Is there any experience more transformative than motherhood? It changes not just a woman’s body but also her very outlook on life. Somehow, everything becomes both sweeter and more frightening. Ruth Hartland experienced the intensity of motherhood twice over with the birth of her twins, Carolyn and Tom. Her daughter is outgoing and self-assured, easily navigating school and friendships. But Tom is anxious and painfully sensitive, never quite finding his place in the world.

When Tom disappears at 17, Ruth enters a hellish limbo, with days “when missing him feels like a hole in my chest.” She throws herself into her work as a highly respected therapist, tucking away her own personal turmoil as she works with people recovering from trauma. But how well can she ignore her own pain while helping others work through theirs? 

Ruth starts treating a new patient, a young man recovering from a brutal assault. He bears a striking resemblance to Tom, a professional red flag Ruth chooses to ignore. She knows she can help this traumatized boy, even though she couldn’t help Tom. As Ruth finds herself crossing professional boundaries to help the troubled young man, the relationship hurdles toward unimaginable tragedy.

Bev Thomas, herself a psychologist, paints a sympathetic portrait of a grieving mother—one with no body to bury—and the choices she makes just to survive. A Good Enough Mother is both a heartbreaking story of love and loss and a hopeful meditation on the winding path to healing.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article misnamed the author.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, the fourth novel from Balli Kaur Jaswal (Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows), is an absolute delight. It interweaves multiple family stories within the colorful panorama of a journey to India, resulting in a novel that is sad, joyful and exciting all at the same time.

Jaswal’s narrative entwines the stories of three adult sisters whose disparate lives are catapulted on a new and completely different trajectory when their mother makes a request. With her death only hours away, India-
born Sita Kaur Shergill, who raised her children in England, says she wants her daughters to undertake a pilgrimage to India—one she was unable to take—and provides detailed instructions for the trip that are daunting, life–changing and often hilarious.

The Shergill sisters—Rajni, Jezmeen and Shirina—live very separate lives, each with its own secrets. The author enfolds readers in deceptively simple stories that reveal the hidden depth, humor and pathos of each sister’s life, as little by little they learn and accept each other’s stories. The teeming, textured setting of India is captured through the author’s evocative scenes, as the sisters navigate on-the-ground travel as well as their own inner terrain. 

At the start of Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel, Queenie Jenkins has just endured a messy breakup with her longtime boyfriend. A 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman living in London, Queenie is funny, clever and curvaceous. First to finish college in her family, she has landed a respected job with the local newspaper, where she hopes to do big things. But when her white boyfriend, Tom, unexpectedly ends their relationship, Queenie spirals through a series of self-destructive decisions until her self-worth is down in the dumps.

Helping her navigate the doldrums—as well as a series of terrible choices in men from online dating apps—are perhaps some of the best girlfriends a person could ask for. Queenie is lucky to be surrounded by caring friends, family and boss. But that doesn’t stop her from constantly questioning how her race, the color of her skin and the size of her body will ever be good enough. Queenie, in essence, is every modern black woman who has ever questioned her abilities and her place in this world. 

With resonant reflections on race, relationships, sex and friendships, Queenie is a terrific debut that’s delivered with a touch of British humor and plenty of feel-good moments.

What would life be if you could forget your most painful memories?

Emmett Farmer’s family is horrified when a bookbinder requests Emmett as her apprentice. Under her guidance, he will learn to lay hands on people, copy their memories onto paper and bind those memories between two covers. Once the memories are committed to the page, their creators forget their most traumatic moments. Sexual assault and violence are no more, but what’s left in their place? Is it worse “to feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered?” Emmett asks. “Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point? And yet that numbness would take part of your self away. It would be like having pins and needles in your soul.”

In The Binding, acclaimed young adult author Bridget Collins explores the way memory shapes a person in times both good and bad. Emmett learns that his trade is controversial—considered witchcraft by some—but that he’s powerless to avoid it. His mentor sees binding as a kind act for those who want to leave trauma behind, but other binders aren’t so ethical. Some practitioners sell books on the black market. Other binders take advantage of people’s need for money and purchase their memories. When Emmett spots a book bearing his own name, the ethical quandary becomes personal.

Collins’ interest in bookbinding is apparent in her enchanting descriptions of these vessels of memories. She also found inspiration in her work with the Samaritans, the British charity organization she volunteered with, working with people who had experienced trauma.

The Binding is an imaginative, thought-provoking tale of how—for better and worse—moments can define who we become.

What do you do when a family member has a secret that is so terrible it changes the way you’ve experienced reality for the first 30 or so years of your life? This is but one of the dilemmas facing the narrator of Megan Collins’ latest novel.

Since she was a child, Sylvie O’Leary’s life has been darkened by her sister’s murder. Persephone—who was aptly named—was strangled on the one night that Sylvie, then age 14, refused to leave their bedroom window cracked open so Persephone could sneak into the house after an assignation with Ben Emory, the son of their town’s mayor. Their mother, Annie, forbade Persephone to date, even though she was already 18. And Annie definitely didn’t want Persephone running around with Ben. Too proud to ring the front doorbell, Persephone ran back to Ben’s car and was never seen alive by her family again.

The catastrophe causes Sylvie to skip town as soon as she’s able, leaving her feckless mother—unhinged from alcoholism and grief and recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer—in the care of Annie’s sister, Jill. When Jill must attend to her own daughter, who is about to give birth, Sylvie is forced to return not only to dying, bitter Annie but also to the town that was the scene of her sister’s murder. The case has been cold for the better part of two decades, but Sylvie is determined to get to the bottom of it. What she finds is more devastating than she even imagined.

With its focus on the grim-dark aspects of the female experience, The Winter Sister calls to mind works like Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects or the film The Tale. This twisty-turny story reminds the reader of the fickle nature of the truth, and that impossible things happen more often than you think.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

Decades and continents apart, two young girls are each unexpectedly gifted a piano. In the Soviet Union during the 1960s, Katya’s piano comes to her from the mysterious German tenant who lives down the hall. In 1990s California, Clara receives hers as a surprise from her father. Katya excels at playing the piano, to which she feels extremely attached, and she centers her education and her self-expression on her musical talent. Clara is similarly attached to hers—not for her talent (of which there is little) but because she received it shortly before her father and mother died in a mysterious house fire. 

When Clara, now in her mid-20s, decides to sell the piano, she realizes that she isn’t ready to part with her past. But she has already found a buyer, and he is extremely determined. The twisting mysteries of Chris Cander’s third novel are set into motion, and the result is a charming, puzzling plot that gets more exciting and addictive the deeper you sink into it.

The Weight of a Piano ruminates on the gravity held by the objects in our lives. Both Katya and Clara are heavily fixated on their pianos; they feel that it is an extension of themselves in certain ways. For Katya, losing the piano means losing everything, but Clara has a chance to come to terms with her painful attachment through a series of unraveling secrets.

Short chapters help the braided plot to avoid becoming overwhelming, and the novel is well-researched, from the Cyrillic script to the exquisitely bleak “sailing stones” in Death Valley. This reviewer just happened to be, in a past life, a piano tuner, and Cander’s unadorned prose composes some truly beautiful descriptions of the joy of music.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If marriage is the prize, you’d better be skilled in the art of “grabbing it,” it being an eligible bachelor. In her Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Soniah Kamal transports Jane Austen’s narrative to early-2000s Pakistan, imbuing the often-reimagined story with a fresh lexicon. Unmarriageable proves the timelessness of Austen and how her centuries-old plotline finds a home in many cultures.

The Binat family has fallen far, deceived out of their fortunes by Mr. Binat’s own brother, and have been making due with reduced circumstances for more than a decade. To Mrs. Binat’s chagrin, her two oldest daughters must work, finding employment as teachers at the local school. All five Binat girls—Jena, Alys, Mari, Qitty and Lady—await their (mother’s) longed-for fate of a good marriage.

Though her prose lacks Austen’s sardonic bite and subtlety, Kamal paints endearing relationships between Jena and Alys, and between Alys and her best friend, Sherry Looclus. Due to the lack of well-developed chemistry, love matches between Alys and Valentine Darsee, and Jena and Fahad “Bungles” Bingla, unfortunately fall flat, but the real spark to Kamal’s writing comes whenever Mrs. Binat opens her mouth. The mother’s hysterics over appearances and the father’s frequent retreat to his garden (plants can’t talk, after all) provide much of the comic relief. Kamal skewers Pakistani society over their obsessions and hypocrisies much in the same way Austen did hers. Alys, told at one point by the condescending Beena dey Bagh that it must be hard for her mother to have two 30-year-old daughters unmarried, retorts that it “seems to be even harder on absolute strangers.”

As an admirer of Austen’s work, I appreciate how others want to emulate her. It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that it is quite the undertaking. Altogether, Unmarriageable is light and entertaining. Meddling mothers, conniving sisters, arrogant men and a marriage-minded society provide plenty of fodder, and in the end, class clashes and societal expectations transcend the ages as well as geography.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Tranquillum House seems like the ideal place for rest, relaxation and repair. Owned by Masha, a former high-powered executive who switched careers after a heart attack, the bucolic wellness center is a refuge for broken souls with deep pockets.

There’s Frances, the semifamous romance novelist who is hitting a midcareer slump; Jessica and Ben, lottery winners whose good fortune is ruining their marriage; the Marconi family, reeling from the loss of their son; and Carmel, a mother of four daughters whose husband left her for a younger woman. They’ve all gathered for 10 massage- and hike-filled days at the center.

But Masha is toying with introducing a new protocol to her strictly regimented program. It’s risky, but if it yields the results she expects, it’ll put Tranquillum House—and her—on the map. If it fails, it could put her guests in danger. As the guests start to suspect they’re getting more than they paid for, they must decide how much they’re willing to do in the name of wellness.

Liane Moriarty is simply unparalleled at infusing flawed characters with humor and heartbreak. Her singular brand of storytelling was most recently showcased when her bestselling novel Big Little Lies was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Nine Perfect Strangers is a worthy follow-up, offering an irresistible take on our wellness-obsessed culture, where the weirder the treatment, the better.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Following her incisive novel Small Great Things (2016), which delved into the white supremacist movement, Jodi Picoult takes on the explosive topic of abortion rights in A Spark of Light.

Picoult sets her story in Jackson, Mississippi—all the action taking place over one long day at the Center, a women’s clinic for those who had “run out of time and had run out of choices.” Picoult begins her riveting saga at the end of the story, when George Goddard—a distraught, anti-abortion father whose teenage daughter recently had an abortion at the Center—storms inside, fires several shots and takes an unknown number of hostages. Hostage negotiator Hugh McElroy has been called to the scene to confront George.

With her latest novel, Jodi Picoult takes on another explosive, timely issue: abortion rights in America.

Picoult then moves backward in time, hour by hour, gradually filling in the details of those who came to the Center that day and why they came. She approaches this divisive issue from all sides—not blaming or condoning, but shining a perceptive light into the lives of those now hoping to survive the hostage situation.

Izzy, a nurse, struggles with the dilemma of whether or not to tell her boyfriend about her newly discovered pregnancy. She’s risen from a childhood of poverty and doesn’t want to rely on him, “the prince from the entitled family.” After the shooting, Izzy tends to the leg wound suffered by Dr. Ward, whose own mother died from an illegal abortion. Dr. Ward regularly travels between four states to provide abortions for women living where almost all such clinics have closed.

Joy completed her abortion before the shooting starts—and although she wanted the procedure, she’s still in mourning for what she’s lost. She lived in foster care for 10 years and didn’t want another child to go through the same miserable experience.

Janine is at the Center faking a pregnancy—she’s an anti-abortion activist trying to prove the clinic doesn’t offer prenatal care. She lives with the guilt of her own abortion after she was raped at a fraternity party. In Picoult’s words, Janine has “white-washed the stain with years of pro-life activism.”

Also inside the Center that morning are Hugh’s teenage daughter, Wren, and his older sister, Bex, who has helped raise Wren since Hugh’s wife left them years ago. Wren is there for a prescription for birth control pills, and she asked Bex to accompany her so she wouldn’t have to walk alone past the line of protesters.

Interspersed with these stories of how each character came to be at the Center are the ongoing negotiations between Hugh and George, heightening the tension throughout the novel, even though most of the denouement occurs in the opening chapter.

A Spark of Light is another winner for Picoult—a provocative exploration of an issue that is in the spotlight now more ever before.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.