DON’T BE A STRANGER by Susan Minot

The master storyteller of female desire, Minot’s latest takes the reader on fifty-two-year-old Ivy Cooper’s affair with musician Ansel, almost twenty years younger. Introduced by a mutual friend, the two fall into a hook-up tat-a-tat until Ivy can’t get enough and Ansel can’t commit. The poetic rhythms of the novel, dreamlike and wafting between delight and utter despair, show the interiority of sexual obsession and the fallout. Set in the Obama era and the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park area, Don’t Be a Stranger seems like a simpler time when the pressing worries of one’s love interest carried more weight. Now, everything seems heavier. It’s a nice diversion, this novel, like sliding into a warm bath and drowning out the news of the day.

Favorite line(s): On her block the topaz streetlights illuminated the yellow ginkgo trees. The gutters were piled with the fallen leaves shaped like scalloped fans. Ivy shuffled through the yellow leaves, layered like pastry, ankle deep. Remember this, she told herself. Remember the feeling and how everything looked. Remember the lift, the padding around her connecting her to the world. Remember the glad body of invisible limbs and the miracle of dotted lights and paved streets and dark figures looming. Remember the pity she feels for those not in this frame of mind, the limping man with the sideways foot humping into the deli, the woman slamming the taxi door, harried. Remember the awareness at a distance of some remorse for not being this happy more often, and further remorse for not giving her son his father and more stability and happiness. Remember even so the bliss as it flashed slow motion by, with her certainty of all being as it was supposed to be, had to be, even the mess and the tragedy lining alongside, especially the mess and the tragedy, encroaching. Remember how the feeling comes from Ansel Fleming and that whatever else happens, this makes it worth it. Whatever fallout there might be and she was pretty sure there would be fallout, she must remember this, this night of the yellow leaves. 

LUCY BY THE SEA by Elizabeth Strout

During the beginning of the pandemic, when New York City was experiencing horrific death rates, many with means left the city for the country. Lucy Barton, a writer, and her ex-husband, William, a scientist, evacuate NYC for a rented house on the coast of Maine. Their two grown daughters and families stay put. William knows COVID-19 will get worse before it gets better. Lucy, not so much. But William convinces her that he wants to keep her safe and that this is the only way. In Maine, they worry about their daughters, take long walks, meet friends outside, and sit in lawn chairs six feet apart. Lucy is still grieving the loss of her second husband, and William, his recent divorce. Together, in the house by the sea, their feelings vacillate from loneliness and dread to gratefulness and love. The inward conversational tone of Strout’s novel lures the reader in as if part of this couple’s foreign landscape and the question the novel raises: why are some people luckier than others?  

Favorite line(s): I had a sense then of being old, and William is even older; I thought how our time was almost done, and I had a real fear that William would die before me and I would be really lost. In the middle of the night, William suddenly snorted after a snore, and he work up, and he said “Lucy?” And I said “What?” And he said, “Are you there?” And I said, “I’m right here.” And he went back to sleep immediately; I could tell by his breathing. But I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.

TWO STEP DEVIL by Jamie Quatro

In a decaying cabin in the woods of Alabama, a self-proclaimed Prophet sells fruits and vegetables and artwork he’s sketched on cardboard and assembled from metal blades. His belief in the “Big Fish” that must be saved happens while scrounging for materials at a junkyard. He sees a young girl zip-tied in the back of a car, kidnaps her, and takes care of her while she detoxes from opioid addiction. The Prophet nurtures her back to health only to give her instructions to take his apocalyptic vision of the impending invasion of “the most powerful army in history” to the White House and President Obama. The writing is sublime. The story, about sex trafficking, addiction, good versus evil, God’s will versus free will, and faith—the theme present in all of Quatro’s work—finds the gray areas of virtue and sin and makes them clear and present.

Favorite line(s): (So much kindness among you fleshsacks, is what I’m saying. You forget this. You polarize, call something evil and forget the goodness the evil engenders. You call something good and forget the evil the good depends on. But the kindness! If you counterbalanced all the kindness with the evils you keep putting before your eyes—your newspapers and TVs, apps and websites—you would not recognize your own planet.)

AMAZING GRACE ADAMS by Fran Littlewood 

Grace Adams is hurting. In the opening pages of Littlewood’s debut novel, Grace abandons her car in traffic and begins her journey to pick up her daughter’s custom sixteenth birthday cake for a party her estranged husband is hosting. A party she’s not invited too. On her long walk to the bakery, Grace faces off with a pharmacy employee, head-butts a man on the London tube, steals a golf club, and uses it to pummel the car of the man who almost runs her over. It’s not enough her temper has run away with her sanity, but she learns she’s lost her job(s). She’s not only suffering the toxic cocktail of perimenopause but a greater loss than all the raging hormones combined. We’re rooting for Grace while wincing at her missteps.

Favorite line(s): Grace uncrosses her legs, tips forward a little on the five-inch heels as she plants her feet. “So, today’s untranslatable word is huzun. It’s an enigmatic Turkish word that has an Arabic root and it describes a spiritual anguish. The gloomy feeling that everything is in decline and that the situation—often political in nature—will probably get gradually worse. But this isn’t about a personal sense of darkness or persecution. There’s—oxymoronically—a shared joy or magic in having this word to remind us that our misfortune our dark mood, is largely collective. We’re together in this as the curtain comes crashing down…so huzzah for huzun! Grace laughs. “The closest word we have to the mysterious huzun in English is probably ‘melancholy.’ And, finally, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk described the concept equisitely as ‘the emotion hat a child might feel while looking through a steamy window.’”