THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE by David Sedaris

Sedaris, known for his honest and funny observations on life—mostly his—aims these twenty-eight essays at what’s involved in growing older. The humiliations of tall toilet seats and walkers. The indignities of caregivers and friends who’ve lost their verve. The freedom after an aging parent dies. There’s the serious and the wacky, and through it all Sedaris still marvels at humans and their odd behaviors. Who else could make Duolingo sound like so much fun?  

Favorite line(s): A few months before the incident in Portland, news broke of a Canadian tourist who was wading in the Atlantic when a shark she was trying to take a picture of bit off both her hands. I read about it on half a dozen websites, and on each of them the comments were brutal. How awful, I thought, to lose your hands and get no sympathy whatsoever, not even, “I’m sorry you’re so stupid.” That’s what keeps me from feeding bears in national parks, or from attempting to hug a baby hippo with its mother watching. In my case, though, all I did was walk down a street two blocks from an art museum.

“Well, that’s what you get for walking,” the world seemed to say.

I said to a neighbor when I got back to New York, “I was bitten by a dog last week!”

And he asked in a scolding tone, “What did you do? As if it was most certainly my fault.

“Nothing,” I told him. “I was walking down the street and passed four people smoking fentanyl.”

“I didn’t know you could smoke it,” he said.

This was like me telling someone I got hit by a car and them responding, “What kind of mileage did it get?”

THE FIVE STAR WEEKEND by Elin Hildebrand (audio)

It’s a Nantucket summer. Hollis, a popular food influencer (Hungry With Hollis), hosts a long weekend at her beach house with best friends from every phase of her life—childhood to present. It’s a gift to herself after the sudden death of her husband in a car accident the past winter. Along with one friend waiting on a cancer diagnosis, another married to a scary control freak, and the successful sports agent suddenly canceled, there’s the mysterious Gigi who had been having an affair with Hollis’ husband. An old boyfriend of Hollis’ shows up, and Caroline, Hollis’ daughter, is there for the weekend filming it all. Lots of secrets, betrayals, and tears that lead to lots of confessions.

THE PALM HOUSE by Gwendoline Riley  

Friends Laura and Edmund (Putnam) work in publishing in contemporary London. They meet for drinks over the course of a long weekend. Putnam’s father has just died, and the magazine he’s worked at for decades has been taken over by a new boss ready to gut everything good about the publication. Laura’s life, too, isn't going according to plan — career-wise, with her unlikeable mother, and with a bevy of awful men she’s encountered—a character study in friendship and ruminations on where their lives didn’t go as planned.

Favorite line(s): He’d given his notice back in July. I remember a bright, damp morning, an early screening at Stephen Street. We were waiting outside, both perched on the edge of a flower planter with our coffees, when Geoff Pitt ambled over, bun in hand.

I hear you’re off, Ed? he said.

Good morning, Geoff, Putnam said. What are you asking me?

From Sequence. You’re leaving Sequence.

Ah. Yes. I am.

My goodness!

News travels fast, said Putnam.

Well, everyone’s shocked, said Geoff.

I think you’re overstating that, said Putnam.

Not at all . . .

Which is so unlike you, said Putnam.

Not at all, Ed. People are shocked. It’s like the ravens leaving the Tower. Don’t you think? he said, looking at me.

You’re not the first person to say that, I said.

No, I bet. How long has it been?

Oh, just twenty-five years,” said Putnam.

He started young, I said.

So what year was that? Is this the nineties?

Nineteen ninety-two.

Ninety-two. My goodness.

Here I folded up the paper bag my flapjack had come in, sealed it in my empty coffee cup, and looked around for a bin.

I bet you weren’t born, said Geoff.

Oh, I was born all right, I said. But thank you for the compliment.

Nineteen ninety-two, Geoff said. I remember you then. Angry young man.

I was not angry. Honestly, where do you get this stuff?

OK. Intense. You were intense. Now, Ed, you were intense.

I was serious, said Putnam.

THE SHAMPOO EFFECT by Jenny Jackson 

Caroline moves to coastal Massachusetts for a writing fellowship when she meets Van and falls hard. Van has been in an on-again, off-again relationship with Bailey. She finds out she’s pregnant with Van’s baby. The lifelong friendship group that had welcomed Caroline now shuns her. What Caroline spins with this hurt disrupts everyone’s lives.

Favorite line(s): Back in high school, when that all started drinking and going out, they became obsessed with “the shampoo effect.” When they had a big night of partying and followed it with a beer the next morning, they could get drunk again in an instant, the way a second squirt of shampoo in the shower produced outsized suds. It was because the alcohol hadn’t been fully metabolized, because instead of starting with a blood alcohol content of zero they were really starting with .03 or something. Frank thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this, and the way it applied to so many interpersonal dynamics—the way that in these old relationships nobody was ever really working from a clean slate, new feelings were built on old feelings. Fran’s own brothers had been so rude to her for so long that even a grunt or an eye roll was enough to send her spiraling into a dark mood. Van and Bailey had been sleeping together for so long that they fell back into bed with each other at the slightest provocation. Colin and Eben, best friends, now brothers-in-law, had so much unspoken frustration between them that a small moment in a pickup basketball game could instantly work them into a lather.

ONE PERFECT STORM by Carley Fortune

Fortune’s settings in her five romance novels are bucolic places in tucked-away corners of Canada. In Our Perfect Storm, it’s Tofino, a rainforest beach in western Canada—a honeymoon destination for Frankie and George. Except Frankie was supposed to marry Nate until he, for mysterious reasons, calls off the wedding. So Frankie takes her childhood best friend George to the already booked and paid-for resort. Can friends for four decades protect their friendship at the cost of giving up on love? Can secrets and buried feelings derail everything?

Favorite line(s): I used to believe that a serious relationship would tie me down, distract me from what I wanted, the way it did for my mom. I could imagine falling in love and losing myself within another person the way she did—then waking up one day panicked about everything I’d missed out on. For my mom, it was her chance to return to the ocean to breathe the salt air that felt like home, and to work to save the North Atlantic right whales she so adored. She ended up hurting the people she loved to reclaim the part of herself she’d given up. I never wanted to do that.