Around the world people are under orders to shelter at home. Thanks to Internet you can binge on streaming content or play uptown pokies for free or for real money prizes. But there’s nothing like a good book to give you a feeling of comfort and companionship during the long days and nights of solitude.
Some of the best books to come out over the last year include:
Three Women
Three women was a 2019 New York Times bestseller that follows the lives of three women. One is Maggie, who has been the lover of a married schoolteacher since she was 17. Sloane is a happily married woman whose husband selects sexual partners with whom she engages in in extramarital affairs.
Lina is a mother of two who rekindles her romance with her highschool sweetheart and leaves her family to pursue this affair. Author Lisa Taddeo writes more about desire than about sex as she explores more about desire—and really it is about more than that.
This book can be a profound read, but it is also just a good read. There will be moments when the words and the images make you forget that you even are reading; other times you will feel like you want to turn off the light and never speak to another human being again. But that would mean you wouldn’t get to talk about this book.
Olive Again
Elizabeth Strout takes us on a journey into the life of Olive, protagonist of Strout’s 2008 novel Olive Kitteridge which won the Pulitzer Prize and spawned a hit HBO miniseries starring Bill Murray and Frances McDormand. Now Olive returns in Olive Again as she shares her observations from Crosby, Maine in thirteen interconnected stories.
The book opens to Olive being wooed by widow Jack Kennison. Jack is at a loss to explain his attraction and affection for Olive but as Olive shares her thoughts about what’s happening around her it’s clear that Jack is entranced by the same qualities that lure the reader – the reminder that you’re never too old to grow up.
Queenie
Some readers might pick up Queenie looking for a Bridget Jones-type novel about a London girl who sets out on a series of ill-advised flings. But that would be a bit deceiving. The book is a bit darker and, even though protagonist Queenie’s hook-ups are depicted in a light-hearted way, show how Queenie’s bad decisions are rooted in terrors and disappointments from her past. It’s more of a Bridget Jones for the thinking reader, but is still light enough to keep it on the level of being described as a pleasant read.
The Silent Patient
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is perfect for psychological thriller fans. The book centers around Alicia Berenson, an artist married to her fashion photographer husband, Gabriel. Late one night Gabriel returns home and Alicia shoots him five times in the face.
She’s taken to an institution called The Grove where investigators and therapists try to uncover her motivations for the shooting but Alicia refuses to speak. Psychotherapist Theo Faber becomes obsessed with her case and slowly he uncovers the twists and secrets behind the crime.
Red, White and Royal Blue
Red, White and Royal Blue is the perfect book for anyone who wants a light read. Alex Claremont-Diaz is the son of America’s president and a celebrity in his own right. He’s smart, charismatic and quite the stud, making him a great asset for his mother’s public relations team.
When Alex gets into a spat with one of the real royals, U.S./British relations suffer. To control the damage Alex and Prince Henry must meet and call a truce. The initial frosty meet-up turns out to morph into friendship and then into a romance as Harry and Alex find that they have more than politics in common. Chaos ensues as Alex’s mother’s reelection campaign seems set to suffer.
The Man Who Saw Everything
The New York Times Book Review called The Man Who Saw Everything one of the best books of the year of 2019. The Man Who Saw Everything is author Deborah Levy’s exploration of sexuality and history, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both.
The narrative centers around Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian who is doing research in Communist East Berlin with the understanding that when he’s finished he will publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic.
Adler is amenable to the conditions but when he is grazed by an oncoming car the trajectory of his life changes, forcing him to confront previous and current incarnations of Europe, real and imagined betrayals and conscious and unconscious transgressions. All this takes place as Adler faces the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power.
Orange World
Karen Russell, a Pulitzer Finalist, brings a collection of short stories which are insightful, meaningful and thought-provoking. The tales bring make-believe worlds into focus as what seems to be normal slowly turns into the absurd.
Some of the stories involve a middle-aged man who raises tornados, a mother who suckles the devil and a high school boy who carries around his centuries-old frozen girlfriend, a teenaged boy who falls in love with a bog corpse. In these stories and others, Russell brings weirdness to the brink of absurdity and then reels it back.
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
A book about living in Trump’s America, as told by a mother who is trying to help her young son make sense of our increasingly fractured world. Mira Jacob plunges into gray areas of family and race and in how we struggle to find common ground so that our children can make sense of it all.
Jacob confronts race, sex, love and family frontally as she tries to guide her six-year-old son into this new and challenging world that wavers between rejection and acceptance.
American Spy
One thing that the Chicago Tribune, New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, NPR and the New York Public Library agree about is the American Spy was one of the 10 best books of 2019. Author Lauren Wilkinson wrote the novel American Spy as a letter that former spy Marie writes to her sons to explain her past life.
Marie is a former CIA agent who was charged with becoming a “friend” of the leftist president of Burkina Fast, Thomas Sankara, whose administration the American government was trying to overthrow. The CIA wants Marie to seduce Sankara and she takes on the assignment reluctantly as she sees America’s adventurism and moral absolutism for what it is.
In addition to the human element the novel issues of politics, race and gender but it’s never overly heavy-handed or didactic – just fun to read.
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