BY KRISTYN KUSEK LEWIS
Historical Fiction
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Let Us Descend, is set in the South before the Civil War. Annis, an enslaved teenager in the Carolinas, gets sold by the man who fathered her to a slave market in New Orleans. As she walks all the way there, she survives by summoning memories of her mother and visions of an ancestral spirit. The writing is so visceral that you truly feel Annis’s experience, making the latest from one of our greatest literary minds a devastating, deeply moving masterpiece.
Inspiring Memoir
In How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair, the poet, now in her late 30s, recounts growing up in Jamaica with a strict Rastafarian father. In their home, women were expected to be obedient above all else and follow stringent rules to maintain their “purity” (covering their bodies and hair, not having any friends). But Sinclair’s mother, oppressed as she was, gave her children books, which became Sinclair’s salvation and helped her find the voice that would free her. You’ll be riveted by this powerful woman’s journey.
Inventive Fantasy
Picture an old house on a plot of land in western Massachusetts. Now imagine all the lives that have passed through it over 400 years, starting with a pair of young lovers who’ve run off from their Puritan colony. In North Woods by Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the setting becomes the main character, and stories of the house’s past (romance, murder, ghosts!), combined with Mason’s stunning descriptions of nature, will get you thinking about the history of the place you call home.
Dramatic Page-Turner
When a stranger is found dead in the backyard of John Kim’s California home, he and his adult children are rattled but assume it’s random—until they find out he was carrying a letter to Sunny, their wife and mother, who disappeared a year earlier. Taking place in 1999 and the late 1970s, after Sunny first arrives in America from Korea, What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim—part mystery, part family story—examines the consequences of harboring secrets.
Relatable Read
Wellness by Nathan Hill follows Jack and Elizabeth, who fall in love as college students immersed in the underground art scene in 1990s Chicago. Twenty years later, they’re a married couple dealing with parenthood and homeownership, trying to reconcile who they were with who they’ve become, both together and apart. With hilarious commentary about our culture’s fixation on health and happiness, this novel beautifully probes how we cope with change.