WHISTLER by Ann Patchett

A couple visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York when they realize they are being followed. The man following them turns out to be the stepfather of Daphne, the woman in the couple. She hasn’t seen him in forty years. Eddie was Daphne’s thrice-married mother’s second husband. When Daphne was nine, Eddie was driving Daphne to stargaze one winter night when the car slipped off the road and landed on the side of a cliff. To reassure a frightened Daphne, Eddie tells the story of a horse named Whistler, who “helps his owner realize that love can defy death.” The theme that ties the novel together from memory and moments. Eddie is pinned and injured in the accident, and Daphne must crawl out of the car and find help. After the accident, Daphne’s mother kicks Eddie to the curb, and Daphne never sees him again until the museum. Present day. Thus begins their platonic love story all over again. They spend the next weeks and months filling each other in on the blanks in the years apart and find time hadn’t erased their connection of the heart—a gorgeous novel.

Favorite line(s): Eddie nodded. “Thank you. I’ve made an important decision,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m never going to be angry at anyone ever again,” he said, and then he fell asleep.

It was another hour before his name was called. The waiting room for oncology patients was always quiet, unlike some other waiting rooms where they kept a television going with HGTV. In the oncology waiting room, people were less likely to talk on their phones. They conserved their energy so as to take inventory of the heart’s collected shards of glass. We were in the quiet car now, both the patients and their guests. I read the novel I’d brought while Eddie slept. Every now and then I put my hand on his wrist because I could.

THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY by Elizabeth Strout 

Artie Dam’s life looks great from the outside looking in. A popular high school history teacher. Married for over three decades. Sails his boat on the weekends in Massachusetts Bay. But inside his world is one of loneliness and quiet rage against a world gone mad. Artie contemplates suicide but then embraces life after he almost drowns. After learning of his wife’s secret, Artie must come to terms with how much one doesn’t really know the other. He “had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” This is Strout at her finest. A beautiful novel. A quiet gift.

Favorite line(s): But Artie worried that day that his relationship with Anne would be different from now on (He was right, it would be, until the year he became ill.) And he thought that it was because he had been lying to her. He had not told her that he did not know what she was referring to concerning her marriage. She knew nothing about Rob not being his biological son, or Evie having lied to him for so many years, or his desire (so long ago, it seemed now) to have killed himself. Or the fact that he had been caught shoplifting. In a way, Artie was aware for the first time how much people lied to one another. Why had he not realized this before? Because he had not lied to people? He couldn’t, in truth, remember now how much of his life he had been lying. He only knew that things were different for him now. When Flossie called him these days—as she occasionally did—he knew that he was lying to her as well, just by not telling her what he now knew. In fact, he was not really that happy to hear from her.

MAD MABEL by Sally Hepworth     (audio)

The audio, read by Hannah Fredericksen and Jenny Seedsman, was exceptional. Each narrator captures Mabel’s life as a child growing up with a mentally abusive father and then later, as an eighty-one-year-old blamed for a neighbor’s death. In their quiet neighborhood, Mabel is a curmudgeon known as Elsie and befriends a single mom and her daughter. After a neighbor ends up dead, Elsie’s notorious past leads the police to tap her as the main suspect. Less a who-dun-it and more of a decades-long character study in how we carry loss and grief with us in all our iterations.

JOHN OF JOHN by Douglas Stuart

John-Calum Macleod, called Cal, is an art student studying textiles in Edinburgh when his father, John, calls him home under the pretense that his grandmother is dying. Lies and secrets, the reader learns from the beginning, are a way of life for the Macleods. The father, a domineering lay preacher, sheep farmer, and weaver, is secretly in love with Innes, another sheep farmer. And Cal is in love with his childhood friend, Doll, a fisherman. With the Outer Hebrides as setting, the reader feels the claustrophobic loneliness of living inside yourself. The descriptions of a world built on little change, with lineage and duty more important than love and happiness, would make for a dour storyline if not in the talented hands of Douglas Stuart. This novel is a work of wonder. 

Favorite line(s): The men carried the coffin away from Falabay in a slow cortege. Doll’s was the heaviest body Cal had ever carried. Since he had grown old enough, he had helped bear six of their neighbours to the grave. All of those dead had been blessed with long, stretched-out lives and in death their bodies were as desiccated as salted herring, the weight all bones and Bibles, all trimming cloth and calcified spite. With Doll, the pallbearers felt every step. They walked as far as they could before a rotation of men tapped them on the shoulder, took their place, and did their duty for a quarter mile more. They carried the body out of the eyeline of the church where they loaded it into the back of Flash’s rusted estate. Then Flash lowered the boot on the casket and secured it with a bungee cord as the men prepared to leave the women behind. Doll could not be buried in Falabay, none of their dead could; the ground was too shallow, nothing but a miserly layer of dirt that had scabbed over the bedrock. All their dead were buried on the Atlantic coast, in the fertile, sandy machair, the rolling grasslands that had seeded over the millennia of crushed shells and sea salt and flourished every spring in a riot of harebell, eyebright, and golden buttercups.

MY SALINGER YEAR by Joanna Rakoff

Rakoff’s memoir of her year working for the Agency (Harold Ober Associates) that represented JD Salinger takes us lovingly to the 1990s literary world. Before technology descended into every facet of our lives, there were handwritten or typed letters by the hundreds that were sent by Salinger fans to the Agency. Rakoff’s job was to reply with a form letter stating Mr. Salinger appreciates the letter but cannot respond. Under no circumstances was Rakoff ever to give out any information about Salinger. Of course she goes off script and replies to some of the more heartfelt letters. She hadn’t read anything by the famed author before working at the Agency. Then one week reads Salinger’s canon. This memoir is a coming-of-age story that pushes up against the realities of adulthood, and no one was better at that than Salinger himself.   

Favorite line(s): It goes without saying, I suppose, that I now understood why the fans wrote to him, not just wrote to him but confided in him, confided in him with such urgency, with such empathy and compassion, with such confession. Because the experience of reading a Salinger story is less like reading a short story and more like having Salinger himself whisper his accounts into your ear. The world he creates is at once palpably real and terrifically heightened, as if he walked the earth with his nerve endings exposed. To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable. In Salinger, characters don’t sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head. All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It’s almost too much. Almost. And so, of course, his readers felt an urge to write back. To say this is where it hurts or here’s how you made it better.