KIN by Tayari Jones 

Set in the 1950s and 1960s, Kin tells the story of two best friends from Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Both motherless, Vernice and Annie call themselves cradle friends, best friends, and neighbors until they go their separate ways and live entirely different lives. Vernice, raised by a single independent aunt after Vernice’s mother is killed by her father, leaves for college while Annie, raised by her grandmother, goes off looking to find the mother who abandoned her as a baby. Through letters, the two women stay in touch until Annie reaches out to Vernice for help, and Vernice comes to her aid. The novel explores the bonds of women’s friendships and what it means to be a mother.

Favorite line(s): “Heartbroke?” I asked, searching her face through the blur of my tears.

She nodded. “Not yet. The rainbow is bending my way, but I can smell the devastation in the air.”

I started to say, “You can’t see the future,” but I didn’t know for sure if that was true or not. Instead, I just said, “You could tell me. What are you so nervous about?”

She said it was the somebody before Franklin. Somebody that she wasn’t supposed to be with. She told me she cut it off and burned the field so it wouldn’t grow back, but what is done in the dark always comes to the light. I didn’t ask for a name because it wouldn’t make no never mind. I didn’t know a soul in Atlanta. And I didn’t ask what made this lover so wrong for her because I was scared she would say something that reminded me too much of myself, Bobo, or Clyde.

“Don’t fret,” I said. “It’s so many things worse than not being fresh. And Franklin won’t care about anything that happened way back before. You have been true to him since he asked you, right?”

She nodded.

“You love him, don’t you?”

Another nod.

“You don’t love the other one, do you?”

She didn’t nod or shake her head either. She was upright as twelve noon.

“ I hate that way we always have to choose,” I said.

THE ENGLISH UNDERSTAND WOOL by Helen DeWitt

Marguerite has learned a way of life her mother laid out. The English understand wool. The French understand wine, cheese, and bread. The Arabs honor and hospitality. The Irish, linen. And to avoid, at all costs, “mauvais ton.” Bad taste the biggest sin of all. Schooled in precision and how things should be done, Marguerite also understands when she’s being taken advantage of—the epitome of bad taste. When Marguerite learns she’s been duped not only by her parents but by those supposedly hired to help her navigate the publishing world, the story takes a satisfactory turn when you least expect it.   

Favorite line(s): I played “Straight, No Chaser” and “Kind of Blue” and some other things. People came to the piano to talk and some brought me drinks and came back to talk some more. They knew who I was, of course. More people gave me invitations. I did not think they would have given me invitations if I had been talking about my feelings instead of dressing with eclat and playing bridge with flair and playing the piano when a party was off to a dull start. So perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think they were people I would want to know.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin

Giovanni’s cramped and crumbling apartment in Paris, where he meets his lover, David, is the setting for their intense affair. David’s fiancée, Hella, is traveling in Spain, wondering if marriage is possible for her. David can’t imagine a life with Giovanni in the heteronormative 1950s. Torn, David abandons Giovanni out of guilt, shame, and an inability to love himself or others honestly. The three are left with choices and consequences none of them could have imagined. Giovanni, least of all. Baldwin at his heartbreakingly best.

Favorite line(s): Indeed there were young people, half a dozen at the zinc counter before glasses of red and white wine, along with others not young at all. A pockmarked boy and a very rough-looking girl were playing the pinball machine near the window. There were a few people sitting at the table in the back, served by an astonishingly clean looking waiter. In the gloom, the dirty walls, the sawdust-covered floor, his white jacket gleamed like snow. Behind these tables one caught a glimpse of the kitchen and the surly, obese cook. He lumbered about like one of those overloaded trucks outside, wearing one of those high, white hats, and with a dead cigar stuck between his lips.

COSMOGONY: STORIES by Lucy Ives

Ives bends the everyday to reach experiences that hover without easy explanations or words for them. These twelve stories weave the act of witnessing with experimental curiosity. Plots are uncommon except to understand how the author’s characters get from asking questions to vague but satisfying answers. Cosmogony reads like a collection of essays that veer into the weird, atmospheric realm of sci-fi. But Ives never tricks the reader into a belief, but rather leaves the door open for individual interpretations. 

Favorite line(s): Someone once said that fate is “the reflection of the world in a raindrop.” This rings true to me, but I have to unpack it. What I think this means is that everything that will happen is already determined. But everything is not determined from some future point of origin/view. This is why fate is weird. It is a pattern. It’s everything about your life flattened into an image and foretold in reverse, from this very moment on. That’s why you can’t understand it now.

…but I’m convinced it’s people with no imagination who have the least idea of what’s going on and therefore live in bliss.

THE UNCOMMON READER by Alan Bennett

Who is the uncommon reader? Queen Elizabeth. This short novel is a fictionalized version of the head of the monarchy doing everything possible to avoid everyday duties, hide in a quiet room, and read. It isn’t necessarily a story about Queen Elizabeth but about literature. “That simple and pleasurable pursuit that doesn’t mind who you are or where you have come from. Everyone, she reminds us, can get lost in a book.” And it’s easy to get lost in this one for the few hours it takes to finish it.

Favorite line(s): Books did not defer. All readers were equal, and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognized with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognized.

SWITZY by Emma Cline 

Seventy-something David Hastings, with advanced dementia, is on his way to Switzerland (Switzy) accompanied by Cody, his thirty-something companion hired to make sure he arrives for his scheduled euthanasia. Along the way, David visits his estranged daughter and grandson to say goodbye, but never reveals the reason why he’s there. In Zurich, David has an awkward visit with an old boarding school roommate he once had a relationship with until a falling out. David wants to apologize to Tom, but his bursts of thought never get around to it. He leaves his hotel room in the middle of the night, gets lost in foreign cities, and has episodes of paranoia, believing people are trying to steal from him. Cline writes convincingly and beautifully about the escaping reality that is the Alzheimer patient. The reader can’t help but struggle internally right along with David until the very end. A wonder, this powerful novel. 

Favorite line(s): It was sometimes like looking at the kindling for a life, a meticulously laid fire that was cold, unlit. The possibility was there, the elements properly arranged, but he couldn’t make it spark.