HAMNET: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell

Oh, how I loved this book. In the late 1590s in Stratford, England, the Black Death killed the only son of William Shakespeare. Hamnet is eleven years old when his twin sister, Judith, contracts the plague. While their mother, Agnes (aka Anne Hathaway), fusses over her sick daughter with herbs and potions, she is unaware Hamnet is sick with it too until it’s too late. Their father, the famous playwright, is never mentioned by name. The novel mostly centers on the women in Shakespeare’s life. His wife, his two daughters, his mother, and his sister inhabit this historically fictional world. O’Farrell writes us into the daily life in the country town of Stratford. From meals cooked on the open fires to the monthly cloths washed in the washhouse, the reader is a fly in the dark corner of the plaster walls. Yes, the story is everything, but the writing pulls us along with its transcendence. 

Favorite line(s): She thinks of the seams of a glove, running up and down and over each finger, keeping close the skin that does not belong to the wearer. How a glove covers and fits and restrains the hand. She thinks of the skins in a storeroom, pulled and stretched almost—but not quite—to tearing or breaking point. She thinks of the tools in the workshop, for cutting and shaping, pinning and piercing. She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.

THE PUSH by Ashley Audrain 

Unputdownable creepiness. Think The Bad Seed. Think Gillian Flynn’s unreliable narrators and those dark shadows looming on every page. There are scenes of domestic bliss between Blythe, Fox, and their daughter, Violet. But motherhood is front and center with “is it me or is it her” pathos. At some points in the novel, I suspected one or the other or both. The central question, are daughters hardwired to repeat the mistakes of their mothers, is explored with the interwoven backstory of Blythe’s mother and grandmother’s mental instability. Without giving too much away, the ending isn’t that surprising, but how the author gets there is done with such finesse you don’t see it coming, even if it’s a little abrupt. 

Favorite line(s): She was obsessed with her baby doll and brought it everywhere she went. She knew her colors by the time she was sixteen months old. She insisted on wearing tights with Christmas trees under her pants for most months of the year. She ate scrambled eggs for nearly every meal and called them yellow clouds. Chipmunks scared her and squirrels thrilled her. She loved the woman from the flower shop on the corner where we went for a stem every Saturday morning. She kept the flower beside her potty to hold while she peed. She made no sense at all, and yet all the sense in the world. 

SORROW AND BLISS by Meg Mason

A young woman with a never-named mental disorder slowly pushes everyone she loves away with her constant mood swings and suffering. The novel opens with Martha’s husband throwing her a fortieth birthday party, a party he hopes will jostle his wife out of her funk only to have her cruelty hit new lows, causing the husband to move out. What happened to cause such bitterness? The novel begins there. The rest of the story shows us how Martha’s dark depressions move through her and into every important relationship she has. A prize of the story? The relationship between Martha and her sister, Ingrid—funny, sad, and true. Every scene seemed like it was written for a movie. 

Favorite line(s): I said, “I’m lonely.” It was the truth. Followed by some lies, told to absolve him of concern. “I’m just lonely today. Not in general. Generally, I’m completely fine.”

“Well, they say London is a city of eight million lonely people, don’t they?” The man gently tugged the dog back to his side. “But this too shall pass. They also say that.” 

He nodded goodbye and moved off along the path.

As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father, I thought, when they said “the body was discovered by a man walking his dog,” that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

I couldn’t put this book down. The best what if fictionalized account of an unnamed (nuclear?) disaster. But it’s not about what caused it—war, devastation, politics. At its core, Alam’s beautiful novel is the story of privilege, race, class, and parenthood and what these characters become in the face of a threat they can’t name and don’t understand. Amanda and Clay and their two children rent a vacation home for a week in a remote area of Long Island. The family has swum in the pool, cooked in the well-appointed kitchen, lounged in the comfortable living room when a knock on the door late that night throws their idyllic surroundings into a panic. The owners have come back to their country house after New York City’s power grid goes down. Are they who they say they are? Stuck without phones or television, the two families must rely on each other when what’s happening outside in the world is unclear. 

Favorite line(s): “Tchaikovsky was thirty-five when he composed Swan Lake, did you know that? It was considered a failure, but you know—it’s the very idea of ballet: a dancer dressed as a bird.” She hesitated. “I remember thinking—well, it’s a maudlin thought, but I suppose we all have thoughts like this from time to time—if I had to die, and we all do, if I could hear music, as I was dying, or have a piece of music that I knew would be the last thing I hear before I died, or that came to my mind as I was dying, even just the memory of it, I would want it to be that. Tchaikovsky, this dance from Swan Lake. That’s what I’m sitting here thinking about. Though perhaps you don’t like to hear it, but I was thinking, goddamn, I have those CDS in my apartment.”

BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi

The sins of the mother passed down to the daughter. Antara lived in an ashram with her mother, Tara—who was the lover of Baba, the father, the leader, the god to those living in the religious community. Now, Tara is in the grips of dementia, and Antara, an artist and married, relives her neglected childhood as she cares for her mother. It’s a story of identities rooted in abandonment. The mother-daughter relationship held together by blood only. A sad story but beautifully written.  

Favorite line(s): Ma doesn’t know. I never told her that for a portion of my childhood I was always hungry and have been searching for some fullness ever since. Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover. 

DESPERATE CHARACTERS by Paula Fox 

The dialogue in this novel! The descriptions of desperate characters within desperate settings honed to perfection. Seriously, there isn’t one word that doesn’t belong. Not one word out of place in a story of characters maneuvering through everyday relationships and the banality of everyday routines in late 1960s America. Published in 1970, Desperate Characters follows Sophie and Otto Bentwood as they struggle through a cat bite, a changing Brooklyn neighborhood, a failed business relationship, a dimmed love affair, a host of small disasters within a long but failing marriage. Epic in its brilliant writing, the novel is one monumental tiny 191-page masterpiece. 

Favorite line(s): Deliberately, she visualized the living room of their Flinders farmhouse, then, blurring that bright familiar place, another room began to form: the skimpy parlor of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men’s low voices, feeling on her cheek the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown-up life to come.

She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult, as though, she thought, it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed.