desire to belong and the power of storytelling.

That’s the great achievement of this book. Aside from being a wonderful read, it’s a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. A decade has passed since Mengestu’s last novel, the equally exceptional All Our Names. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

A decade after Dinaw Mengestu’s equally exceptional All Our Names, Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Pearl

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne and her teenage daughter, Susannah, are taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes, in Marianne’s home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Her mother’s unexplained disappearance has colored Marianne’s entire life—a mystery that she can’t move beyond. Marianne recounts her idyllic, idiosyncratic rural childhood in an old farmhouse with her creative mother, who sang folk songs and shared ancient stories. Later, during the bumpy, sad years after the disappearance, Marianne’s father Edward, a history professor, tries to patch together a life for Marianne and her younger brother, Joe. The adult Marianne narrates in an episodic, not-quite-linear fashion, looking back from early middle age to circle the mystery of her mother. The narrative is particularly strong in conveying the younger Marianne’s self-absorbed, mishap-filled adolescence, and her lurch into young adulthood.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast. To that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem (“As I went over the water, / The water went over me. I saw two little blackbirds / Sitting in a tree”). Throughout, the spirit of Marianne’s missing mother hovers, and this underlying mystery pulls the reader forward, though the story remains more immersive than propulsive.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

Poet Sian Hughes brings vibrant language and a droll sensibility to her debut novel, Pearl, which explores a woman’s grief after losing her mother at 8 years old, set against the gentle landscape of English village life.
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

Hum

Review by Thane Tierney

When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum. Cancel culture, job displacement due to AI, government overreach, deteriorating middle class wealth, missing children, declining air quality, bad breakfast cereals . . . the future’s so dark, you gotta wear a miner’s helmet.

In fiction, a trip out into nature almost always ends up with Job-like trials being visited upon the vacationers. Deliverance. 127 Hours. Jurassic Park. Into The Wild. Even Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. But despite these fictional precedents, when May makes a little extra money by submitting herself as a test subject for a surgical procedure that will disguise her features from the latest iteration of AI recognition software, she decides to take her family on vacation to the very expensive hyper-natural Botanical Garden. May hauls her two kids and her husband off into this Disney-fied paradise, requiring them, for good measure, to leave their phones and other communication devices at home so they can reap the full benefit of the experience.

And reap it they do.

The “hum” of the title is an AI-powered, jack-of-all-trades android, able to fill roles from a dental hygienist to a pop psychotherapist. If there was any question as to whether Phillips has seen 20 minutes into the future, in addition to dispensing whatever wisdom is appropriate to the moment, hums shill commercial products—unless you upgrade to the ad-free tier. Hum is, as dystopias go, reasonably breezy; it’s suitable for a coast-to-coast airline flight or an extended stay on the beach as an antidote to binge-watching the latest season of your favorite TV show. For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, the setting is relatable enough to not make you feel like (ahem) a stranger in a strange land.

For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.
FictionLiterary Fiction

How to Leave the House

Review by Cat Acree

Nathan Newman’s first novel, How to Leave the House, tracks a young man named Natwest in his quest to reclaim a missing package. Inside the package: a large sex toy. Along the way, various players in Natwest’s small town step forward to share apparent wisdom with the young man, in scenes that range from ludicrous to genuinely philosophical. Through these loosely connected narratives, readers encounter a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors.

Some chapters relate Natwest’s interior narrative (often obnoxiously laden with literary and artistic references), while others inhabit the minds of other characters, including his dentist (obsessed with painting mouths), his former English teacher (recovered from cancer and looking for sex) and his mother (proud of her son and desperate to show it). There are comedic and entertaining stories, especially one involving an egg fight and one in which a woman dances on her brother’s grave. Others are upsetting and cruel, like the chapter narrated by Natwest’s self-loathing ex-boyfriend, and another about the provocative internet activities of a girl named Lily.

In one storyline, an imam named Mishaal struggles with his love for classic cinema. He is enraptured by closeups of Ingrid Bergman, tortured by them as if he were having an illicit affair. When the imam encounters Natwest, he lectures the young man on binaries: “If it’s not Chaplin or Keaton, it’s Spielberg or Scorsese. If it’s not Spielberg or Scorsese, it’s Truffaut or Godard.” He insists that Natwest embrace his inner Keaton and stop trying to be a Chaplin.

Natwest’s story, along with everyone else’s, is bisected, torn between conflicting desires. The characters’ fates are ambivalent, not only in that we don’t know how things will work out for them, but also because none of them know how they’d like their stories to turn out. “I believe that a happy ending is at least as realistic as an unhappy one,” the imam says. Natwest is horrified by that idea, as the young man insists that unhappiness is “real shit.”

How to Leave the House is fiction as friction, designed for discomfort. This is a novel of dichotomies that beg to be challenged, with psychological spaces that desperately need transparency but are inherently, tragically closed off to each other.

Read our Q&A with Nathan Newman about How to Leave the House.

Nathan Newman’s debut is a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors, set in a small town over the course of 24 hours.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Catalina

Review by Eric A. Ponce

College is supposed to be the best four years of your life. Throwing a Frisbee on the quad, spending late nights in the library, meeting people from all over the world—in the American imagination, college is a utopia. In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, the titular character goes to Harvard and realizes that college can be a dystopia, too. As an undocumented person in the United States, Catalina Ituralde is forced to live her life quietly, mostly staying home with her two grandparents, who are also undocumented and at risk of deportation. But Catalina can’t avoid attention, or at least she doesn’t want to. An adventurous free spirit, she wants to live life to the fullest. She wants to fall in love and experience all of life’s pleasures and pains.

Every college student dreads graduation: After four years of security, what comes next? The “real” world? For Catalina, in her senior year, this dread is emphasized by an actual existential threat. Her status as a student helps to keep her from being deported, and if she can’t find a sustainable life path to follow after college, she risks being taken from the only world she’s ever known. When a pretty, privileged boy starts to take interest in her, it seems like a way is opening to get everything she wants. Nathaniel—whom Catalina never refers to as “Nathan” or “Nate,” underscoring the disparity of their social statuses—is the son of a famous director and an aspiring anthropologist. Both he and his father have a keen interest in the culture of Latin America, particularly Ecuador, where Catalina and her family have roots. Catalina flirts with Nathaniel, ensuring that he slowly, helplessly falls for her, and she starts to catch feelings too. But when the threat of deportation becomes a reality for her family, Catalina has to take advantage of her budding romance, asking Nathaniel’s father to help her gain public support by collaborating on a documentary. The project puts a strain on Catalina as she is forced to define herself, to speak for her dysfunctional family and to confront what kind of person Harvard has made her.

Written in brilliant, overflowing prose, Catalina is one of the best, most fun-to-read books you will find. You may see a bit of yourself in Catalina, or you may learn how to empathize with someone whose entire life is chaos.

Read our interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about Catalina.

In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina Ituralde, an adventurous free spirit and an undocumented student at Harvard, finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.
FictionThrillerLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Bright Objects

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A fatal accident, a cosmic visitor and a mysterious stranger all come together in a small Australian town in Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects.

Young widow Sylvia Knight is recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and left her with serious injuries, both physical and psychological. Profoundly lonely, Sylvia works at the local mortuary, keeps her husband’s grave tidy and puts on a cheerful face for her mother-in-law, Sandy, whom she visits weekly. But she is haunted by sketchy memories of the night of the accident. Although another car was involved, nobody was arrested, but Sylvia believes she knows who was responsible. When word comes through her friend Vince that the police are closing the case, she falls into a deep depression and plans to take her own life. However, the appearance of a rare comet proves a distraction. When the comet’s discoverer, American astronomer Theo St. John, walks into the mortuary one day, Sylvia’s life takes a turn. Sylvia and Theo begin to find connection through shared meals and trips to the observatory to view the comet.

As the comet’s path draws closer to Earth, the mood in town shifts from celebratory to ominous. Joseph Evans, local meditation teacher and the heir of a wealthy family, sees the comet as a divine messenger and begins a series of mystical lectures that attract a cultlike following. He is eager to involve both Sylvia and Sandy, and Sylvia is distressed to see her mother-in-law drawn in by his promises. Conflicted in her feelings towards Theo and still wrestling with suicidal ideation, Sylvia finds her obsession with uncovering her husband’s killer pushing her to the edges of her sanity.

Bright Objects is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.

Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects, is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.
FictionAudioLiterary Fiction

Long Island

Review by Deborah Mason

In Long Island (9.5 hours), Colm Toibin wastes no time before lobbing a hand grenade into the happy, suburban life of Eilis Lacey, the heroine of his critically acclaimed novel Brooklyn. The resulting shock waves push her out of her home in Lindenhurst, New York, and back to her mother’s home in Enniscorthy, Ireland, where she confronts past regrets, present secrets and, perhaps, future happiness.

Oscar-nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley does an excellent job of switching from Eilis’ lilting Irish accent to the distinct Long Island accent of her Italian American in-laws, creating nuanced, complex characters on both sides of the ocean. Moreover, Buckley honors the many pauses and silences Toibin builds into the story, allowing the reader to fill those spaces with the weight of the characters’ hesitance, hope and fear.

Read our review of the print version of ‘Long Island.’

Oscar-nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley gives nuanced voices to Eilis Lacey’s Irish relatives and Italian American in-laws in the audio version of Long Island, Colm Toibin’s sequel to Brooklyn.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Writing a woman on the verge

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Both Same as It Ever Was and your debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, are lengthy novels that examine family dynamics over the course of decades. What draws you to this type of story?

I’ve always been drawn as a reader to big, meaty novels that stick with a cast of characters over a long period of time, and it’s very much where I feel most at home as a writer—having the ability to explore my characters from all angles, from different vantage points in time and space. Once I fall in love with a character, I want to know absolutely everything about them, and in the case of Julia that meant getting to know not just her but her entire family, the trajectory of her upbringing and her marriage and her becoming a mother.

This time around, the time span is a bit tighter and the family’s matriarch, Julia, is at the center of the story. Can you tell us about how Julia’s character came to you?

Julia’s voice came to me first—her observational skills, her neuroses, her tendency toward self-sabotage. I find difficult characters much more interesting—and endearing, as it were—than their better behaved counterparts, and Julia delivered tenfold in this respect.

“We’re so deeply, messily shaped, as women, by our mothers—or mother figures.”

You’ve spoken before, to the New York Times, about doing your “emotional homework” in order to write about characters with experiences that are different from your own. How did you prepare to tell the story of Julia, a 57-year-old woman whose marriage has persevered despite past challenges and who is preparing for life as an empty nester? 

I had to get to know Julia as a much younger woman before I felt comfortable writing about her later in her life. I did similar work with The Most Fun We Ever Had, overwriting a great deal just to get my characters in certain situations to see how they’d react, examining them in childhood and in the quieter and less cinematic moments that don’t make it into the final draft of a novel. I explored many different phases of Julia’s life—her difficult childhood, her somewhat traumatic adolescence, her lost decade before she meets Mark, the early days of marriage and parenthood—before arriving at the 57-year-old Julia and understanding who she was.

Same as It Ever Was focuses on complex maternal relationships. What inspired you to explore this subject?

There’s just endless fictional fodder in family relationships, and I think mother-daughter relationships are perhaps the most fodder-full of all; I could write 10 more books exploring characters exclusively through this lens. We’re so deeply, messily shaped, as women, by our mothers—or mother figures—and then by becoming mothers, or not, the how and the why of it. And there’s a great deal of societal pressure and expectation as well—what it means to be a good mother, how much mothers are accountable for, the notion that we should want children and delight in them. Julia’s feelings about motherhood are complex and not especially rosy, and she’s often ashamed of them, or confused by them, which I don’t think is an uncommon experience by any stretch, so I wanted to explore it as candidly as I could.

Like The Most Fun We Ever Had, Same as It Ever Was plays with flashbacks, carrying the reader across decades to gain insight into the past moments that have shaped the characters’ present. What appeals to you about this structure? 

I love having the freedom to move around in time because it enables me to look holistically at my characters. Nobody exists in a vacuum; everyone is shaped by a wealth of big and small moments. I’ll also say that there was some degree of claustrophobia writing this novel—residing in the head of a single character over 500 pages—and moving between different versions of Julia allowed me some breathing room, and often spaces to find empathy for the character.

This novel is rich and sprawling—easy to read, but packed with hefty sentences full of detail and action. Those sentences surely couldn’t have been as easy to create as they are to consume. How long did it take you to write Same as It Ever Was?

I actually started this novel around 2015, when I was still finishing The Most Fun We Ever Had—I like to have two projects underway simultaneously. And like Most Fun, I wrote this book very much out of order, so the structure took a lot of working and reworking. This story isn’t told linearly, and finding the right shape for it was a challenge.

Tell us more about your writing process. Do you outline? Do these rich sentences appear more or less fully formed, or do you labor over their composition, starting with something leaner before hanging meat on the bone?

I don’t outline until I have a full draft on the page—once I do have a finished draft, I make a storyboard, which helps me to visualize the arc of the novel and fine-tune how I might make it work better. The sentence-level writing came fairly easily to me—it helped to have such a voicey narrator in Julia! Once I really got to know her voice—which, to be fair, is a lot like my own, full of segue and non sequitur and interruption—I had no trouble articulating her thoughts.

What are your reading habits like when you’re writing?

I have to be careful! I try not to read books with too much thematic overlap to avoid being unconsciously nudged in any particular direction. When I was deep in the writing of Same as It Ever Was, I was reading a lot of mystery novels—I read the entire Louise Penny series, for instance—because they felt in terms of genre and structure to be far enough away from my project.

Given that you also work part time as a bookseller, I’m curious: What books have you been encouraging customers to buy lately?

It is such a joy that part of my job is getting to shove books I love into the hands of customers. Some of my most-shoved books lately are The Trees by Percival Everett, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, and American Mermaid by Julia Langbein. I also love nudging our mystery seekers toward Tana French and Richard Osman.

Do you bring anything from your experience as a bookseller to your writing?

There’s absolutely overlap between the bookseller and writer parts of me—I’m fascinated by human dynamics, by understanding what makes people tick, and I think those interests benefit me in writing books and talking to other people about them. And working in a bookstore has turned me on to books I might not otherwise have read, which is a great gift.

Read our review of Same as It Ever Was.

Following up The Most Fun We Ever Had, Claire Lombardo returns with another big introspective novel, Same as It Ever Was, which explores the highs and lows of a family and a marriage from the point of view of its matriarch.
FictionPopular FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Tackle complicated mother-daughter stories with your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

Diane Marie Brown’s Black Candle Women tells the story of three fierce Black women united by the spells and elixirs that have been passed down in their family. Willow, Augusta and Victoria Montrose lead a quiet existence in California until Victoria’s teenage daughter, Nickie, becomes involved with Felix. Unaware of the family curse—that anyone a Montrose woman falls in love with is doomed to die—Nickie risks everything for her new relationship. Richly atmospheric, Brown’s moody, magical novel is a profound exploration of family, legacy and love.

In Thao Thai’s Banyan Moon, Vietnamese American artist Ann Tran struggles with the loss of her grandmother, Minh. After unexpected events jeopardize her romance with Noah, a professor, Ann goes to Florida for a difficult reunion with her mother. As they work to heal their frayed relationship, they learn that Minh has bequeathed them Banyan House, their old family home—an inheritance that may help them find a way forward. Thai’s poignant portrayal of three women connected by the bonds of family offers many discussion topics, including the immigrant experience and the nature of grief.

Hula, Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes’ moving multigenerational novel, takes place in Hilo, Hawaii. Hi’i Naupaka has a deep interest in hula and hopes to win the Miss Aloha Hula contest, a competition her mother triumphed in years ago. But painful questions haunt Hi’i. She doesn’t know who her father is, and her grandmother—a formidable figure in the community—has nothing to do with her. When the truth about her parentage comes to light, Hi’i’s world is turned upside down. Hakes uses elements of Hawaiian history and culture to create a transportive tale of family and community.

With Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi probes the complexity of the mother-daughter tie. In Pune, India, newly married Antara is disturbed by the behavior of her mother, Tara, who seems to be suffering from dementia. A headstrong, free-spirited woman who walked out on her marriage, Tara was a less than ideal mother throughout Antara’s childhood. Now she and Antara must come to terms with the past as they face an uncertain future. With themes of memory, forgiveness and aging, Doshi’s multilayered novel is a rewarding reading group pick.

Four powerful novels chronicle the drama and intensity of mother-daughter relationships.

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