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Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez

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There are inflection points in our lives, moments when everything changes: What we thought of as our life now exists only as the past, and the future is about to begin. We meet Antonia Vega as she confronts such a moment.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Antonia came to the United States with her family and found herself teaching Americans about their own language and literary traditions. Now, not only has she retired from her work as a college professor, but her husband of over thirty years has died. “Who am I going to be anymore?” she wonders. As a woman with no profession, no husband, no children, she feels herself becoming invisible.

At the same time, she is haunted by words: those of her husband—a beloved doctor in their small Vermont town—and those of all the authors whose work she has read and taught over the years. She tells herself: “An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted.”

The world has not done with her, though. She becomes embroiled in the problems of an undocumented worker on the neighboring farm, whose fiancé is being held hostage in Colorado by coyotes who demand Mario send more money. At the same time, her older sister Izzy is behaving more and more erratically, and her other two sisters rope her into their schemes to force Izzy to get help. Then Izzy goes missing.

As both situations escalate, Antonia questions where her responsibility lies. Unlike her big-hearted, activist husband, she lacks the appetite for self-sacrifice that most women have had drummed into them. She turns to questions from a Tolstoy story she used to teach: “What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?”

She reminds herself of the rampant individualism in her adopted country, that advises you to put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. Yet she also conjures a saying her husband’s mother used when someone had a problem: “Let’s see what love can do.”

One of the aspects of this book that I most valued turned out to be these contradictions and how we manage to live with them. For example, the farmer next door (whom Mario works for) loudly complains about illegal immigrants, yet he secretly hires them because he can’t afford to pay the salary a citizen would expect.

The themes here fascinate me: the identity crisis caused by your world flipping over; the way women are taught to sacrifice their own needs and desires to those of others; the immigrant experience, not just in the first contact with the new culture, but what happens after a few decades of steeping in it. I was surprised by how much this short novel resonated with me. And of course I appreciated the Vermont setting.

I love all the lines from stories that swarm into Antonia’s thoughts, their sources mostly not identified. However, that can cause danger for the author, similar to the danger of using such a generous amount of Spanish, especially in the dialogue. As a former English teacher and devoted reader, I recognised most of the quotes and, though not knowing Spanish myself, I could figure out what was meant by the context. But that will not be true for everyone. One reader on Goodreads thought that these quotes were just the author trying to be a poetic and instead, sounding like “word salad.” Reasonable enough.

I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite part of the book: the four sisters. Every scene with them explodes with life and emotion and—oh, golly!—the dialogue! Alvarez so beautifully articulates the shifting dynamic between them: alliances forming and reforming, ancient injuries resurrected, fierce loyalties and unquestioned support. Most of all, a secret language that only those you’ve grown up with can understand.

Luckily, I consumed this story as an audiobook, masterfully narrated by Alma Cuervo. I enjoy physical books—I’d better, since they threaten to overwhelm my home—but there are times when an audiobook works better, at least for me.

While I seek out stories about people and cultures different from mine, I’m also interested in books about women and men in the later stages of life. There are many ways to define these stages: Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, Erik Erikson’s eight stages, Gail Sheehy’s Passages. Mostly I think about the four stages of life as described in ancient Hindu texts (the Student, the Householder, the Hermit, and the Wandering Ascetic).

Whatever stage of life you’re in, I recommend this 2020 novel by the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

What novel have you read that surprised you? How?

The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

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What a find! I love maps. I mean, I really love maps. Especially paper ones, the kind you have to fold just right. When I was young, they were both a vehicle for dreams of adventure and a way to comprehend the space around me. Once I understood the grid of Baltimore and the spider rotaries of Worcester, the storied streets of London and the plazas of Madrid, I could venture out with confidence.

I also love mysteries, so I was delighted to come across this novel in my local indie bookstore. My expectations soared so high that I should be reporting disappointment now. In fact, they were not high enough. I loved the maps, the tangled mystery, and the true story that seeded the novel.

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. But Nell’s dream had exploded seven years ago in a disastrous argument with her father that destroyed the careers of both Nell and her then-boyfriend Felix. Now Nell works for a hole-in-the-wall operation that gussies up semi-historical maps with sea monsters and fake age spots.

Then she gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library.

Nell embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. In order to accomplish that, she must finally lay bare the secrets of the common highway map that caused the argument with her father and explore the mystery of her parents’ past. She forces herself to get in touch with Felix for the first time since that terrible argument; he is now working on a cutting-edge mega-map and might have technology that can help her.

Lately I’ve been thinking about goal shift—when I was an engineer we called it requirements creep—and how that can be a good thing in a story (though it isn’t in an engineering project). Writers know that what drives most stories is the protagonist’s push to achieve a goal, whether it’s destroying a ring of power or marrying your true love. However, often in a story, as that main character moves through adventure after adventure, their goal may change or may accrue related goals. For example, Frodo’s original goal was simply to hand over the ring to the Elves, not to go all the way to Mordor. Elizabeth Bennet’s original goal was to get her sister married to Mr. Bingley and to ignore the snobby Mr. Darcy.

Here, Nell’s journey grows tendril after tendril of secrets that must be unraveled, making for a delightfully complicated plot filled with surprises and satisfying shifts.

I often dislike novels with multiple points of view—different characters taking over telling the story—but here I found it worked well. For one thing, the change of voices is smoothly handled, usually by a new chapter. For another, each person in the team that coalesces around Nell has a piece of the story to tell, so having them tell it in their own voice is a clear and economical solution. We are never in doubt that Nell is the main character, no matter how much we may come to care about some of the others.

If you like a good mystery or maps or—even better—both, check out this book!

Have you read a novel about a map that you can recommend?

The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble

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I dove into this 1987 novel, having long been fascinated by the way Drabble uses the closeup of individual lives to chronicle social history. We begin at a New Year’s party in 1980 with three longtime friends, now approaching midlife turning points, even as Britain itself enters a decade of change wrought by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cronies.

At the party Liz Headland, a psychologist, finds that her marriage to Charles, long tamed by child-rearing and busy careers, is falling apart. Alix Bowen is becoming disillusioned with her work as a teacher within Britain’s social-welfare network, feeling that the progressive fervor of the previous decades has not accomplished much. Artist Esther Breuer, pessimistic about the role of art in a changing society, contemplates leaving London for good and moving to Italy.

The three had met at Cambridge twenty-five years earlier, their social and academic success there promising brilliant careers. In a nod to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, they are “the crème de la crème” of their generation. However, at this point, Liz is the only one of the three to be financially stable, though even that might change with her divorce. Alix and Esther do piecemeal work and are often criticised for wasting their brains and for lacking ambition.

While wrestling with their own disappointments and demons, they navigate a society that is turning away from the socialism that has helped Britain recover from WWII, to a ruthless capitalism that rewards winners and ignores the suffering of losers.

In much of my reading over the last few months I’ve been looking at how writers balance the personal lives of their characters with the larger events in their world. In some cases, such as Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck, the correlation is obvious and inescapable. In others, such as Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, it is more subtle. Here I feel Drabble’s social context—miner’s strikes, social service cuts, a serial killer—sometimes overwhelms her characters’ lives.

I know from reading other novels by Drabble that her style is rather dense, with more exposition and fewer dramatic scenes than we are used to in today’s fiction. That’s okay with me—I search out these novels that call for a little more attention. I enjoyed the deep dive into the minds and hearts of these three women. The other characters are well-drawn and fascinating, not only within themselves but also how they interact with and affect Liz, Alix and Esther.

The novel is a wonderful portrait, not only of these characters, but of a decade whose changes are only now starting to lose steam. I found its paean to friendship between women equally fascinating, especially the way their bond survives even as each of them transforms in the course of the novel.

What novel set in the 1980s have you enjoyed?

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

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Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become.

A global crisis has lessened the country’s standing in the world, and in response, the government has created PACT, the Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act. The increasingly authoritarian government rigidly enforces PACT, indoctrinating children young, tolerating no dissent, and cracking down on any resistance. Because China is blamed for the crisis (sound familiar?), all east Asian people, even longtime citizens, are subjected to racial violence and discrimination.

Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. He loves his white American father, yet wonders why the man allowed himself to be punished for whatever his wife had done. Noah isn’t even allowed to go by the nickname his mother gave him: Bird. It’s not hard to imagine the effect on a child’s identity when he loses the name he’s always been known by.

This is a fascinating story, part mystery, part thriller, part social commentary. Several choices by the author add to its power: putting current social/political tensions into a mostly fictional world, and concentrating the terrible racist abuse on Asians rather than people of color—not that it doesn’t exist now but not so blatantly and virulently—provides a little distance for the reader. We recognise them and can more easily appreciate how these fictional forces play out in today’s society. For example:

In Orange county a march protesting anti-Chinese bias spiraled into a clash with bystanders hurling epithets, ending with riot police, Tasers, a Chinese-American three-year-old struck with a teargas canister. For the officers, paid leave; for the protester, a full investigation into the family.

We can also see where our real world tensions could lead. More and more people are embracing the idea of an authoritarian regime, without actually understanding what that will mean for them. Like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this dystopia is all too close to reality.

I love the descriptions of the protests in the novel. They are sometimes enigmatic and often playful, adding a touch of humor and reminding me of the Yippies’ protests in the 1960s. Most of them reference a phrase from a poem by Noah’s mother: our missing hearts. It’s a brilliant symbol, which accrues meaning as the novel progresses.

Even more, I love the role librarians play. I believe librarians are the smartest people around. They are my heroes. I appreciated Noah’s father and the sacrifices he makes to protect his family. I also liked Noah’s feisty friend Sadie. And I loved the way he used the stories and folktales his mother had told him when he was little. Through these characters, Ng delves into the power of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when people are silenced.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. Whoever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

Wondering why his mother left, where she is, and whether Noah will succeed kept me glued to the book. True, parts of it dragged; the emotional lives of the characters could have been more fully developed; and there were a couple of consistency problems near the end. Overall, though, it is a brilliant book, and a worthy follow-up to Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere.

What dystopian novel have you read that seemed disturbingly close to our world?

Dark Bird, by Sam Schmidt

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Sometimes you start a book, and you cannot stop until you have turned the last page.

That is what happened to me reading Schmidt’s new collection of poetry. In fact, it begs to be read as a whole. It begins so innocently, with a tree—“An ordinary tree”—a tree in winter, in a graveyard across from the author’s home. A tree with a crow in it.

Of course I thought of Haworth. The first time I visited the home of the Brontë sisters, a bleak day in the dregs of winter, I was shocked to find that their front yard was actually a cemetery. The Brontë parsonage lay right up against the graveyard and, beyond it, the grey stone church, and everywhere the crows, hoarsely screaming and rising in the air at my intrusion.

These poems stand up to the comparison, even to the echoes of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Eleanor Farjeon, and others. The reader is pulled in, made complicit in this openness to the world as we move through the year from winter to winter. One poem begins:

A tree revolves among faces.
When I open my eyes, it’s back as it
was. It was never a god in disguise.
It won’t reveal
a passage through. An exit
out. It’s not a young
woman—or an old one—
transformed.

Everything I look for in poetry is here: language that sings, lines concise and perfect as a snowflake, themes that speak to the universal heart of human existence, and surprising images that range from fairytales to news stories. Some of the images recur, spiraling into new meaning each time they appear.

I love that these poems circle around a graveyard. Anywhere we walk is a graveyard, isn’t it? Layers of rock and older civilisations, beings that came before us. They represent the geology of time, personal time and the earth’s time.

In my review of Schmidt’s previous collection, Suburban Myths, I praised the depth of emotion and experience in his work. Here he achieves that depth partly by the brilliance of his writing and partly by the force of his themes. Even more striking is how vulnerable the author allows himself to be and, therefore, how intensely powerful each poem is. Wrestling with demons from childhood, coming to terms with a father’s criticism and your own child’s independence, navigating a decades-old marriage—the more personal the poems are, the more they open us to ourselves.

He balances between silence and speech.
Between hope that he
might talk his way
into friendship with the sky. And
despair that he’s asking too much.

These songs invite us to walk through this world bookended by graveyard and family home. We enter, not a wood, but a single tree. We bang on the doors that are shut and unearth what is buried within us.

What poetry collection have you read that you kept reading and rereading?
 
 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

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Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred are bigwigs in early 20th century Manhattan. He’s a financier, a cold stick of a man who’s a genius when it comes to money—according to some anyway. She’s involved in various charitable endeavors, particularly when it comes to music. An otherwise reclusive couple, they become richer and richer; some say Bevel’s tinkering led to the Great Depression.

The premise of my book club’s choice for this month is an interesting one: tell the story of the Bevels from four different points of view. The first part of the book is a novel entitled Bonds, supposedly based on the couple, renamed Benjamin and Helen Rask. It is written in the narrative-heavy style of the early 20th century, no dialogue or dramatic scenes. I found most of it lackluster, though part of it was horrific and disturbing.

The second part contains Andrew’s notes toward an autobiography, intended to refute the story told in the novel, especially when it comes to his wife. The dry and often fragmentary notes magnify Andrew’s genius, and insist that his motives were less about making money, which he doesn’t care about, and more about doing good in the world. Much of it concentrates on portraying Mildred as a brainless little woman who didn’t understand what he did, and supported innocuous classical music.

The third part is a memoir written much later by Andrew’s secretary who had written up the autobiography from Bevel’s notes, giving us parts of it with her comments, among other things. It’s written in a modern style, with the astute characterisation, dialogue and dramatic scenes that make for more interesting reading. The final part is a diary giving yet another point of view.

It’s a fun premise: four parts, four points of view. I first ran across it in the 1970s when I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which entranced me and opened up a whole world of possibilities in fiction. Some reviews call Diaz’s book experimental fiction. I guess that’s true, though it’s been done so many times before that is seems a rather tame experiment. Many historical fiction novels also interweave two or more stories, often one in the present and one in the past.

My book club split pretty evenly between those who enjoyed it a lot and those who found it boring and predictable. Many of us confessed to skipping chunks of the tedious second part. I think we all shook our heads at the constant put-downs of women.

I came down on the boring and predictable side, among those surprised that it won a Pulitzer Prize. However, I will say that the book reflects our country at this moment in time: awash with false news and outright lies, making it hard to identify a trusted source. Even when you find one, you have to separate out the AI fakes from the real person.

The other relevant side of the book is the way its characters, even in that time period, are eager to present an image of themselves that may or may not be true, and defend that image if challenged. So much of today’s social media contains presentations of ourselves that have been carefully crafted to project a certain persona.

One discovery that interested me was that everyone in the group, including me, tended to believe each new section over the previous one, though of course there’s no way to actually tell. I guess it’s human nature to believe the last thing you’re told, especially if it’s something that fits best into your worldview: yet another way the novel speaks to today’s public discourse.

I also appreciate the way the author adapted the style for each part to reflect the writing of the time. So I liked the premise for the story and applaud the author to trying something grand, even if, in my view, it fell short in the execution.

Are you in a book club? What are you reading now?

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell

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In this leisurely Victorian novel, we get a wonderful portrait of domestic life in a rural English town. Gaskell follows Jane Austen’s dictum that “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” There is much humor here as well, but unlike Austen’s wit and satire, Gaskell’s compassion gives us well-rounded characters we recognise immediately from our own lives.

We first meet Molly Gibson, motherless daughter of a respected doctor, as a girl of twelve. Quiet, sensitive and loving, Molly’s sheltered upbringing has made her an interesting combination of innocence and perspicacity. As her father’s companion, she has had more leeway in terms of reading material and worldly conversation than most young women of the time.

The story follows her into young adulthood, as she gains a stepmother and stepsister, as well as a deeper connection with several local families. Here is the true charm of the story for me: the careful way the various characters are brushed in, and the depiction of the subtle—and not so subtle—class distinctions in the town.

As a professional, Molly’s father is a step above the genteel families of Hollingford, themselves superior to the servants and working class. A step above him is Squire Hamley, who family has been established on their property since before the Norman Conquest, though the family is in decline at this point. Above them—though Squire Hamley frequently contests this point—are Lord and Lady Cumnor at the Hall who have been there a mere hundred years or so.

As you would expect, there are romantic entanglements for both Molly and her stepsister Cynthia. The two are close from the start despite their different personalities, Cynthia being shallow and selfish compared to Molly. Romance finds other characters, too, especially Squire Hamley’s two sons.

I’m impressed by how much Gaskell works into this novel, while keeping up the narrative pace: not just daily life, class distinctions and the limitations of women’s roles, but also the political tensions between Whigs and Tories, the complications arising from family secrets, and the burgeoning (if often amateur) scientific developments. Charles Darwin was Gaskell’s cousin and perhaps the model for young Roger Hamley. There is also a fascinating thread about the limitations and unintended consequences of innocence and purity.

The last novel by Gaskell, was originally published in serial form in Cornhill Magazine between 1864 and 1866. Gaskell died in 1865 without completing the final bit, so the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood explaining how Gaskell intended the novel to end. Gaskell was also the author of North and South, Cranford, and a biography—the first—of Charlotte Brontë.

Wives and Daughters is a long and leisurely read. The first two-thirds seemed slow to this 21st century reader, but I relaxed into the pace, and was rewarded by a more lively last third. Another benefit of the length is the rich tapestry of rural life in England around 1830.

Do you have a favorite Victorian novel, or one set in that time period?

A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas

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There have been so many takeoffs on the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was wary of one more. However, this series puts a new twist on them by giving the detective’s character—sharp, analytical, unemotional—to a woman.

With such characteristics, Charlotte Holmes does not fit Victorian England’s definition of a proper upper class woman. Her parents are eager to marry her off, which is the last thing she wants. She comes up with a plan to craft a life where she can exercise her remarkable mind without the constraints society puts on women.

However, when that falls through, her backup plan leaves her disowned by her family and a social outcast, until a chance meeting with the remarkable Mrs. Watson opens another possibility. As her family’s social world is rocked by three unlikely deaths, and her father and sister become suspects, it becomes up to Charlotte to find a way to clear them and find the real murderer.

I delighted in the skillful way Thomas has worked in elements of the original canon while staying true to the time period. A woman cannot be a detective, forcing Charlotte and Mrs. Watson to craft a truly inventive workaround. Plus, the characters spring to life—each one unlike what you’d expect, full of flaws and fun and surprising gifts. The mystery itself is engrossing as well.

Usually I avoid novels that use real people or other author’s characters. The former feels invasive and the latter lazy. However, I’m glad I made an exception here. These stories are truly original and a lot of fun. I’ve now read seven in the series and look forward to reading the others.

While I enjoy all the characters and plots, Charlotte herself is what keeps me reading these books. She is a most unusual woman, as you would expect from someone with Sherlock’s personality and gifts. She stands out even more in this time period—the first book takes place in 1886—when women’s roles were much more constrained than now. I enjoy seeing how she handles ever more difficult situations.

If you’re looking for a new mystery series to entertain you while the cold weather keeps you inside, give this book a try.

What mystery series are you enjoying these days?

The Romantic, by William Boyd

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An unusual novel, my book club’s pick for this month covers the life of Cashel Greville Ross from his time as a young child in Ireland, through 451 pages of adventures, to his death. Born in December, 1799, Cashel’s 82 years covers most of the 19th century, and his adventures hit most of the touchstones of that period.

For example, when he gets disillusioned as a teenager, drops out of school, and joins the army, he ends up in the Battle of Waterloo. When he travels to Italy, he becomes friends with Byron and the Shelley ménage. This is a picaresque novel, like Don Quixote, where each chapter is almost a stand-alone story, with a new challenge for the protagonist and a new setting.

It’s great fun, seeing where a new chapter will take Cashel as he travels the world in pursuit of his next great scheme for living. Should he be a lover, an explorer, a writer, a farmer? This question of how to live your best life is far older than Oprah or Mary Oliver. Montaigne’s Essays are primarily multiple attempts to answer it.

The change of scene and story in each chapter becomes a huge challenge for a writer, which Boyd rises to brilliantly. He must have done a tremendous amount of research in order to create a new world in each chapter, full of a stunning amount of period detail. Also, since Cashel’s adventures are often tied to real events and people, each one had to be meticulously studied.

What ties it together, besides the dazzling writing and Cashel himself, is the theme named in the title. The question at the heart of the Romantic Movement in the 19th century is whether we should value our feelings over our rational thoughts. Which should prevail as we make large and small decisions? The Romantics plumped for the former, in reaction to the previous century’s Enlightenment, which prized science, facts, and logic above emotions. Thus, Cashel often allows his emotions to dictate his actions, with mixed consequences.

This theme of feelings versus logic is of interest to me. Of course, nothing could be more relevant to our society’s current discord between those who believe a statement is true because they feel like it is and those who look for facts and proof and logic to support it. Over the course of my own long life, I’ve also considered this theme, and questioned how much one or the other influenced my own decisions.

While I did enjoy—and admire!—the story, I have to admit that I eventually tired of the identical pattern for each chapter—Cashel succeeds brilliantly, then crashes for some reason or other, at which point another opportunity presents itself, which becomes the adventure of the next chapter. The idea that one person could be so amazingly proficient in every sphere is unlikely, which undermined what’s been called the dream of the story, pulling me out of it.

So why did I listen to this lengthy novel, not once, but twice? Because I was entranced by the narrator Kobna Holbrook-Smith. His voice is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I’d be happy to listen to him read anything, however boring the content. Here, though, his dramatic talents are on display, bringing the story and each character to life. I might be happy to listen to this story many more times, until I can find something else he’s narrated.

By listening to this book, I apparently missed out on some of the ancillary materials: footnotes, maps, etc. In this case, it was a trade-off I was happy to make. It’s not the first time this has happened with an audiobook. Since I love maps, perhaps in the future, I’ll look to see what’s included with a book before choosing the audio version.

What “whole-life” novel have you read?

Best Books I Read in 2023

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2023. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life as a purveyor of wood and coal. Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. Then comes a book like this that reminds me of the courage and goodness that can be found.

2. Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

3. The Years, by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

4. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly. Yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

5. Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer
There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away and created our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world. A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

6. A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan
I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work. This, her first novel, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults. It’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

7. Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips
In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him. This is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, and how they are affected by the girls’ disappearance. We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia.

8. Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck
This absorbing historical novel follows two real women, Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it.

9. Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve is given away in payment for his father’s debts. Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

10. The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner
When Zoë is sixteen, her widowed mother unexpectedly marries again and moves to Nice. Zoë decides to stay in their old London flat and enjoy her new-found freedom from her drab life alone with her mother. As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice. With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of Zoë and the people with whom she interacts.

What were the best books you read in 2023?