The Gravity of Birds Tracy Guzeman (2013) An art history professor and an art authenticator in New York agree to search for missing works by a renowned painter and end up involved in a cross-country missing persons mystery. They discover that the two sisters depicted in the paintings had a troubled relationship with the painter thirty-five years in the past. I stayed up until 2 am to finish this poignant and complex novel. Thanks to Cinda Hocking for the recommendation!
The Great Passion James Runcie (2022) No, it’s not a love affair between two people but rather Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St Matthew Passion,” one of the greatest of all choral compositions, premiered in Leipzig in 1727. In this novel, the fictional Stefan Silbermann, as an adult, looks back on his year as a boy soprano and aspiring church organist studying with Bach. He narrates his experiences with the boisterous Bach household and with the brutal boarding school where he lives. Musicians should especially appreciate the details, but all fans of historical fiction should appreciate the portrayal of eighteenth-century Germany and of “The Big Guy,” JSB.
We Are the Brennans Tracey Lange (2021) Moving the plot along mostly through convincing dialog, Lange creates a vivid picture of the present-day Brennan family, pub owners in a town north of NYC. An estranged adult daughter comes home to recover after a serious car accident and gets retangled in family life, with some mystery and some romance enlivening things. The character names are odd, but the story is a winner.
Whereabouts Jhumpa Lahiri (Written in Italian and translated by the author) (2021) Lahiri delivers a powerful if unconventional short novel, about an unnamed middle-aged single woman in an unnamed European city. Each of the 46 brief chapters is a precisely rendered, first-person vignette of some aspect of the woman’s daily life—she’s in her office or at the museum or on vacation or at the coffee bar. Altogether, the vignettes give the reader amazing insights into her personality and her life’s trajectory.
The Kindest Lie Nancy Johnson (2021) The racial tensions that trouble the US play out through the stories of two families in the months near the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Ruth Tuttle, a successful Black engineer, can’t move forward with her life in Chicago until she finds the baby whom she was forced to give up when she gave birth at age 17 in an industrial town in Indiana. Her search reconnects her with her family and with the family of a young white boy nicknamed Midnight. The author tackles difficult issues of race, class, poverty, and social justice forthrightly and eloquently.
French Braid Anne Tyler (2022) Meet four generations of the Garrett family, from 1959 to 2020, mainly in Tyler’s favorite locale, Baltimore. The Garretts exemplify what families ideally do for one another: in the words of one character, “. . . ‘hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions.’” The family members are convincingly portrayed and their stories are memorable. Hang on through that first chapter, which seems slightly disjointed. This is a splendid book.