9 Novels By Contemporary Jewish Writers for a Sweet New Year

In one eventful year, Isabel Moore’s husband left, her 10-year-old daughter became a moody tween, and her best friend was killed in a car accident. Suddenly, the relationships that have always defined Isabel—wife, mother, best friend—are changing before her eyes. DAYS OF AWE is a smart, piercing story of transformation, not necessarily welcomed but necessary nonetheless.

Sophie Levine is coming of age in Electric City, the birthplace of Edison Machine Works. But in 1965, the town, and America as a whole, is on the cusp of great instability. A poetic and multilayered love story, ELECTRIC CITY shows how we light our way, struggling to bridge the gap between the old world and the new.

Sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec gather each summer at their family cottage in Connecticut at “Bagel Beach,” with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal. But a tragic accident the summer of 1948 irreparably alters the long-established family equilibrium. This debut novel is a beautiful meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.

It’s July 4, 2005, and the Frankels have gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings and an intrepid journalist killed a year ago, while on assignment in Iraq. But the family is adrift, overwhelmed by navigating their lives and their grief at the same time. THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU asks, How do we move on after losing someone we love? How do we allow ourselves to love again?

When Joy Bergman’s beloved husband dies, her children have no shortage of solutions for their elderly mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO is a wryly observed, heartfelt novel about aging, family, loneliness, and love.

Wendy’s Fictional Dinner Party Guest: Rachel Pomié Petit Pizzarro

Rachel Pomié Petit Pizzarro is a woman full of fire and life. A businesswoman, a romantic, a renegade, she’s quite the nineteenth-century badass, not taking anyone else’s advice on how to live her life. I respect and admire her passion, vulnerability, and fearlessness in the face of the judgment of her insular St. Thomas community. She followed her heart, suffered for it, and lived the life she wanted—with a great love and many children, one of whom was the artist Camille Pissarro, father of Impressionism. No doubt, she would command the room.

This multigenerational family saga illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE is a comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory and of connection and disconnection.

Elinor Lipman is one of my favorite writers because she’s so unassuming and funny. Her novels are so well-observed and uncomfortably true with both a light touch and a shadow of sadness. Her latest, THE VIEW FROM PENTHOUSE B, is a sister story of unexpected midlife changes and love in unexpected places.

I gave this book to my boyfriend’s mother and she loved it—so much so that she keeps asking if I’ve read it yet. So it’s on my list for this year! In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money—and maybe get him killed. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won’t find it.