Beyond Bestsellers - Fiction, Summer 2021

Great recent titles you may have missed, selected by our librarians.

July-September 2021 Issue

       

See also:

Cusk, Rachel.  Second Place.
An author invites an artist whose work she has admired to spend the summer in a cottage on her family’s estate, leading to increasingly tense interactions.  eBook

Doshi, Avni.  Burnt Sugar.  
In this novel set in India, a young woman looks back on her unhappy childhood with her unstable mother,  while in the present, her increasingly needy mother starts to show signs of dementia.  eAudio

Feng, Linda Rui.  Swimming Back to Trout River. 
After China’s Cultural Revolution has ended, a young Chinese couple emigrate to the United States, leaving their five-year-old daughter, who was born without legs, in a small village to be cared for by her grandparents.  eBook

Flanagan, Richard.  The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. 
In the near future in Australia, an architect whose mother is dying insists that everything possible be done to keep her alive; meanwhile, the country is ravaged by wildfires, and the architect begins to notice that some of her body parts are disappearing.

Freitas, Donna.  The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano.  
Nine stories show different versions of what happens to a married couple who are being pressured into having children; each scenario begins with a confrontation when the husband discovers the wife is not taking her prenatal vitamins.  eBook, eAudio

Fuller, Claire.  Unsettled Ground.  
After the sudden death of their mother, a pair of middle-aged English twins, who had lived with her all of their lives, are surprised to discover that she was in debt, and find themselves evicted and penniless.  eBook

Graff, Andrew J.  Raft of Stars. 
After a 10-year-old boy shoots his friend’s abusive father, the boys panic, run into the woods, and build a raft to carry them away down the river, while family members and the local sheriff try to find them.  eBook, eAudio

Greenidge, Kaitlyn.  Libertie. 
A dark-skinned girl is born in Brooklyn after the Civil War to a Black woman doctor who expects her to join her medical practice when she grows up; instead, she marries a Haitian man who takes her to Haiti, where she finds she is still not free.  eBook, eAudio

Heiny, Katherine.  Early Morning Riser. 
In this offbeat comedy about love, family, and community, a free-spirited elementary school teacher, who has recently moved to a small town in Michigan, instantly falls in love with the handyman she calls when she locks herself out of her house.  eBook, eAudio

Jerkins, Morgan.  Caul Baby.  
A Black woman who is desperate to have a baby contacts a well-known Harlem family to get a piece of caul (a baby’s amniotic sac) from them for good luck. They turn her down, and her baby is stillborn, but soon her niece gives birth, to a baby born with a caul, who is adopted by the family.  eBook

Lee, Andrea.  Red Island House. 
A Black American woman, a literature professor, marries a wealthy Italian man, who builds a vacation property for them in Madagascar, leading her to feel uncomfortable as the manager of a household with African servants.  eBook, eAudio

Mbue, Imbolo.  How Beautiful We Were.  
The residents of a small village in an unnamed African country take on an American oil company which has poisoned their land and water by drilling for oil, but despite the intelligence and strength of a village girl who leads the fight, the village is doomed to lose out.  eBook, eAudio

Messina, Laura Imai.  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World. 
Two people who lost relatives in the 2011 Japanese tsunami meet each other on their way to a garden on top of a hill along the seashore, where a disconnected telephone allows them to send their voices into the wind to talk to their loved ones.

Murakami, Haruki.  First Person Singular: Stories.  
A collection of creative short stories written in the first person, many including magical realism, on subjects that include music, baseball, and young love.  eBook

Nelson, Caleb Azumah.  Open Water.  
In this contemporary story, a man and woman meet at a dance hall in South London; both are Black Britons who share a love for film, literature and music, as well as a deep vulnerability due to the racism they’ve encountered.  eBook

Nguyen, Eric.  Things We Lost to the Water.  
A pregnant Vietnamese woman and her son arrive in New Orleans as refugees in 1978, without her husband, who unexpectedly and without explanation stayed behind when they left.  eBook

Nolan, Megan.  Acts of Desperation.  
In this contemporary novel by an Irish writer, a young woman tells the story of her love for a handsome art critic and the tortured and obsessive romance that resulted.

Oyeyemi, Helen.  Peaces.  
In this imaginative story which combines humor and suspense, two men set off on an unofficial  honeymoon with their pet mongoose, boarding a fabulous train heading to an unknown destination.  eBook, eAudio

Ozick, Cynthia.  Antiquities.
In 1949, a retired lawyer returns to live in his old boarding school, which has been converted into a retirement residence for its trustees, and begins to write what starts out as a short memoir of his student days.
 
Polzin, Jackie.  Brood.  
The narrator of this novel reflects on the lives of her small flock of chickens as she tries to recover from a miscarriage and the realization that she is not likely to have children.  eBook

Quade, Kirstin Valdez.  Five Wounds.
This novel depicts a fateful year in the lives of a family in a small town in New Mexico: a man who is unemployed and alcoholic; his mother, who is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor; and his estranged teenaged daughter who shows up on their doorstep and reveals that she is pregnant.  eBook, eAudio

Rogers, Morgan.  Honey Girl.  
A young Black woman who has just earned her PhD in astronomy celebrates with a trip to Las Vegas, and awakens the next morning alone in her hotel room with a hangover and a dim memory of having married another woman in the night.  eBook, eAudio

Ross, Leone.  Popisho.  
This novel takes place on a fictional archipelago, where the land is alive, the culture is powerful, and every person is born with a special magical gift.  eBook

Rowley, Steven.  The Guncle.  
In this offbeat comedy, a gay former sitcom star agrees to take care of his young niece and nephew at his Palm Springs home for the summer after his sister-in-law dies and his brother goes into rehab.  eBook, eAudio

Sathian, Sanjena.  Gold Diggers. 
In an Atlanta suburb with a community of Indian immigrants, a boy who is worn down by his parents’ demands for achievement discovers that his best friend’s mother has mixed up an alchemical drink with stolen gold to give her daughter extra energy.  eBook, eAudio
 
Spufford, Francis.  Light Perpetual.  
This novel presents an alternative  history for five children who actually were killed by a German V-2 rocket in London in 1944, imagining their lives if they had lived to be adults.

Swann, Stacey.  Olympus, Texas.  
This vivid novel, set in a small Texas town, concerns the members of a powerful and prominent family, including a philandering real estate tycoon, his embittered wife, and his children, legitimate and illegitimate.  eBook, eAudio

Theroux, Paul.  Under the Wave at Waimea.  
After a competitive surfer in Hawaii accidentally kills a homeless man with his car, he looks back on his adventurous life, and also sets out to learn more about the man he killed.  eBook, eAudio

VanderMeer, Jeff.  Hummingbird Salamander.  
This eco-thriller begins when a security consultant receives a key to a storage locker, where she finds a preserved hummingbird and a note with clues that direct her to a preserved salamander. The clues have been placed by an eco-warrior who needs help to stop her father from destroying the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  eBook, eAudio

Vlautin, Willy.  The Night Always Comes.  
A hard-working young woman living in Portland, Oregon is about to buy the decrepit house she’s been renting when her mother decides to not co-sign the loan; her determination to find the money however she can leads her into a series of life-threatening situations.  eBook, eAudio

Walton, Dawnie.  The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.  
The editor of a music magazine sets out to gather an oral history of an avant-garde rock duo, a Black woman from Detroit, and an English man, who achieved success and then met disaster in the 1970s.  eBook, eAudio

Wilson, Diane.  The Seed Keeper.  
A Dakota Indian woman, raised in foster care by a white family after her father died, marries a white farmer and lives with him as he learns to use chemical fertilizer and genetically modified seeds; after his death, she returns for the first time to her family’s cabin and remembers the lessons her father taught her and how her people lived with the land in the past.

Yejidé, Morowa.  Creatures of Passage.  
In this dark novel which blends fantasy, Egyptian mythology, and gritty realism, a woman with magical powers ferries lost souls in a haunted sky-blue Plymouth Belvedere through the streets of a Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C.