Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

It is 1960 in North Carolina and the lives of Ivy Hart and Jane Forrester couldn’t be more different. Fifteen-year-old Ivy lives with her family as tenants on a small tobacco farm, but when her parents die, Ivy is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew. As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
 

When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she is given the task of recommending which of her clients should be sterilized without their knowledge or consent. The state’s rationalization is that if her clients are poor, or ill, or deemed in some way "unfit," they should not be allowed to have children. But soon Jane becomes emotionally invested in her clients’ lives, causing tension with her new husband and her supervisors. No one understands why Jane would want to become a caseworker for the Department of Public Health when she could be a housewife and Junior League member. As Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm --- secrets much darker than she would have guessed. Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing a life-changing battle.

Necessary Lies is the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy. Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: How can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

343 pages (September 2013)

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Title Read-alikes: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate; Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout; God Help the Child by Toni Morrison; The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips; The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin; Some Luck by Jane Smiley; The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray; Nightwoods by Charles Frazier; Betty by Tiffany McDaniel; Cold Rock River by J. L. Miles; Unfit by Lara Cleveland Torgeson; The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult;  and 28 Summers by Erin Hilderbrand.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

 Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

307 pages (March 2013)

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Title Read-alikes: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson; Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens; A Painted House by John Grisham; Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey; Dodging and Burning by John Copenhaver; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield; Setting Free the Kites by Alex George; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall; and The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley; News of the World by Paulette Jiles; and The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

The riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.

 

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children, a brilliant new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.  

Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.

When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.

Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity, thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.

253 pages (April 2013)

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Title Read-alikes: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh; The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold; The Blue Guitar by John Banvile; Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier; Exhibit Alexandra by Natasha Bell; Luster by Raven Leilani; Indiscretion by Charles Dubow; The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng; The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine; Life After Life by Kate Atkinson; and The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.

Canada by Richard Ford

"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later."

When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of a happy, knowable life is forever shattered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life across a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American, whose suave reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew and loved. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare elegant prose, resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic

420 pages (May 2012)

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Title Read-alikes: The Round House by Louise Erdrich; The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall; Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks; Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden; The Painter by Peter Heller; Peace Like a River by Leif Enger; Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje; History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund; Still Missing by Chevy Stevens; Wyoming by J. P. Gritton; El Paso by Winston Groom; You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka; and Simón by Miqui Otero.

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan

A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O'Nan's intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of visits by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities.

Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings - of pride and regret, joy and sorrow - are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O'Nan as an American master.

255 pages (March 2011)

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Title Read-alikes: This is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison; My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan; Tempting Fate by Jane Green; Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; All Adults Here by Emma Straub; George and Lizzie by Nancy Pearl; The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood; Who Asked You? by Terry Mcmillan; Bear Necessity by James Gould-Bourn; Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler; Dear Ann by Bobbie Ann Mason; and Monogamy by Sue Miller.

Faith: a novel by Jennifer Haigh

In the spring of 2002, a perfect storm hits Boston: Trusted priests are accused of the worst possible betrayal. Faith explores the fallout for one devout family.

Estranged from her family, Sheila McGann returns home when her older brother, Art—a popular pastor—finds himself at the center of the maelstrom. Her strict mother is in a state of angry denial. Sheila’s younger brother, Mike, has convicted his brother in his heart. But most disturbing of all is Art himself, who dodges Sheila’s questions and refuses to defend himself.

As secrets begin to surface, Faith explores the corrosive consequences of one family’s history of silence—and the resilience it finds through forgiveness. A suspenseful tale of one woman’s quest for the truth, Faith is a haunting meditation on loyalty and family, doubt and belief. Elegantly crafted, sharply observed, this is Jennifer Haigh’s most ambitious novel to date.

318 pages (May 2011)

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Title Read-alikes: Beartown by Fredrik Backman; Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng; All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin; Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout; The Precious One by Marisa De los Santos; This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper; One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel; The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin; The Gathering by Anne Enright; Household Words by Joan Silber; Maggie-Now by Betty Smith; The Widow Waltz by Sally Koslow; and The End of Day by Bill Clegg.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Under "a blossoming pear tree" in West Florida, sixteen-year-old Janie Mae Crawford dreams of a world that will answer all her questions and waits "for the world to be made." But her grandmother, who has raised her from birth, arranges Janie's marriage to an older local farmer.

So begins Janie's journey toward herself and toward the farthest horizon open to her. Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel follows Janie from her Nanny's plantation shack, to Logan Killicks's farm, to all-black Eatonville, to the Everglades, and back to Eatonville—where she gathers in "the great fish-net" of her life. Janie's joyless marriage to Killicks lasts until Joe Starks passes by, on his way to becoming "a big voice."

Joe becomes mayor of Eatonville and is just as determined as Killicks was to keep Janie in her proper place. Through twenty years with Joe, she continues to cope, hope, and dream; and after Joe's death, she is once again "ready for her great journey," a journey she now undertakes with one Vergible Woods, a.k.a. Tea Cake. Younger than Janie, Tea Cake nevertheless engages both her heart and her spirit.

With him Janie can finally enjoy life without being one man's mule or another's bauble. Their eventful life together "on de muck" of the Everglades eventually brings Janie to another of her life's turning points; and after burying Tea Cake, she returns to a gossip-filled Eatonville, where she tells her story to her best friend, Phoeby Watson, and releases Phoeby to tell that story to the others.

Janie has "done been tuh de horizon and back." She has learned what love is; she has experienced life's joys and sorrows; and she has come home to herself in peace.

219 pages (January 1937)

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Title Read-alikes: The Color Purple by Alice Walker; Jazz by Toni Morrison; Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines; Native Son by Richard Wright; Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin; Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich; Ruby by Cynthia Bond; Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay; Another Brooklyn by Jacquelyn Woodson; Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen; Heavy by Kiese Laymon; An American Marriage by Tayari Jones; The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett; and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Moving from San Francisco in the 1970s to a vividly imagined New York City sometime after 2020, Jennifer Egan portrays the interlacing lives of men and women whose desires and ambitions converge and collide as the passage of time, cultural change, and private experience define and redefine their identities.

Bennie Salazar, a punk rocker in his teenage years, is facing middle age as a divorced and disheartened record producer. His cool, competent assistant, Sasha, keeps everything under control—except for her unconquerable compulsion to steal. Their diverse and diverting memories of the past and musings about the present set the stage for a cycle of tales about their friends, family, business associates, and lovers.

A high school friend re-creates the wild, sexually charged music scene of Bennie’s adolescence and introduces the wealthy, amoral entertainment executive Lou Kline, who becomes Bennie’s mentor and eventually faces the consequences of his casual indifference to the needs of his mistresses, wives, and children. Scotty, a guitarist in Bennie’s long-defunct band, emerges from life lived on the fringes of society to confront Bennie in his luxurious Park Avenue office, while Bennie’s once-punk wife, Stephanie, works her way up in the plush Republican suburb where they live.

Other vignettes explore the experiences and people that played a role in Sasha’s life. An uncle searching for Sasha when she runs away at seventeen becomes aware of his own disillusionments and disappointments as he tries to comfort her. Her college boyfriend describes a night of drug-fueled revelry that comes to a shocking end. And her twelve-year-old daughter contributes a clever PowerPoint presentation of the family dynamics—including hilariously pointed summaries of her mother’s “Annoying Habit #48” and “Why Dad Isn’t Here.”

From a trenchant look at the vagaries of the music business and the ebb and flow of celebrity to incisive dissections of marriage and family to a provocative vision of where America is headed, A Visit from the Goon Squad is unnerving, exhilarating, and irresistible.

340 pages (June 2010)

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Title Read-alikes: NW by Zadie Smith; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; Trick Mirror by Ji Tolentino; One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper; Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon; Trust Exercise by Susan Choi; Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell; Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes; and Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo.