CRUSH by Ada Calhoun

“You’ve got a Lamborghini engine for flirting,” the husband, Paul, tells the unnamed wife at the beginning of this contemporary marriage novel. The narrator is a successful ghostwriter and breadwinner to Paul’s fledgling art career. They have a teenage son they adore. All is right with the world, except Paul hasn’t kissed his wife in eighteen years and thinks himself magnanimous when he encourages his wife to kiss other men. She comes to believe that “Crushes were how you stayed a little bit in love with the world even though you had a husband.” She gets to “crush” without implications. Well, it gets more complicated as she spends most of the novel in epistolary love heaven with a nerdy religion professor. Expected emotions know nothing of the heart.

Favorite line(s): While I walked around London, I called Veronica and asked her why as a happily married woman in middle age I’d become, all of a sudden, some sort of vixen.

“Because you’re alive,” she said.

That was how I felt: more alive than I’d felt in a long time. The more alive I felt, the more attention I got, and the more alive I became, on and on in an endless cycle of aliveness. I walked down the street convinced that I was glowing. I’d only felt even close to that radiant once before. After high school, using my babysitting money, I spent months backpacking, walking for hours through one city or another. When I was hungry I stopped at a bakery and got a hunk of bread. When I was tired, I lay down on a hostel bed. When I craved company I sat in a park and hoped whoever talked to me wasn’t a murderer.

THE FURY by Alex Michaelides

The Fury refers to the relentless winds that batter the small fictional Greek Island of Aura where this mystery thriller is set. A small group of friends and a famous ex-movie star and her son arrive on the island for the weekend with secrets and plots to upend certain relationships. Including the unreliable narrator, Elliot, who by all accounts, is the novel’s Nick Carraway character, giving us the backstory on all the guests, including himself. But all is not what it seems. It never is in a mystery. Who are these people and why do they do the things they do? Is it for love? Revenge? Jealousy? It’s helpful to read this novel in a few sittings since it jumps around in point of view and motives. Plot twists galore.

Favorite line(s): As a writer, I am habitually prone to fleeing reality. To making things up and telling stories. Mariana once asked me about this, in a therapy session. She asked why I spent my life making things up. Why write? Why be creative? I felt surprised she needed to ask. To me, the answer was painfully obvious. I was creative because, when I was a child, I was dissatisfied with the reality I was forced to endure. So, in my imagination, I created a new one.

THE RACHEL INCIDENT by Caroline O’Donoghue

It’s 2009 in Cork, Ireland, and Rachel is wondering what she should do with her life now that her college graduation looms, the economy is in the toilet, and there are no job prospects. She has broken up with her boyfriend and has a fierce crush on her English professor when she decides to move in with James, her co-worker at the book store. James will prove to be Rachel’s ride or die even when she meets and falls in love with Carey. The professor and his wife, Deenie, both mentors, until romantic, financial, and professional entanglements let off big and little bombs with the fallout lasting nearly a decade. The Rachel Incident is full of enduring characters and you’ll fall in love with with their quirks and wounds.

Favorite line(s): It’s an exaggeration to say that James and I never talk about Dr. Byrne. But the talk is limited to a certain time and place. That time and place is my living room, at about 3 a.m., on the second night of a three-night visit. When we’ve chewed thorugh all the old nostalgia, updated each other on everything we can be updated on, piled on a few fresh memories so the old ones don’t get stale. When we have tended to our friendship like the rare orchid that it is, he will nudge me with his foot, top up my drink, and say: “What do you think is going on with Fred Byrne? Where do you think he is now?” We mull over hypotheticals, and eventually, we crack out the laptop. Aideen Harrington, Deenie Harrington, Deenie Harrington-Byrne, Fred Byrne, Frederick Byrne, Dr. Frederick Harrington-Byrne. The only social media that either of them has is Deenie’s locked Facebook page. The only photo we can see is her, in sunglasses, in front of a white wall in a hot country. The photograph has not changed in four years. Dr. Byrne still teaches at UCC. He hasn’t published a book since The Kensington Diet, and when we’re feeling egotistical, James and I wonder if that is because of us.