The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.
Clementine Oberst
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Clementine’s Take: In the late 18th century, the formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife Patience establish a small colony on an island off the coast of Maine. Over a century later, their descendants and a few others still live on the island – a group of about twenty semi-self-sufficient mixed-race islanders. A few …
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Alison and Clementine consider “If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escoffery, a Booker 2023 longlisted title.
Tauhou by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
Tauhou is an inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, a writer of Māori and Coast Salish descent.
Eight Strings by Margaret DeRosia
An enthralling coming-of-age debut novel about a young woman in late 19th-century Venice who becomes a man to join the male-dominated world of the theater as a puppeteer.
A House Without Spirits by David Homel
In this ninth novel, David Homel delivers some of his most memorable characters to date – reclusive artists, disaffected life partners, wandering ghosts, cult-affiliated nuns – in a contemporary Montreal noir that reveals how much we learn about ourselves when we begin to ask questions of others.
Léa by Ariela Freedman
Based on the life of famed activist Léa Roback, this novel brings to life a heroine emboldened by political struggles that resonate to this day.
