BROKEN COUNTRY by Clare Leslie Hall

It's the late 1960s in the English countryside. Beth and Frank tend to their sheep when Beth's first love, Gabriel, now a famous author, returns with his son, Leo, to his nearby country estate. Beth and Gabriel's love affair plays out in two timelines: before she married Frank and after her marriage and the loss of her son, Bobby. Leo finds a mother figure in Beth. Gabriel wants her back. Frank's brother Jimmy finds out about the affair, and tragedy ensues. The author ping pongs between 1968, 1955, and a murder trial set in 1969. The characters are rich but flawed. The countryside sweeping and heavy with secrets. A love triangle with heavy sadness. This novel is about forgiveness and hope.

Favorite line(s): For Frank, Love Beth:

If the man could hear me, I would tell him this:

It was instant, Dad

It was instant.

No pain

The sorrow was all your own.

Enough now.

I would tell him that.

Lives should be measured in intensity.

Remember mine

For its glory-stretch of furious light and wondrous beauty.

The world we love-lived

Is earth

Is dust

Is me, Dad.

SO FAR GONE by Jess Walter

More than a treatise on American politics, So Far Gone shows the division of one Oregon family on Thanksgiving in 2016 and the fallout from that day. Namely, Rhys Kinnick hasn't seen his daughter or grandchildren in seven and a half years when there's a knock on the door of his dilapidated house. His two grandchildren have been entrusted to his care while the children's mother, Rhys' daughter, has gone missing. If that's not enough to keep the story moving along, the children are kidnapped by a right-wing religious group that the children's father belongs to. So begins Rhys's adventure to find them and get his family back. Walter's characters are far from caricatures. Their wit, bravado, and the way each sees the world are relatable examples of most families in this fractured country.

Favorite line(s): And still his granddaughter stared. How to explain self-exile? Part of it had been the fight with Shane. And Bethany's reaction. It symbolized the dark, sour turn the whole country had taken. As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he'd thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family. But, if he was being honest, it wasn't those people, his fellow Americans, many of whom had probably always been as distracted or as scared or as cynical as they revealed themselves to be by electing a ridiculous racist con man. No, they weren't really the problem. Most of them probably just wanted lower taxes, or, like bad television, or, like Shane, had fallen into the fake-Christian faux-conservative Nationalist cesspool; or maybe they were just burned-out and believed that corruption had rotted everything that one party was as bad as the next; or maybe they really did long for some nonexistent past. Whatever their motivation, for Kinnick, it was all just part of a long, sad cultural slide that he'd had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president). There was inside Kinnick an emptiness that felt like depression.

SALT WATER by Katy Hays

The Lingate family returns to Capri every summer to the rented villa on the cliff. Thirty years ago, Sarah Lingate was found at the bottom of the cliff, dead. Helen, Sarah's young daughter at the time of her death, is now grown and determined to find out exactly what happened to her mother. Especially after the necklace she was wearing when she died was mysteriously found in the villa after they arrived. Along with an assistant, Helen sets out to learn the truth about her mother's death, even if it means her family is in danger. The ending is a surprise.

Favorite line(s): Sarah had always imagined, when she was younger, that she would be the kind of woman who walked out if things go bad. But the reality was more complicated. Marriages gathered a momentum of their own, they tumbled forward over obstacles and past off-ramps with an alarming speed, until suddenly, years later, all the exits were behind you. Your entire life—the things you loved, the work that defined you—in the rearview. Even worse, somehow she got used to it. Watching every opportunity slip by, every almost, every next time. It wasn't apathy. She thought about it—the way things seemed within her control and yet never were—it was all she thought about. The truth was, the strength required to tear apart the fabric of her life was in short supply. Shorter still with a toddler, without resources, without her family. It was embarrassing to be so weak. Her strength didn't come back for years. But now that I had returned, now that Helen was three and she was working, now that she knew they could be their own family, that they could find a way—she realized she was strong enough, finally, to leave. That was the other thing about marriages: at a certain point you cared less about burning them down. The rubble preferable to a pretty façade.

WHAT THE DEEP WATER KNOWS: POEMS by Miranda Cowley Heller

These sixty-two poems, broken into six sections, are reflective of Heller's phases of life. Her childhood, love, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and beyond. Described as "lyrical, frank, and poignant," Heller offers an honest portrayal of a woman reimagining a way forward.

Favorite line(s): I will start someday, until all the somedays are over.