Dolly All the Time ~ Annabelle Monaghan Dolly is the single mom to a 13 year old boy, Gus. She teaches kindergarten in Boston, but is spending the summer at her father’s Rhode Island home, repairing damage from a small fire. Struggling to make ends meet, she supplements her income by driving for Uber and working in customer support for a tiny company that specializes in weighted vests. She also helps out with her father’s seafood business. Years earlier, her mother persuaded him to expand the company, then abandoned the family when the venture failed, leaving him deeply in debt. Now the house needs a new roof to avoid being…

Mad Mabel ~ Sally Hepworth Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is 81 and lives on a quiet street in Melbourne. She has lived there for decades, and is the type of person to speak her mind, often when she should probably keep her mouth shut. When she finds the body of her dead neighbor, a neighbor she never liked, her history as the youngest person ever convicted of murder comes to the forefront, and a media circus ensues. From here we go back to her childhood, to the deaths that surrounded her – her sister, her mother, and others. How she was teased by her classmates for being tall and having red…

Land ~ Maggie O’Farrell When Tomás and his son, Liam, come across a hidden spring in a small copse in western Ireland, Tomás decides that he will no longer work for the Redcoats, and instead the maps he creates will be real and true, though this will mean the loss of the only income the family has. Tomás is a cartographer in mid 19th century Ireland, and has survived the Great Hunger that killed so many, and sent others to the New World in search of a better life.  He is a quiet, sometimes hard man, though his childhood in a Dickensian workhouse softens the reader up a bit to him. Land is…

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife ~ Anna Johnston At 82, Frederick Fife is on the verge of homelessness. His life savings was spent on unsuccessful cancer treatments to save his wife, and he is being evicted because he can’t afford his rent. (Shockingly, this story takes place in Australia, not the US. It feels like such an American story, right?) A fluke accident, a heart attack (not his), a man who could be his identical twin, and suddenly Frederick is living in a nearby rest home, and everyone is calling him Bernard. He tries to straighten them out, but as Bernard suffers dementia, no one will listen to him.…

The Vanishing Place ~ Zoe Rankin Effie has left her troubled childhood in the bush of New Zealand behind, and is living in Scotland, when she receives a phone call from a police officer that she was close to decades before – a young girl has come out of the bush, covered in blood, who looks like she could be Effie as a child. The girl, Anya, won’t speak to anyone, and Effie is the only person who knows that area well. Please, the friend says, you are the only person who can help her. Please come. So Effie travels to New Zealand, to the town of Koramo, and confronts…

Small Rain ~ Garth Greenwall It’s the summer of 2020 in a small Iowa college town, and the unnamed narrator of Small Rain suffers an infrarenal aortic dissection, a rare vascular condition where a tear forms in the inner layer of the abdominal aorta below the kidneys. It is incredibly painful and very dangerous. The majority of the novel takes place in the ER and ICU. He’s hospitalized for about two weeks, during which time he meditates on art (especially poetry, he is a poet and teaches at the nearby college), the frailty of the body, intimacy, and the pros and cons of domesticity. Small Rain is such a beautiful…

Whistler ~ Ann Patchett Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, are spending the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, when they run into Eddie Tripplet, who was, for a brief time in her childhood, Daphne’s stepfather. Daphne and her sister Leda had three fathers – their biological father, Buddy, who probably should not have had children, his first love was the ocean; Eddie, who probably should not have married their mother; and Lucas, to whom Daphne never felt connected. Both Daphne and Leda have strong affection for Eddie, and consider the time with him in their lives to be the most stable and happy. As Daphne…

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano ~ Donna Freitas Rose does not have children. She has never wanted children. She has always been very clear about this, to herself, to her family, her friends, and her partners. She marries Luke, who also does not want to have children, never has. Until a few years into their marriage, his parents convince him that life is meaningless without kids, and now suddenly it is the most important thing ever for him. He’s a complete dick to her, and piles on the pressure, despite knowing that she doesn’t want kids, despite knowing (I assume) how much money and work goes into being a…

Kin ~ Tayari Jones Annie and Niecy are ‘cradle friends’, and have known each other for as long as they can remember. Both are orphans in the Jim Crow South, Annie raised by her grandmother, Niecy by her Aunt Irene. Niecy’s mother was murdered by her father (who then committed suicide) when she was an infant, while Annie’s mother deserted her and went to Memphis. Early on, Niecy’s Aunt Irene tells her that she is the luckier of the two girls, because her mother is gone and there is no hope of finding her, while Annie lives with the idea of perhaps finding her and reclaiming the maternal love she…

The Things We Never Say ~ Elizabeth Strout Loneliness does not come from having no people around you. Instead, it stems from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you, or from holding certain views that others find inadmissible. ~ Carl Jung This is the epigraph of Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, and it perfectly encapsulates the novel. Artie Dam is depressed. He is a middle-aged high school History teacher in Massachusetts with a love for sailing. His best friend, Flossie, has moved away to be closer to her daughter after the death of her husband, Reginald, whom she describes as an asshole whom she…

The Calamity Club ~ Katheryn Stockett Birdie Calhoun is visiting her sister, Frances, in Oxford, Mississippi, hoping to borrow money from her sister’s new husband to save the family farm. It’s 1933 and things have not gone well, and she needs money to pay the property taxes. Frances has married into a wealthy family and is a social climber. She volunteers at the local orphanage, where she tries to ingratiate herself with the chairwoman, Garnett Pittman, who runs the place with a cruel, uncaring hand. Meg Lefleur is one of the girls at the orphanage. Her mom left one day to go to the store and never came home. Garnett…

Good People ~ Patmeena Sabit The Sharaf family are an immigrant success story. The parents came to the US from Afghanistan and settled in Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, and through intelligence and hard work, became extremely wealthy. Rahmat is a successful businessman, and Maryam is his wife and stay at home mother to their four children. The parents have dreams that their eldest son, Omer, will be a world class surgeon, but he has other plans and doesn’t even want to go to community college. Now the dreams are pinned to their teenaged daughter, Zorah, becoming a lawyer. Zorah is an excellent student, and straddles the fine line…