Julia Ames is shopping for her husband’s 60th birthday party, on the hunt for ingredients that were out of stock at her regular grocery store. It seems like an ordinary task, traveling two towns over for crab meat—until Julia spots in the aisles the one woman whom she intended to avoid for the rest of her life.

Helen Russo was a volunteer at the botanic garden when the two women met about 20 years earlier. At the time, Julia was struggling to find ways to fill the days with her young son. She had never felt completely at ease in life, although meeting her husband made her feel tethered in a way she didn’t feel with her mother, who had raised Julia on her own. After becoming a mother herself, Julia  loved her son madly, but she felt the impact of her early loneliness: “She’d never had a proper set of tools, but it had mattered less before; now there were others involved.”

Since giving birth, Julia had been adrift, and everything seemed too much. Helen—older than Julia by two decades, more experienced as the mother of five grown sons—recognized what the younger woman needed and quickly befriended her.

Now, running into Helen in the grocery store sends Julia’s mind racing back to those early days of motherhood and decisions that nearly destroyed her marriage. Told in chapters alternating past and present, Same as It Ever Was explores the challenges of motherhood and of being mothered. As in her New York Times bestselling debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, novelist Claire Lombardo dives deeply into her characters’ lives to mine the family dynamics that shaped them.

Lombardo peels away years of secrecy to reveal the choices that led Julia to—and then away from—her defining friendship with Helen. The reader gets to know Julia not only as a nearly 60-year-old mother of adult children and earlier as a struggling new mother, but also as a teenager with her own difficult, tumultuous mother. As Lombardo draws back the curtain on Julia’s past, the parallels to her present life become clear. Same as It Ever Was is an engrossing story of maternal complexity and a reminder of the myriad ways the past can quietly inform the present.

Claire Lombardo finds “difficult characters much more interesting”: Read our Q&A with the author about Same as It Ever Was.

Emergency rooms often resemble war zones, with patients who have ghastly injuries and medical personnel needing to make quick decisions. Joseph should know: An employee at an understaffed trauma center in Philadelphia—or, as he calls it, a “northeastern middling city”—he’s also an Iraq War veteran. And he has a complicated family life with its own set of distresses, including a series of ex-lovers and a mother who once asked him to kill her boyfriend. The memoirist Joseph Earl Thomas (Sink) integrates all of these elements in his dazzling debut novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.

Yes, that Otis Spunkmeyer, the purveyor of cookies and muffins. Pastries play a supporting role in this work, both as junk food Joseph and fellow soldiers enjoyed in Iraq, “the only good thing we got for free besides tinnitus,” and as snacks proffered to emergency room patients. The treats provide comfort of a sort to ease the pain of the challenges Joseph, his patients, his family and his colleagues have to face.

Joseph shares custody of his children with an ex-spouse but has to pay child support. His father, who abandoned his family long ago, is so unfamiliar to Joseph that he and his mother have to look up his father’s mugshot online to recall what he looks like. And there’s Joseph’s mother, who was addicted to cocaine when he was young and who is often incarcerated, “most prominently for drug possession, prostitution, and then assault.”

Thomas expertly employs a stream-of-consciousness style, rapidly toggling between encounters with family, the patients who come through the ER, and Joseph’s coworkers, among them Ray, who wants to be an artist and served beside Joseph overseas. The style seamlessly shifts as well, blending dialogue and slang into formal, literary prose. Graphic material—detailed depictions of injuries and of sex—is handled beautifully and feels true to the characters.

The result is a kaleidoscopic tour through Joseph’s eventful life. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is an intricate and brave debut that readers will savor.

Children who have lost their parents are orphans, wives who have lost their husbands are widows, and husbands who have lost their wives are widowers. But there is no word to account for the immense, devastating loss of a child. John Vercher begins Devil Is Fine from this nameless position, as the unnamed narrator, a struggling writer and professor, attends his son Malcolm’s funeral. In contrast to the lack of words for his grief, there are plenty of words (some more acceptable than others) for his racial identity: mixed, biracial, mulatto, etc. Inevitably, these two aspects of our narrator’s identity—the loss of his son and his biracial background—intersect as he finds out he has inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather on his white mother’s side of the family. This land, he soon finds out, is a former plantation. Wrestling with the racial history of the land and the meaning of inheriting it, our narrator embarks on a mystical, profound journey into an unraveling identity. 

In terms of form, theme and voice, Devil Is Fine is anything but stable. Following the narrator in the first person, the book leaps through time back to when Malcolm was alive and even to when the plantation was in the hands of the narrator’s ancestor, with interjections from spirits along the way. One of Vercher’s greatest technical accomplishments is how surprising and urgent this shifting feels as it gives the reader a fuller, richer picture of the identity problems haunting the narrator and a better understanding of how these problems impact all of our lives. Vercher offers no final judgment on the questions of identity that he raises: The narrator has an ambiguous relationship to writing “Black” fiction, which he does out of duty but finds both fulfilling and contemptible, a torn feeling that all writers whose work is similarly labeled can relate to. This instability and in-betweenness mirrors identity itself, that thing we each supposedly have that we can never really pin down, that’s always changing and can never wholly describe us.

As Bear by Julia Phillips opens, there’s a wildness that takes over, an immediate sense that control is elusive, that the landscape, not humans, is in charge. On an island in the Pacific Northwest, two sisters—Sam and Elena—spend their days working, caring for their dying mother and imagining future possibilities for their lives. Their routines are measured and predictable.

With limited employment available post-pandemic, Sam works in food service on the ferry to and from the island. She’s startled one day to see a bear swimming off the side—unusual for the area—and she shares the sighting with her sister, Elena. When the bear unexpectedly arrives outside their home, Sam is shocked, terrified; Elena is enchanted, curious. The bear disrupts their equilibrium, introducing questions they’re unsure how to answer. As the novel unfolds, the twin tensions of caring for their mother and of tracking and understanding the bear’s presence push against each other, forcing the sisters’ relationship to change. 

Bear takes light inspiration from the Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” but it would feel like a modern fairy tale regardless thanks to its sense of looking for wonder and magic in surroundings, of giving in to surprise and forces beyond one’s imagination in a world that feels hard. There’s a taut energy, a quickness to the language that contrasts the richness of landscape with the intensity of humans struggling in myriad ways to survive, let alone thrive. It’s a novel that asks to be read in a single sitting: it’s short, carefully paced, language-driven. Just as Elena and Sam can’t look away from the bear, it’s hard to look away from this story that unfolds in deft, surprising, unexpected ways.