Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town, and arrives at her parents' home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth's mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic.

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.

July 1962. Following in the tradition of Indigenous workers from Nova Scotia, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she’s lost her way. A medical school dropout, she’s come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota.

Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled—the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away. Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.

In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.”

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.

Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town, and arrives at her parents' home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth's mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic.

Written in Cho Nam-joo’s signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo’s precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier.

In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep-sea diver in her family. She urges her mother to allow her to make their annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade sea delicacies for pork. A sea-village girl, Junja has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth, and it is there she falls in love with mountain-boy Yang Suwol. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place.

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn—has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.

Bride-to-be Lulu is about to marry Shanghai’s most eligible bachelor. She just has one secret: she isn't in love and is only marrying him under pressure to fix her family’s financial issues. But for Lulu and her two best friends, her upcoming nuptials may offer a different opportunity entirely…

Dok-go lives in Seoul Station. He can’t remember his past, and the only thing he knows for certain is that he could really use a drink. When he finds a lost wallet filled with documents, his life is drastically changed.

Acid rainstorms have transformed New York City into a toxic wasteland, cutting its remaining citizens off from one another. In one apartment building, an unlikely family of humans and ghosts survives. Mira reels from a devastating breakup with her partner, Mal, whose whereabouts are unknown, while her mother is plagued by furious dreams and her grandfather, Grandpa Why, stakes his claims as a rambunctious ghost. Across the hall, the cockroach Shin, also a ghost. As the world around them worsens, each character must learn to redefine what it means to live, die, and love at the end of the world.

In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family’s strong women, he starts to do just that–until a patient’s son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men’s unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background.

In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients. But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past.

Progressing from the 1960s to the turbulent present, the novel begins on the island of O’ahu and centers on Ana, abandoned by her mother as a child. Raised by her extended family on the “lawless” Wai’anae coast, west of Honolulu, Ana, against all odds, becomes a physician. While tending victims of Hurricane ‘Iniki on the neighboring island of Kaua’i, she meets Nikolai, a Russian filmmaker with a violent and tragic past, who can confront reality only through his unique prism of lies. Yet he is dedicated to recording the ecological horrors in his motherland.

From the outside, Renee Goh’s life looks perfect. She’s thirty and beautiful, runs a glamorous—and profitable—women’s clothing company in London, and is dating a hot Taiwanese pop star. But Renee is lonely. Estranged from her family in Singapore, she practically lives at the office, and now she’s just been dumped by her supposed boyfriend. Who she never saw anyway, so why is she ruining her Instagram-ready makeup by crying? Before she can curl up on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, Renee’s father calls.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left the family reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.