THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In 2008 the Barnes family, once one of the wealthiest in their small Irish village, is struck by the financial crash, and the family cracks in their staid exterior begin to show. Dickie, the father, runs the car dealership left to him by his father. He never wanted the dealership or thought of himself as a family man but marries his brother’s fiancée, Imelda, after the brother dies in a car crash. In alternating sections, Dickie, Imelda, and their two children, Cass—who is drinking and resentful of her family’s diminished status, and the son, PJ, who plans to run away after friending a pedophile on social media—face their demons, the hard way through secrets and lies. The Barnes’ story spans decades. Murray writes, in this doorstopper (650-ish pages), with insight into the forks in the road that turn a life upside down. A wonder of a novel.

Favorite line(s): The light of the city is pale, silver-blue, sea light. Your house lies under a flight path, and the air resounds with a constant low boom like a slow-motion explosion. The street is composed exclusively of cottages just like yours, and so is the next street, and so is the next and the next. There are no trees. One morning you find a leaf on your doorstep, and you look up and down the road try to figure out where it came from.

THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters

It’s 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine one summer to work on a farm picking blueberries. Their four-year-old daughter, Ruthie, goes missing. Taken by a local white woman, Ruthie is raised as Norma. She wonders why she dreams of a different mother and siblings and why her skin is so much darker than that of her parents. The brother, Joe, who was with Ruthie when she went missing, must live with the guilt he feels for her disappearance and also witnessing the violent death of his brother Charles. Told in alternating chapters from Norma and Joe’s points of view through the decades, the reader learns of the silent betrayals of poverty and class and the unfolding traumas of family secrets. 

Favorite line(s): I teach words. How to put them together to create fear or beauty or suspense. How a long line of words strung together can take you to a dinghy out on the ocean searching for a whale, can sit you beside the witch as she tells her story of the white man, bringing him into existence. I teach words that can take you to places that exist only in the imagination, introduce you to people so peculiar, so interesting that they can’t possibly be real, yet they are, on the page. That’s why I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

SPLINTERS: ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE STORY by Leslie Jamison 

After the birth of a daughter and then in the deep trenches of a bitter divorce, Jamison examines what it’s like to be a single parent, a writer, a teacher, a daughter, and an ex-wife in New York City pre and post-COVID. The author writes about her separate selves—the one who sees herself in a brownstone with the finance guy—and the one on the open highway with the musician who gave her chlamydia—and the one she lives alone in a small sublet apartment next to a fire station with her infant than toddler daughter. In each life, she wonders how to reconcile her desires for everything “other” as if manifesting it will make her whole. What is non-negotiable is her love for her daughter and her need for her mother. 

Favorite line(s): Some part of me knew that the fact of Peanut in the world, the way he made me feel that day, mattered more than the ex-philosopher ever would. Or at least, that’s what I wanted to believe—that my capacity for wonder was stronger than my resentment, that I cared more about the teeming girth of the world than the rejection of a rom-com villain who wasn’t right for me anyway. Sure, yes. But also, I was angry. Have you ever woken up next to someone in an eye mask? I have. In his glass high-rise. It was like getting fucked in the middle of the Javits Center. All those windows overlooking the plague city. He was a moral vegetarian already making money off the pandemic recession. Something about my anger felt energizing—the pure song of it, the river, the fire. Maybe it was something about its baffled, misdirected honesty, the way it said, This hurts! My anger was completely out of proportion. He hadn’t done anything wrong, only decided he didn’t want to date me anymore. My therapist asked the natural question: “Is it really him you’re angry at?”