NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

Lillian and Madison are roommates at a boarding school when Lillian, the scholarship student, takes the blame for an incident that gets her booted out of school. While Lillian wallows in her mother’s attic for years, working dead-end jobs and feeling stuck in neutral, a letter arrives from Madison asking for help. Lillian moves into the guest cottage on Madison’s property for the summer and becomes the governess for Madison’s two step-children, who spontaneously catch on fire, much to the anger of their father, the politician Madison is married to. Lillian begins to care about the twins and their well-being—so much so that the twins start to trust her. It’s a story about what it means to be a parent—on paper and through love. Darkly funny, Nothing to See Here is a surprise on every page. 

Favorite line(s): At first, it was purely out of an instinctual desire to be superlative, as if I suspected that I was a superhero and was merely testing the limits of my powers. But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship, information that my mother could not have cared less about, I redirected my efforts. I didn’t know that the school as just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made other students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs. I memorized poems about Harlem and awkwardly recited them to my mom’s boyfriends, who thought I was some weird demon speaking in tongues. I played point guard on the boys’ traveling basketball team because there wasn’t one for girls. I made people in my town, whether they were poor or middle class, especially upper middle class, feel good, like I was something they could agree on, a sterling representative of this little backwoods county. I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

SIGNAL FIRES by Dani Shapiro

It’s the summer of 1985. Three teens on a joyride smash into a neighborhood tree, and one of the passengers dies. The survivors, Sarah and Theo Wilf, a brother and sister, hold onto the secret of their father’s involvement in the death, along with who was driving the car that night. Choices that change the course of their lives forever. Fast forward decades later, when a young family moves in across from the elderly Dr. and Mrs. Wilf. Dr. Wilf delivers the neighbor’s son. The son, Waldo, shares his passion for the constellations with the doctor on late nights roaming around the neighborhood. After an altercation with his father, Waldo runs away and meets up with a confused Mrs. Wilf, who has run away from the assisted living facility where she has lived since her dementia took over. This is a beautiful story about the strange confluences in life when fate and chance meet in joyous and horrific ways. Shapiro’s first novel in years is structured like a movie's dream sequence, with years melding into each other and the space between the characters never more than a hair’s breadth away from each other. 

Favorite line(s): The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars. Perhaps each one is what remains of every soul who has ever lived; perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling. The young man standing beside him is the infant he placed on his mother’s belly; the husband and father whose salvation comes in opening his own heart; the elderly astrophysicist who devotes his life to the hunt for habitable exoplanets beyond our solar system. The whole crowd is here, invisible, surrounding them. The air shimmers with everyone he has ever loved. He is near the end of his life, and in another sphere, he is also just beginning. He would like to believe this. And why not? He will find out soon enough.

INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura

The mysteriousness of Intimacies bleeds through the storyline. And also in the writing. The unnamed narrator, a translator at The Hague, is the go-between to a cast of secondary characters. There’s the African head of state she translates for during his trial for heinous crimes against humanity. The man she is seeing, Adriaan, a married father of three, leaves for Portugal to ask for a divorce but doesn’t return for months. And her infatuation with her first and only friend, Eline, whom she meets when she moves to the Netherlands from New York City. Her friendship with her seems needy and superficial. The novel explores that sacred space between individuals—the closeness, the secrets, the confessions, and the motives that make up the deep understandings we all want in relationships but often reject as private and off-limits.       

Favorite line(s): In those moments, in the face of the former president’s resolute indifference, in that small, airless conference room amidst the folders and piles of paper, something yawned open inside me. The depersonalized nature of the task—I was only an instrument, and during the hours that I was there I was almost never spoken to directly, in fact, the only person who bothered to address me at all was the former president—sat alongside the strange intimacy of the encounter, the entire thing was a paradox, impossible to reconcile. Despite the uniformity of these meetings, each time I approached the room with trepidation, and each time I felt I did not know what waited on the other side of the closed door.