Maeve Binchy has done it again. In Minding Frankie, she assembles a large cast of characters (many of them familiar faces from the close-knit Dublin neighborhood last depicted in Heart and Soul) and deploys them with her characteristic playfulness, effortlessly forming yet another warm tale of individual growth and human community.

Binchy writes about a baby girl born to a dying mother, who names the exact right person among her acquaintances to raise little Frances before she dies. That would be Noel Lynch, a victim of advanced apathy concerning just about everything in his life, which is further complicated by alcoholism. He could indeed be Frankie’s father, but it takes all of dying Stella’s determination to start things in the right direction, and before the story is done, the whole neighborhood bands together to see things done right by Frankie.

Binchy mourns the loss of community in the town, but a desire to work together seems alive and well as the neighbors gather ’round to care for Frankie—and to foil Moira, the rather nasty social worker who threatens to upset the carefully planned arrangements.

Even minor characters feel the jab of Binchy’s wit, like Miss Gorman, a secretary “who had a disapproval rating about almost everything,” and the Italian restaurant owner, who speaks in “carefully maintained broken English.” Ireland may not be what it used to be, but Binchy viably populates a modern version that is almost as heartwarming.

Binchy specializes in exploring human foibles without spelling them out in tiresome detail. Here she adds a 19th novel to a string of successes that take light-hearted looks at real life and always find it worth the effort. There’s a good chance that many readers, like this one, will consider Minding Frankie one of Binchy’s best novels yet. 

Cleaning Nabokov’s House is a laugh-out-loud pleasure of a read. Our main character, Barbara Barrett, is a divorced mother deemed emotionally unstable by the court. Her children, Sam and Darcy, will live with their father (referred to by Barb as “the experson”) until Barb can prove she has it together—a stable income, a happy and clean home, friends and hobbies. Barb’s journey to reinvent herself—to find a different way of living than the silly, stuffy way of the experson—is a totally original delight.

The novel is partially of interest because Barb is an outsider. She’s an outsider in her northern New York town of Onkwedo, where everyone knows the experson and automatically sides with him during the divorce. She’s an outsider professionally, working a dead-end job answering letters for a local dairy (she gets to decide if the person who complained deserves a free ice cream cone). And, most significantly, she’s an outsider from her former family. Barb’s remarkable resilience comes from her ability to pursue happiness on her own terms. While initially hostile to Onkwedo and to the experson, she uncannily puts her finger on just what Onkwedo needs and opens up her own business with smashing results.

Along the way, Barb moves into a house formerly inhabited by the genius writer Vladimir Nabokov. When she finds a manuscript tucked behind a false wall in a cabinet, Barb believes she’s found a lost masterpiece. Her attempts to get it published lead readers to the wonderful cast of secondary characters—no-nonsense agent Margie (pronounced with a hard G), a slick entertainment lawyer and maybe even a new boyfriend. As writer Dorothy Allison says in her endorsement of Cleaning Nabokov’s House, “Go ahead, take a risk. You are going to love this woman—and this book.” 

Around the globe, the words “coffee house” conjure a fairly standard picture: steaming mugs of caffeinated refreshment, quality time with friends and intimate conversation over the buzz of an espresso machine. Author Deborah Rodriguez opens her first novel, A Cup of Friendship, in heart of the Afghan city Kabul. Here, at Sunny’s cafe, there are hot beverages and baristas. But there is also an armed guard at the door and a policy that patrons must check their guns before enjoying a latte. The shatterproof glass in the windows serves as a strong reminder of the threat of terrorism that Afghans face on a daily basis.

Though fictional, A Cup of Friendship was penned by a realist: The wayfaringRodriguez, whose best-selling memoir Kabul Beauty School drew on her own experiences living in the fickle Middle Eastern metropolis.

Readers meet several strong women from all walks of life in the novel. American ex-pat Sunny is struggling to run a business while navigating her feelings for two men: her longtime boyfriend Tommy flits in and out of her life while fighting the Taliban, while Jack, a regular at the café, begins to catch Sunny’s eye. The problem is, he’s already in a relationship.

At the book’s opening, the generous Sunny adds village girl Yazmina to her small staff and Sunny is drawn into a dangerous predicament that she’ll need both Tommy and Jack to help resolve. Yazmina harbors a secret that could endanger her life, but Sunny feels a moral obligation to engage despite the risk.

Isabel, an assertive British journalist working to expose the injustices against women in the country, is another memorable character. While her assertive manner is hard for Sunny to digest at first, Isabel’s heroics endear her to her coffee house compatriots forever.

Halajan, Sunny’s landlord, feels like the most authentic of Rodriguez’s characters. At almost 60, Halajan has lived through freer times: when women weren’t mandated to cover up in public or prohibited from keeping company with the opposite sex. Halajan’s feisty and insightful commentary on a nation torn between tradition, religion and change gives readers a truly unique and thought-provoking perspective.

Though A Cup of Friendship is light on page-turning action, the story here is more about the complexity and, ultimately, importance of bonds that transcend culture and circumstance. 

In 1979, in the wake of Hurricane David, five toddlers were found in an abandoned boat tied to a dock in Puerto Rico. No one knew where they came from or who put them there, but they were well-dressed and well-fed—someone had loved them. Called the “starfish children” because of the starfish inked on their hands, they were adopted by different families, reunited as adults and now consider themselves brothers and sisters. Then one of the five, David, comes down with a brain tumor that brings flashes of what he believes are real memories of his life before the hurricane. His siblings rally around him, but not without anxiety: David wants to get to the bottom of who they are and where they came from once and for all before he dies. Some of his siblings do not.

Aside from his family, David has a sometime girlfriend, Julia Griswold. The Griswolds have roots that go back centuries: Every Griswold knows exactly where he or she came from and, sometimes, where they’re going. This is one of the reasons David and the other “starfish children” are so intrigued by her. Much of Sandra Rodriguez Barron's novel, Stay with Me, takes place in the beloved old island home that is the Griswolds’ family seat.

One of the novel’s pleasures is Barron's empathy for her characters; you feel you know these people and would like to spend time with them, tetchy though some of them are. David, who narrates some of the chapters, is by turns brave, peevish and romantic. Adrian is a passionate and talented musician. Holly, the only one with kids, is maternal and kindhearted. Raymond, overweight and a recovering alcoholic, is nurturing as well. Taina seems to be the most damaged, and her pain causes her to do things that come within shouting distance of being unforgivable. Julia is loving, steadfast and welcomes the family into her home, though not without cost. She’s also torn between the duty she feels toward her ex-boyfriend and her attraction to the charismatic Adrian.

Full of intrigue and romance, Stay With Me is a deeply moving paean to loyalty, compassion and family—biological or not. 

Terry McMillan may not be the most lyrical of novelists, but she does one thing very well, and it must be the key to her success: She’s fantastic at capturing the lives of certain African-American women. These women are middle or upper class, suburban, well-educated and take their right to be treated as full and intelligent human beings as a given. Still, there’s room for their lives and the insides of their heads to be delightfully messed up. Such is the case in Getting to Happy, a sequel to the iconic Waiting to Exhale.

The same four girlfriends are back—Savannah, Bernadine, Robin and Gloria. They’re middle-aged now, and dealing with bodies that sag no matter how much they work out, sudden health scares, shaky job situations and perennially bewildering men and children.

The book begins with a restless Savannah tossing her Internet porn-addicted husband’s computer into their swimming pool, and goes on to Bernadine’s financial woes and light addiction—if an addiction can be light—to over-the-counter meds; Robin’s man troubles and her relationship with her smart, funny and exasperating daughter; and the personal and professional traumas endured by Gloria, who has gone from single parent to doting grandmother.

Another of McMillan’s talents is that she can leaven even the most grim situation with a nice dose of unforced, true-to-life humor, and there are many passages in the book that will have the reader laughing out loud, as well as passages that will leave one a bit dewy-eyed. It spoils nothing to say that all’s well that ends well in the lives of McMillan’s spirited, potty-mouthed, tetchy quartet. Can we look forward to following them into vibrant old age?

In her last 11 books, Jane Green has created friends who become family and family who become estranged. Her characters have had their hearts broken, their dreams realized and their health jeopardized. Green’s latest work, Promises to Keep, maintains her tried-and-true formula but has special meaning for the author, who says writing this novel helped her cope with the loss of a dear friend.

The characters in Promises to Keep are going about their lives, dating, raising kids and searching for meaning, when one of them, a cancer survivor, falls ill again. What follows is what Green does best: A group of people—some blood-related, some kindred spirits—rallies for Callie Perry. They take her flowers and food—establishing an important community theme in the novel—with a recipe between each chapter. They make sure her kids are loved and entertained, and her husband stable. Instead of approaching Callie’s illness from the sick woman’s perspective, Green shows the disease as she knows it best: from the standpoint of someone watching their loved one shrink away.

The reader is able to go through the grieving process without distraction, as these characters are all who they seem: Callie’s doting husband does not cheat, her best friend does not neglect her and her children don’t turn against her. By not building characters for shock value, Green creates a scene of what has become a large family drinking wine and eating chips on Callie’s bed as she dozes between bouts of laughter. The reader views the image from the doorway of a room floodlit with spirit. Promises to Keep is a thoughtful, poignant tribute to cancer victims and those who were impacted by their abbreviated, shining lives.

Literature is filled with lovers that not even death can divide. Heathcliff and Cathy, then Edward and Bella; now in Ann Brashares’ entrancing new romantic saga, readers will be swept away by Daniel and Lucy, whose love is truly one for the ages.

Daniel is both blessed and cursed by “the Memory”—he is able to remember his previous lives and recognize the reincarnated souls of people he once knew. In present-day Virginia, he comes across Lucy, though he knows her as Sophia, his one true love. Initially Lucy has no knowledge of the tumultuous past she and Daniel have shared, but with his gentle coaxing, the secrets lying deep within her soul begin to reveal themselves to her. And with them comes the realization that she and Daniel must identify and confront the ancient threat that has always managed to tear them apart.

In My Name is Memory, readers will trace Daniel and Lucy’s love over centuries and continents, intoxicated both by the pair’s passion and by Brashares’ rich historical and geographical detail. A potent mix of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Twilight and something entirely new, My Name is Memory is the first installment in a planned three-book series that will remind readers that when it comes to love, hope springs eternal.

Brunonia Barry burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, The Lace Reader, a story filled with magic, romance and an ensnaring web of family secrets. Initially self-published, The Lace Reader garnered so many rave reviews and such a loyal following that it was eventually picked up by HarperCollins and became a bestseller.

Now Barry is back with another enthralling novel that is sure to please previous fans as well as gain her new devotees. The Map of True Places tells the story of Zee Finch, a young therapist who is struggling to navigate the tumultuous waters of adulthood. Toil and turmoil are nothing new to Zee, whose life has never been set on a straight course; as a young girl, she watched her manic-depressive mother die before her very eyes, an event which forced Zee to grow up quicker than most and is a burden she still carries with her—one that grows heavier by the day. When one of her patients commits suicide, Zee retreats to her childhood home in Salem, Massachusetts, only to find that her father is gravely ill. As Zee juggles the demands of caring for her father and also meeting her own needs, old memories and guilt resurface, prompting her to slowly untangle the snarls of her past so that she may find peace in her future.

Gripping and emotionally taut, this is a novel brimming with both the messy and the lovely parts of life. A provocative examination of family, aging and finding your true place in the world, The Map of True Places is sure to smoothly sail Barry up the bestseller list once more.