A FLAT PLACE: MOVING THROUGH EMPTY LANDSCAPES, NAMING COMPLEX TRAUMA by Noreen Masud

Masud fled her abusive family in Pakistan at fifteen and spent several years after tracing her steps of post-traumatic stress disorder through the flat landscapes of the United Kingdom. Trauma is the response, Masud writes, not her identity. By walking and hiking through flat landscapes, Masud came to understand her unease with the hot, dirty, and crowded streets of her childhood in Lahore. “If I walked far enough, I thought, over those fields, out past the edges of my vision, soon the road and the car and my fighting sisters would vanish, and there would just be me. Standing in the middle of that flatness, turning slowly, with nothing to see on any side. Then, maybe, I could rest.”  This memoir held me in its wandering journey from first to last page. 

Favorite line(s): If I wasn’t prepared—if a kick broke my concentration, or wrestling siblings knocked my head out of its line of sight—I’d miss the miracle. Because when we reached the end of that cramped road, our car dodging donkey carts and street sellers and dashing children, and turned the corner, in that instant, the world opened out. Lahore vanished around me. All I could see, stretching out for miles, were huge empty fields. We’d crossed from city into fairy tale. And, every morning, no one noticed but me. I’ve forgotten so much of my early life, but those fields have stayed with me. How could there be so much empty land in the middle of crowded, parched, shouting Lahore? How could anything be so deeply, achingly green? I felt that green on my skin and in my dry throat.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

It’s the summer of 1975 in the Adirondacks, and a camper, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Her parents own Camp Emerson that employs most of the area’s residents. Fourteen years earlier, Barbara’s brother went missing. The search begins for Barbara while the community begins to relive the trauma of the brother’s disappearance. The cast of characters is vast, and the multiple plot lines keep the reader guessing at the odds of this happening twice to one family. Why? Digging into the family's secrets and history moves this story in interesting directions. 

Favorite line(s): How many hours did she spend watching him? The silk of his hair. The weight of him on her chest, as she dozed in the bedroom of the Albany house, or the sunroom of Self-Reliance. The warm fragile weight of her son. She pictured his bones inside him, suspending the rest of him with their careful architecture; the miniature lungs that lifted and lowered the back; the small limbs that twitched as eh settled into deep sleep; the whole infant body somehow an impossibility in its scale, in its smell, in its composition, in the way it induced a sort of calm in her that—the conviction landed on her one day like an anvil—she would never again feel in her life.

LOVED AND MISSED by Susie Boyt

Ruth’s daughter, Eleanor, is a drug addict and unable to take care of her daughter, Lily. The grandmother raises the granddaughter, and the disappointments and fears she had while raising Eleanor are assuaged as Lily shows she’s not like her mother. This is a love story about family. Spanning years, Ruth and Lily’s story of sorrow and joy reminds us of what human beings are capable of, even amid aching disappointments.

Favorite line(s): The way Eleanor lived was all-consuming, anyway. The structure of her days. There was something so searing in young people whose bearing strongly brought to mind the end of life. I made up my mind to wean myself off Eleanor. Remove myself from the fray and bow out. Call on all available devices of detachment. I had to graft myself to something more sustaining even if just for appearances’ sake. Two people couldn’t go down. Three. It was right to concentrate on Lily now. I couldn’t keep trying to come up with new things in myself. Hard to say you were giving up exactly when there were no longer things you could reasonably expect. I a couple of years Eleanor would be thirty! I would keep her hazy shape in view, though. I’d hold her close to me in theory as one holds a new baby in the crook of one’s arm before it is born, or the memory of a person who has recently died and you are not quite sure who is comforting whom or who can see and who is blind. It would take sleight of hand not to look at things head on, but instead to soften my ideas around her, let them by lacy at their edges and fall away. I couldn’t keep on trying to balance the equations all the time. That my care had equaled what she was living.

STRANGERS: A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE by Belle Burden (audio version) 

This story sounds ho-hum on the surface: a hedge-fund guy caught in an affair decides to leave his clueless wife for the younger woman. What makes this story compelling is the narrator, the left wife, who was married to this man for twenty years, not really knowing who he was. A man who buys a brand new mattress for their bed days before walking out on Belle and their three children. During the pandemic. He tells her he doesn’t want anything, which includes shared custody of their kids. “I don’t want it,” James (not really his name) says. “I don’t want any of it.” Except for all the money he made during their marriage, enforced by a prenup. Belle, a descendant of the Vanderbilt and Paley dynasties, bought their two homes, and now James wants those, too. It’s the stuff of a good docuseries. Except the narrator doesn’t resort to violence—she picks up a pen and tells the world through a piece in the Modern Love section of the New York Times what a douchebag her starched shirt and tie and tennis white’s guy he really is.