14 Books Worth Revisiting from Today’s Best Writers

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, examines the relationship between a grown woman and her estranged mother. Her first novel, AMY AND ISABELLE, also explores this most primary relationship. Sixteen-year-old Amy feels alienated from her distant mother, and Isabelle feels betrayed by the discovery of her daughter’s sexual secrets.

Michael Chabon’s intelligence and imagination never disappoint. While his novels tend to be epic adventures, his debut, THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, is an intimate and penetrating narrative of complex friendships, father-son conflicts, and the awakening of a young man’s sexual identity.

Richard Russo is a master at chronicling small-town life and the quirky characters you meet there. Set in Mohawk, New York, THE RISK POOL is the irreverent and expectedly moving story of a young man doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his parents can properly be called adult.

AMERICAN WIFE is the story of a kind, bookish child who winds up marrying the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family. When he unexpectedly becomes the president, she discovers that she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with him—and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona.

This is a poignant, powerful, beautifully written 1970s coming-of-age story. Twelve-year-old Ares Ramirez lives with his mother and developmentally disabled younger brother in a trailer in the Southern California desert. In this desolate place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances, Ares struggles with the burden of responsibility and to forge his own identity.

On New Year’s Eve in 1937, a handsome banker sits next to a young woman in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar. This chance encounter propels her on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. Pour yourself a dry martini and race through the pages of this story about a life on the brink of transformation.

This heart-stopping novel imagines every mother’s worst nightmare—the disappearance of a child—and explores a family’s struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds. Emotional and resonant, THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN was the first title chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.

When Parsifal, a handsome and charming magician, dies suddenly, his widow—who was also his faithful assistant for twenty years—learns that the family he claimed to have lost in a tragic accident is very much alive and well. Left to unravel his secrets, Sabine sets out on a profound journey of self-discovery.

Named by their Shakespeare professor father after the Bard’s heroines, the Andreas sisters have a hard time communicating with their parents and their lovers, but especially with one another. When a family crisis returns them all to their childhood home, they have to face their own disappointments, their parents’ frailty, and, most importantly, each other.

The Goodwins are outsiders in their Wisconsin community, regarded with suspicion as “that hippie couple” playing at life on a dairy farm. Their bucolic existence is forever shattered one day when a neighbor’s two-year-old daughter drowns in their pond while under Alice’s care. This vivid human drama of guilt, heartbreak, and betrayal is for fans of Sue Miller and Jane Smiley.

A young Irish orphan comes to Tall Oaks, a Virginia plantation, in the early 1800s as an indentured servant and is placed in the kitchen house under the care of the master’s illegitimate slave daughter. THE KITCHEN HOUSE is a gripping story of class, race, dignity, deep-buried secrets, and familial bonds—and lucky for us, Kathleen Grissom’s new novel, GLORY OVER EVERYTHING, returns us to Tall Oaks.

Meet Birdie, Joan, and Dinah, three women who marry the same charismatic, predatory, and enigmatic opportunist: Ken Kimble. Resonating with emotional intensity and narrative innovation, Jennifer Haigh’s award-winning debut novel is a timeless story of grief, passion, heartache, deception, and the complex riddle of love.

Colson Whitehead has been much in the news these days with his latest novel, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, recently selected to be the next Oprah Book Club Pick. He burst onto the literary scene nearly 20 years ago with the marvelously inventive, genre-bending, noir-inflected novel THE INTUITIONIST, set in the curious world of elevator inspection. With a nod to Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN, Whitehead portrays a universe parallel to our own, where matters of morality, politics, and race reveal unexpected ironies.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is on an urgent secret mission to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, and ultimately healing journey.