I could not put this book down once I started, so swiftly does Roxana Robinson draw us into the lives of her two protagonists, long-ago lovers in their youth who meet by chance in their "golden years." Sarah is divorced, Warren is unhappily married, both have adult children they struggle to be closer to, and work they enjoy… and both are in some way unfulfilled. A new love kindles, and threatens to challenge assumptions each of them has cherished about themselves and about the imagined future.

Robinson weaves a rich fabric of their separate daily routines and inner lives as they struggle long-distance —Sarah in Westchester, Warren in Boston—to decide whether there is a way and a place to build a future together, and whether they can afford the emotional cost, either way… And meanwhile, there are other challenges each must face alone. As we move swiftly through years to reach a stunning conclusion, we are challenged, like Sarah and Warren, to consider what we most value in ourselves and in our lives.

I can't praise this novel enough! I have enjoyed her earlier novels, and this one is the best yet.

This absorbing novel is narrated by three generations of Native American girls and their cherished dolls, who "speak" to each of them out of their own suppressed inner wisdom, guiding and protecting them, absorbing the racial trauma that the girls cannot yet comprehend. Their stories span the 20th Century, focusing on the experience of Indian children removed from their families, sometimes for years, to attend boarding schools where their keepsakes will be destroyed and they will be forced to speak a new language, take on new names, wear new clothing and adopt a new, false identity. Resistance will be crushed. Some will not survive.

Each girl's voice is distinct, each girl intuitive and precocious in her own way. Author Mona Susa Power manages the challenge of creating convincing young narrators while addressing a mature theme: the complexity of preserving tribal identity in a white world determined to criminalize it, the psychological damage that is done, and how that resonates from one generation to the next. Power wisely chooses to tell her story—the fictionalized story of her own mixed Lakota and Dakota family, with a connection to Sitting Bull—beginning with her own generation and moving backward in time. This allows her readers to find the connections between one character's troubling questions and the "answers" that lie waiting to be discovered in the past.

Her writing is pure poetry. At the heart of this powerful novel is her belief that language itself is power. As one character, Cora, puts it, "They treat our language like a sickness so contagious it must be cut from our tongues…" For her granddaughter Jesse, as for the author, in her afterword, putting the truth of this part of history into words is powerful healing. And powerful reading!

This striking picture of the Civil Rights movement, from a Southern black perspective not so far included included in the mainstream white-dominated narrative, raises that question through the compelling emotional struggle of Alice Young, who flees a plantation-minded, nominally integrated and repressive rural Alabama, hoping to find her sister in Birmingham, but who ends up in the prosperous all-black town of New Jessup, where she finds dignity, opportunity, love and hope. Here the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. falls on deaf ears; citizens fear integration will destroy their freedom to be left in peace, to flourish as property and business owners and create a vibrant community— though they are still unable to vote, or to separate their town officially from a neighboring white community, so they don't get back their fair share of tax funds for their school. Most feel that's a price they are willing to pay to raise their children with pride and respect.

Alice feels that way too—her new home is Eden compared to the brutal treatment, daily insults and injustice she experienced under "integration." But the man she loves is part of a clandestine group seeking to peacefully challenge the status quo. As this work gains urgency, pressures mount, for Alice and for New Jessup. No spoilers!

I loved the author's lively way with words, full of poetry and local dialect, and her vivid portrait of the setting, its food, its social life. I admired how gracefully, naturally, she wove the complexity of Alice's dilemma into the story through fast-paced action and dialogue. I learned so much from this novel; it is a model of how literature expands our understanding.

Readers who admire Barbara Kingsolver as I do will not be disappointed with this engrossing and eye-opening novel, winner of her PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

This is a novel for anyone who loves poetry—a bildungsroman that begins when a capable, bright but insecure young woman accidentally falls in love with poetry. To her great surprise: Carla is convinced she's not college material, not a reader let alone a writer. While working for a garden service, she's sent to the home of an elderly client, the famous poet Viridian, a woman of striking looks and intriguing personality who treats Carla as a more than a hired hand. So when Carla happens to notice a poster advertising a poetry reading by Viridian, out of curiosity she decides to attend.

The poems shake her to the core. Her honest reaction touches the poet, who begins to mentor her gardener with poetry books on tape, life advice, friendship and respect, drawing her into a social circle of quirky poets, editors and agents. Carla has no ambition to write, but she begins to push herself to explore new work opportunities in the "poetry biz"—despite conflicts with her boyfriend—and to gain important insights into poems, those who write them, and into herself. She becomes the one in whom Viridian confides, indirectly, an important piece of information that will leave Carla with a key role to play in the poet's legacy.

It is delightful and refreshing to read a novel where affairs of the heart take second place to the more compelling question, How should we live? One where romance is found above all in the joy of learning to see poetry, and life, in a new way.

Chances are that if you're reading this review, it's because you, too, are struggling to cope with some type of loss.

After "three decades of togetherness… I would be facing an uncertain future without the partner I'd had since I was 18 years old," Florence Williams begins her unique, very readable blend of memoir and research into every kind of grief—from divorce, or social rejection or isolation, to the death of a loved one. Wisely she is focused less on rehashing her own past and more on what might helps her, and us, to move forward.

In particular, Williams explores the mind-body connection, the physiology of attachment and loss or rejection, whether with infant animals or adult humans. Why does it hurt so much, and what can we do about it? In many cases, she shows us, even the scientists who study it have been driven by a personal need to know. Beyond that, there's the case to be made (and Williams makes it very strongly) that heartbreak can pose an existential threat, on every level.

This is not a facile "self help" guide but a deep look into the ways that we experience and respond to grief, drawing together the insights of medicine, psychology, sports, philosophy and even literature. Our age, gender, personality and genetics play a part; so does our culture. It's up to the reader to decide what to take away from this book, but at the very least, I found it helpful to learn more about the ways that my unique struggle is nonetheless entirely natural. And that some risks are worth taking, understanding more fully what is at stake.

I've been a fan of Thrity Umrigar's fiction since the 2006 publication of The Space Between Us. A Mumbai native who emigrated to the US at 21, her novels all explore the various "spaces" between us—caste or class, religion, race, above all gender—within the social context of modern India, but with timely parallels to the United States. I am drawn to her distinctive protagonists, women whose struggles to develop their unique selves are always for the sake of something larger, something at stake for humanity, theirs and ours.

Honor likewise presents the dilemma of a relatable young woman, Smita—a Mumbai native who is now an American journalist, reluctantly returning to India on an assignment she accepted as a favor to a friend—as not merely a personal or political problem, but ultimately as a quandary that challenges us to think about what matters most. Her assignment is to profile Meena, a Hindu villager whose Muslim husband was burned to death in an "honor killing" by Meena's brothers. Meena, left disfigured in the attack, has brought charges; a verdict pends.

Umrigar's strength is her great storytelling. As always, not a word is wasted here as she moves us through urban Mumbai and into Meena's rural village, settings like and unlike our own…and into complex encounters and confrontations that Smita views with double vision as an Indian-American. Her investigation stirs up painful memories of her youth in Mumbai, during the years when rising Hindu nationalism reawakened the violence of partition, now a fact of life in India (as in America). Suspense builds.

At the center of the story is Smita's developing bond with Meena and with Mohan, the friend of her journalistic friend, who is acting as her guide, driver and protector, in a village where women are not supposed to work, let alone as journalists.

I highly recommend Honor as an engrossing story that rewards us with far more than entertainment.

This riveting memoir of the author's lasting love affair with China—with its history, culture, cuisines, and with the man who eventually became her husband—is the liveliest portrait of a nation I've ever read. Carolyn Phillips went to Taipei straight out of college to learn Mandarin; over 40 years later, she shares her journey of becoming the first writer in English to introduce all 35 of China's cuisines, a consequence of her effort to become a part of her boyfriend's family, to win their acceptance by cooking their favorite foods. Through their stories, with humor, grace and a straightforward style, Phillips weaves in Chinese history, its changing present, its social structure, and above all its food.

She is a more adventurous cook than most of us: in one of my favorite passages, she describes vividly how her boyfriend talked her into making sh?chá chão zh?tóuròu, a satay-sauced stir-fried pig's head with garlic scapes. "Cleaning a pig's entire face takes forever..." she begins, and we find out exactly why! (A recipe included in this chapter is for smoked pig's feet instead.)

I am more likely to make her garlic roast chicken, cabbage with shredded pork, or Yunan rice noodles— appetizing and clearly written for a moderately experienced cook. There is another bonus with this book: Phillips is a gifted artist, who created the colorful cover and dozens of delicate line drawings throughout her story, including maps. What a story, what a splendid table!

"Palimpsest" might be a better title for this novel which alternates between four characters retrieving their memories at different points in time: some are recent, some buried, some "reread" in light of new experiences. Two of the characters, Frank and Lil, are a longtime married couple from Boston who have recently moved to the small town in North Carolina where Frank spent part of his childhood. A retired professor of archaeology, Frank wants to retrieve relics and dig up memories of that time, which followed the death of his father in a horrific train accident. Lil meanwhile is wading through boxes of keepsakes and journals she has kept throughout her life, sorting them to pass on to their children, as at intervals she revisits her own childhood loss, the death of her mother in the Coconut Grove nightclub fire. Their early experience of tragedy brought Frank and Lil together in their youth, but now the lingering impacts of those memories in different ways shadow an otherwise happy marriage. Shelley is a young single mother remembering her troubled childhood and failed relationships, while trying to cope with an imaginative and challenging son, Harvey. The two live in Frank's childhood home. At the close, we find out how these two families are connected, in a way that suggests how we all misread the "hieroglyphics" of each other's lives, even those closest to us.

Much as I admire the author's craft in capturing the flow of consciousness in distinctively different characters, moving between present and different layers of the past, I found it a hard story to sink into; with conflicts largely buried, and so many shifts back and forth in time and between characters, I missed a unifying narrative thread to propel the action. There's much insight and feeling here, but the drama is all offstage.

At one point near the emotional climax of this profound, lyrical novel, Antonia, who has recently retired and has just lost her husband, ponders how often a milestone in her life has been marked by a major public tragedy. The publication of Afterlife (the first adult novel from Julia Alvarez in nearly fifteen years) amidst an unfolding pandemic is an eerie case of life imitating art—just as Antonia, a Vermonter of Dominican background, a writer and teacher of literature, appears to be based upon Alvarez herself. Though Alvarez is not a widow, and that is where her writer's art rises above any mere imitation of life. Antonia's groping to stir herself out of isolation, to reconnect with others and re-envision her sense of self and purpose, is stunningly accurate (to a twice-widowed reader) and all the more moving for its brevity, poetry and even humor. It is a rare case of an idiosyncratic, particular character deeply and generously representing all humanity, as Antonia wrestles with competing demands she would rather avoid, and that fundamental question: Who is the most important one?

Tishani Doshi is a poet. So it's not surprising that she brings a poet's craft to her first novel, one that unfolds in vignettes of vivid sensual detail and emotional resonance, and that tell a story in the way a lyric poem does— indirectly, through small moments drawn, seemingly randomly, from the near and distant past, and a present that quickly becomes past. We discover Grace Marisola's story—taking place across three continents and perhaps four decades—the way we uncover our own: moving forward through chronological time while dwelling simultaneously in different parts of the past, seemingly "small days and nights" that add up to a self, a life with potential meaning.

To recap Grace's story in narrative terms, we meet her at a time when she is trying to make sense of her failing marriage to an American, her return to her native TK after her mother's death, her untypical childhood there as the offspring of an Italian and an Indian, and the upheaval underway in India itself. Against this backdrop, she must piece together family secrets and redefine family to include a sister she never knew she had.

This is a rewarding read, but not an easy one, despite its shorter than average length. There's a lot to piece together, much implied and left to the reader's imagination, supplied with a wealth of rich and often symbolic details, running the gamut from gross to sublime. Doshani raises themes of individual and cultural identity, of freedom and obligation, on many levels, but true to a poet's vocation, she doesn't tell us what to conclude. She leaves us with Grace's sense of arrival at a point of departure — of hard-won answers, and new questions.

Sarah Rose puts her purpose boldly in her subtitle. Her well-researched profiles of six of the 30 female operatives the British Special Operations Executive sent to Occupied and Vichy France, as Resistance organizers, suppliers, saboteurs, makes a strong case for the significant role of the Resistance before and after D-Day, and especially for the significance of women as operatives—largely downplayed then ("girls" is how they were referred to), and for decades since.

That's a lot of ground to cover, in a history clearly written for a general audience, particularly women (like me) with only a sketchy understanding of WW2 military chronology. Rose supplies this essential context, weaving it into her efforts to trace each protagonist's background, her hiring (SOE's desperate experiment, due to the shortage of men), training and progress through the war. But the weaving is far from seamless: She attempts to tell the women's personal stories as though they were fiction— while sticking only to those (sketchy) details that she can document in painstaking chapter notes. That approach doesn't really bring the characters to life as individuals, and it interferes with the narrative flow and the reader's effort to piece together the larger picture.

Still, the events are gripping, especially as we learn each woman's fate (including torture, execution, indifferent "gratitude" for those who survived, only to battle for military recognition). I learned a lot from this book, and I believe we are all enriched by knowing that the Greatest Generation was more than a "band of brothers"— their sisters were every bit as selfless and courageous.

In A Ladder to the Sky, would-be famous writer Maurice Swift will stop at nothing to advance his name, to the point of appropriating the work of others. That's no plot-spoiler—it's the point made by the book's clever cover design. The question for readers quickly becomes, How low can he go?

A novel that gives us a thoroughly despicable protagonist is a rare, brave work. The Irish writer John Boyne (The Absolutist, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, A History of Loneliness, The Heart's Invisible Furies) is one of the very few writers I know who could pull it off. We tend to want to root for the underdog, we want our main characters to take the hero's journey, the universal arc of story. It's a tough job to work against that expectation.

But Boyne is up to it: He knows how to hook us on page one with Maurice's seductive storytelling voice, he knows how to shift narrative perspectives to build pace and suspense—even though, or especially because we know that each victim will get played— and most important to me, he knows how to subtly reveal that there's a point to all this misery.

It goes beyond farce: Just when we think we've got an over-the-top "happy" ending— possibly cheap, but oh-so- just desserts— there's another twist. And another. We don't know whether to root for transformation or retribution.

I think Boyne is after bigger game than a clever send-up of writers, literary academe and the publishing industry, while raising a few philosophical questions along the way. He's holding up a mirror to human nature, but especially, he's warning us: this is what the embodiment of evil looks like, here and now. (Anyone you recognize?) Bystanders enable bullies: if we look away, silent, even for a moment or two, we do so at our peril.

I wondered at first if I could be enthusiastic about this novel, since it's so different from Boyne's others. The answer is yes.

I'm in awe of Fatima Farheen Mirza. At 26 she has written a novel that --in its depth of psychological insight and its breadth of ideas--takes its place alongside the greatest from the past two centuries. Her portrait of an Indian-American Muslim family of five, each struggling to reconcile personal choices with faith, clashing cultures, gender roles, family dynamics, and the world after 9/11, is at once engrossing, thought-provoking, heart-breaking and uplifting. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay her is this: Mirza has grounded me in a world of convincing characters in loving conflict, whose experiences feel particular to Muslims, but in a way that honors their diversity (no stereotypes here) and shows their struggles as universal, in common with my own.

Her characters wrestle, each in his or her own way, with issues such as sibling (and parental) rivalry, grief, racism, addiction, pride and shame, the longing for a soul mate, for unconditional love, and the great questions: Is God real? What does it mean to be good? to be happy? to belong? What do I owe to others and to my own self? Is honesty always best? When do I forgive, when do I hold fast to principle? How can I make peace with the hurt I feel, or that I have inflicted on the ones I love most?

The point of departure is the family gathering for the wedding of Layla and Rafiq's eldest child, Hadia. (No last name, perhaps to emphasize the universality of experience, and no specific setting, though we can infer it is somewhere near San Francisco.) From that moment, we weave backward in memory and ultimately forward in time, from the perspectives of Layla, Hadia, her younger brother Amar, and ultimately Rafiq; only the middle sister, Huda, isn't fully developed.

Mirza's craft in shifting narrative viewpoints and chronology means the reader is never confused as the story gains momentum while folding back on itself: She allows us to revisit scenes through the eyes of different characters, weaving a tapestry of themes, true to the complexity of her characters--fundamentally decent, humanly flawed-- and of life itself.

The author is a naturalized US citizen who returns with her husband and family from their privileged lifestyle in midtown Manhattan to her native India, to introduce the children to their heritage. She befriends Sarala, a local vendor who sells fresh raw milk from her own cows,raised right in the heart of the city, for Indian housewives to make their weekly supply of yogurt and paneer.

"Befriends" is the word used on the book's cover, but the author chooses to clarify the two women are not friends, which raises a question for this reader! Their relationship over the years (it's not clear how many), seemingly the focus of the book, serves primarily as a device for weaving together many interesting details about cows in general and their importance in the culture of modern India (and not only for Hindus) which goes far beyond supplying milk. Narayan relates her adventures in learning about cows, with Sarala's help,in a light-hearted tone that has probably more to do with the author's privilege in both nations than with the daily reality for most Indians.

More than once she acknowledges her privilege, claiming to "fret a lot" about a lifestyle with twice as many servants as family members, and guilt that drives her to hide her ample supply of fine saris from her house cleaner ; she goes for therapy and is glad to be told to relax and accept it, just drink warm milk.There seems to be a disconnect between her journalistic honesty and her readiness to make light of the situation and focus on the joy of owning a cow, for her spiritual benefit, that someone else takes care of. Unwittingly, this book reveals more about the author than about her subject or her setting -- which disappointed me, as my interest in India is what led me to read it.

John Boyne is simply one of the great writers of our day. He's best known for one of his children's novels, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but I think he deserves to be better known for his many novels for adults, including The Absolutist and A History of Loneliness. Boyne's gifts are his lucid, natural, storyteller's voice that hooks the reader from the first sentence, an engaging, unflinchingly honest and likable main character, and a deep sense moral outrage, directed at all forms of bigotry and cruelty, but most often at the abusive influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland, its misogyny and homophobia.It would be the reader's loss, though, to dismiss Boyne as a "gay novelist." His concern is the human condition.

All of Boyne's strengths are at work in his latest novel, and more besides -- it is an epic with a rare sense of humor, sometimes touching on farce, at other times pathos, and always with a firm grip on harsh reality and empathy for the sorrows that come to us all: loneliness, shame, loss. In nearly 600 pages we span the life of one Cyril Avery, from 1945 to the present day, from his birth out of wedlock to his upbringing as an adopted, mostly neglected, closeted gay in Dublin, and later, the life choices that propel him far beyond Ireland itself, and back again.Cyril is an astute observer of people he meets, the places he lives, and of history. We meet a cast of characters, we see sweeping social changes, even as Cyril changes himself, finds himself, and forges bonds he never expected.

Along the way, through Cyril's voice the author awakened me, more than any other writer has done, to what it is like, out of necessity or fear, to live every hour of every day in a lie: he takes the issue of homophobia out of the public arena and brings it into the human soul, making us feel the damage, the pain, and the ripple effect upon others. And he does it without bitterness, ruthlessly reminding us that some of the damage is self-inflicted, that choices, if hard, are no less real. For all its furies, he shows us, the heart is capable of brave and generous love.

Boyne dedicates this to John Irving, and I think he sells himself short: this is worthy of Charles DIckens.

Henry is named for his father, resembles his father, and takes after his father, a book lover from childhood, an eccentric, gentle man of melancholic temperament, lively imagination, and occasional sly wit. Both love storytelling, the piano, the solitude of nature.

Like his father, Henry grows up in Old Buckram, an isolated, rundown settlement of 400 in the far northwestern hills of North Carolina, where he is equally a social misfit. Like his father, Henry escapes after high school to make his awkward way into the broader world: college, law school, and love at first sight. And like his father, he will return, not entirely of his own accord.

But there is a profound difference between Henry and his father, one Henry is forced to confront, and not just for his own sake.

As he narrates his story, the reader slips into a stream of prose seemingly as transparent as a mountain brook, with ripples of humor, varied landscapes and a gentle, insistent forward movement. Phillip Lewis subtly positions the stumbling stones that gradually alert us to Henry's deeper struggle and its urgency.

"Barrow," used in so many place names, designates a mountain, a burial mound or a pile of rocky debris. In Henry's world, the Barrowfields that lie beyond his family's peculiar glass and iron mansion are a wasteland with stumps of an old forest. But this novel isn't a ghost story. It's a nocturne on the theme of loss, living, and the human spirit.

A tenth-grade girl is brutally raped and tortured; as she lies sedated, her parents are given a choice that opens the fault line in their own marriage: whether or not to use a memory-erasing drug treatment that will spare her PTSD and a difficult recovery, but will also make it harder to find and prosecute her attacker. Right from the start-- for this is only the start-- we see this dilemma as pointing to bigger questions: what value do we place on the truth, even -- especially-- if is painful? Does healing come from forgetting, moving on--or from developing the courage to stand up to your pain? How does memory shape our identity, and what happens when we tinker with that process?

As the search for the rapist unfolds, these issues play out not only in the victim's experience, but for her parents, whose own "forgettings" shape their responses to their daughter's crisis. But there's much more: the mystery itself is skillfully revealed in stages, starting with the reader's first question: Who is telling this story? Once we find out, we need to know why...and that takes us to the heart of this complex story, as we watch a master manipulator at work, struggling to resolve his own woundedness, seemingly, but not quite, forgotten.Amid the twists and turns of events that will keep you from putting this book down, the narrator's voice is an anchor of reason and deception -- and a source of some truly profound statements about human nature, not to mention fascinating details about the brain, memory, personality disorders, police work, and the practice of psychiatry.

The author's note explains that drug therapy to alter memory is already being used by the military and will likely soon become available to civilians, and controversial. Her readers will completely understand why that might be, should be, the case.

This takes the category of "psychological thriller" to a whole new level -- and you will want to read the book before Reese Witherspoon turns this into a movie (rights already sold before publication) because there's no way a movie can capture all of the nuances and thought-provoking issues in this book.