A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is supposedly the story of four friends, but is instead the story of one broken man and his friends. It is the story of Jude, a man who has unquestionably had the worst childhood imagined. Orphaned as a baby, raised by abusive monks, who beat and raped him repeatedly, he runs away as a child with one of the monks, who says he will love him as a son. But only a horribly abusive father would do to Jude the things Brother Luke does. And of course, things get worse from there on out, until Jude is about 16, and goes to college. From…

Marie-Laure is a young blind girl, living with her father in Paris, 1940. Her father is the keeper of the keys at the Natural History Museum, and he builds her a miniature replica of their neighborhood, so that she might memorize the details and learn her way around. When the Germans invade Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris, for the coastal town of Saint-Malo, where they live with his brother Etienne in their childhood home. Werner is a young orphan, living in an orphanage with his sister, other children, and their care keeper, a woman who speaks French and tells them stories of France. Werner and his sister discover…

Sue Monk Kidd’s new novel, The Invention of Wings, starts with Sarah Grimké’s 11th birthday in 1805 South Carolina. As a gift from her mother, Sarah receives 10 year old Hetty (Handful) to be her handmaid. Sarah doesn’t want a handmaid, has been scarred at an early age by the cruelties of slavery, so she decides to set Hetty free. It doesn’t take. So Sarah instead befriends Hetty, tries to be as kind as possible, and endeavors to teach Hetty to read. Unfortunately, teaching slaves to read is illegal, and both Hetty and Sarah suffer for their crime. Sarah is a bright girl who loves to read, and her beloved…

‘Americanah’ is the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who in college, falls in love with a boy, Obinze. They come from different backgrounds…his mother is a high minded academic, a college professor. Her parents are much more working class, living with the issues of power outages and so on. They fall deeply in love, but amongst the constant strikes in the college, it becomes almost impossible for them to graduate from college, so she moves to the United States, where her aunt has invited her. She is an excellent student and gets scholarships, but still she owes plenty of money on tuition and living costs. She’s suffering. Things…

(artwork found on the New York Times website, here) “They say there are many worlds, all around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons and stars. We cannot go there — we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own. . . . And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged, and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had…

“Little Bee” is the name chosen for herself by a young Nigerian girl running from “the men” who have come to burn her village and kill its occupants, so that the oil field below may be developed.  She takes the name to hide her identity, as her real name would clearly identify her as a member of a particular family, all of whom are supposed to be dead.  Little Bee has lived a happy life in an impoverished village, where there is no running water or electricity, but there is a tire swing and a lot of fun to be had.  When the village is destroyed by the men, she…

Graphic found on the New York Times review of the book, here. The preface of Amor Towles Rules of Civility finds our heroine, Katey, and her husband attending the opening of a photography exhibit in Manhattan, in 1966. The exhibit is of photographs taken with a hidden camera on the subways, some 25 years before. She is stunned to find, amongst all of the other photographs, two of a man she recognizes, Tinker Grey. In the first picture, he is wearing a custom shirt and a cashmere coat, and is clearly enjoying life. In the second, taken perhaps a year later, he looks as though he hasn’t had enough to…