After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother's "don't ask, don't tell" generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she gets instead are the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she sees something her generation lacks. Facebook is great, but it won't deliver a pot roast.

Two couples in two separate but similar times-set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy-face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

A modern story of family, I’ll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year—1995—anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child. With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he’s unwilling to share and the man who is now attempting to woo her; and a couple in denial about a looming health crisis as well as their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can’t stop lying.

When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the '90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger.

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun.

For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now. Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew.

Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents’ secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself.

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?”

No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be ex-husband Jonah. Hailey—nicknamed Sunshine by her mother for her bright outlook and ever-present smile—has always tried to do what is expected of her and is regarded as the family peacemaker. But is anyone, including Hailey, who she has always seemed to be? The months leading up to Jonah’s death have been fraught, including a bitter separation and a messy custody battle over their young daughter, Maya.

After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother's "don't ask, don't tell" generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she gets instead are the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she sees something her generation lacks. Facebook is great, but it won't deliver a pot roast.

Two couples in two separate but similar times-set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy-face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence.

David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

At a safe distance from the intrigues of courtly life at Louis XIV’s Versailles, an intellectual crowd of mostly women have been gathering in a Parisian home to share what hostess Marie D’Aulnoy herself has christened contes de fées: fairy tales. Recently ousted from court and still raw from the death of his beloved wife, Charles Perrault finds companionship and creative camaraderie at the salon, where he eagerly joins the storytellers. Their hostess is impressive, fiercely intelligent, but somehow unreadable. She is harboring secrets of her own.

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things. On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations.

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.