TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout 

In Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge is living in a retirement community. Lucy Barton visits, and the two tell stories to one another. Bob is still married to Margaret, but he walks with Lucy weekly. They tell each other their fears, regrets, everything but how they really feel about one another. How often do we put our dreams out of reach to keep love alive? The “unrecorded lives” of others is the magic Strout unearths in these characters so vividly written on the page.  

Favorite line(s): The heart wants what the heart wants. This is true, and Bob’s heart still wanted Lucy. But there is another thing to consider, which is that the heart is only one part of an organism, and the organism’s job is to survive. This desire to survive was already in ascendance with Bob, and this desire grew, and the desire of his heart—It did not shrink, but it did not continue to grow. And there was discomfort, of course, as there is in such things, but Bob held on to the new sense of hope he felt in living his life with Margaret. He watched her for forgetfulness, but he noticed nothing new.

There were moments, though, when he endured a keen sickness of loss, and then it would pass. And so back and forth he went in these swings of emotion. But he did not contact Lucy between his birthday party and her wedding, which took place two weeks after Bob’s party. And she did not contact him.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK by Chris Whitaker

It is 1975 in a small town in Missouri when Patch, a local teenager blind in one eye, fends off the abduction of the daughter of a wealthy family only to be kidnapped instead. While in captivity, Patch befriends Grace, both of them locked up in a small dark room with nothing to do but to tell each other stories. Saint, Patch’s best friend, refuses to give up on finding him. Part mystery, part thriller, and every bit a story about the lengths people will go to for friendship and love, All the Colors of the Dark is a deep dive into the best part of hope.

Favorite line(s): He clamped his hands beneath his armpits and fought a shiver that began low beneath his kneecaps before raging up his body, and at his nape he felt wisps of blonde hair rise. He did not get sick, not since he was a boy and his father died, and he felt a flu descend that did not lift most of that year. His muscles resisting each morning when he walked down the stairs and slowly watched the emptying of their life. It was a slide toward poverty that he had not anticipated, that no kid ever does. Meals grew smaller and hunger larger till he noticed his jeans hanging loose from his waist as he notched new holes in his belt. His mother rose and fell like the seasons, sometimes warm as she hugged him and told him things would get better, and then sparse and bare as he asked what they could fix with stale bread, a bag of oats, and a couple of cans of tomatoes. She gained and lost employment so frequently he did not know if he would return to the smell of her Irish stew or to find the electricity cut or Dr. Tooms waiting at his kitchen table like he knew Patch needed so much.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

After their father dies, brothers Peter, in his thirties, and Ivan, in his early twenties, head off in different directions to deal with their grief. Peter struggles over loving two women simultaneously while contemplating whether or not everyone would be better off without him on the planet. Ivan, on the spectrum and a competitive chess player, falls for a thirty-six-year-old woman. All the characters come to these relationships with turbulent pasts and uncertain futures. How to live within the uncertainty of love—Rooney’s question a tiny bud that opens slowly and then blossoms in the novel like a summer rose.

Favorite line(s): Margaret says the danger there lies not in buying dishwashers, but I growing emotionally invested in the buying of dishwashers. For a time, sipping their lemondades, they discuss, as they often have before, the personalities of their respective mothers. Margaret’s mother Bridget, once the beleaguered matriarch of her household, assailed perpetually by the competing demands of her husband, her three young children, and her work as the principal of a local secondary school. Against this onslaught she developed in middle age a kind of permanently harassed disposition, almost a siege mentality; and at times, their family dynamic resembled nothing so much as an all-out-of-war for her attention, children imploring, mother withholding. This way of life, exasperating though it must have been for Bridget, did, however, come to an end a long time ago. She has long since retired, Margaret’s father has passed away, and Margaret herself, though living close by sees her mother in person perhaps once a month. And yet Bridget communicates, each time they do see each other, the same weary, overburdened attitude that is so familiar to Margaret from her early life, as if Bridget is still working full-time and parenting three children, while Margaret is still a teenager refusing to get out of bed on a school morning. Anna’s mother Nuala, on the other hand, exerts influence over her husband and children primarily through a tendency to become irrationally anxious and upset. Much of the family life has therefore always been arranged around their collective efforts to prevent Nual from becoming upset, which involves concealing from her, by almost any means necessary, the existence of any problems or potential conflicts within the family circle. Nuala lives, to some degree, in a fictitious world acted out for her by a special dramatic troupe consisting of her own children and husband, a world in which none of her loved ones have ever been unhappy, sick, depressed, disappointed, hurt, anxious or frightened. But this, in Anna’s view, has also had the perverse effect of making Nuala feel as if her own anxieties are in fact the only anxieties that anyone on earth has ever experienced, and that her suffering is something she alone, the only unhappy person in a world of thriving and self-confident individuals, can understand.