Snow by John Banville

 

Winter is a living breathing presence in this whodunnit set in small-town Ireland and is worth the price of admission for that alone. Detective Strafford must solve the case of the apparent murder of Father Tom. Strafford is convinced that a member of the Osborne family in Ballyglass House has committed the crime but he gets swept up in their internal machinations. The savvy reader can see the sub-plot, which is not for the faint of heart, coming a mile away. Nevertheless, this is a winning portrayal of class and religious divides in Ireland, which even deep snow can’t smother.

When I'm Gone, Look For Me in the East by Quan Barry

 

The wide-open landscape of inner Mongolia, combined with life-affirming Buddhist philosophies, wraps the reader in a warm embrace in this stunning novel. Young monk Chuluun is tasked with finding the next avatar of a learned teacher. He joins forces with his twin, Mun, who renounced the path of monkhood and who instead makes his life as a tour guide in Ulaanbaatar. The saturated breath-taking landscape is a perfect backdrop for soul-searching questions that Chuluun slowly grapples with, including the primary vector for the narrative: What if you want to lead a life different from the one carved out for you?”

The Hundred Waters by Lauren Acampora

 

Still waters run deep. The idyllic boring uppercrust neighborhood of Nearwater, Connecticut has a way of smothering nonconformity. Louisa Rader should know. An artist who dreamed big as a young woman, she has now shelved ambition for motherhood to preteen Sylvie and being the wife of a successful architect. A teen artist in town, Gabriel, exploits this vulnerability and Sylvie’s growing ennui, in favor of his own activist causes. Acampora’s immense gifts lie in taking boring suburbia – at a time when the plight of rich white people elicits little sympathy – and turning it into a seething dark weapon. Propulsive reading.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID by Lawrence Wright

Four hundred lamps, each representing 100 lives lost to COVID-19 framed the Lincoln Memorial Pool, shortly after President Biden’s inauguration. This observance ends Wright’s look at 2020, the year that the pandemic took hold across the world. An award-winning writer, Wright writes grippingly about the medicine and politics that drove America’s disastrous response to the crisis. Despite the engaging prose, the narrative feels rushed, touching on themes with light strokes. The spread of the virus in prisons gets barely three paragraphs. A commendable achievement for being one of the early ones out of the gate but left me wanting more.

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Discard the standard history texts. Smith gives us a peek at the true history of the United States and how its very vaunted success is built on the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved people. I remember Michelle Obama pointing out, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, that slaves helped build the White House. It was a pivotal moment in my understanding of American history. Mostly history and travelogue, we receive lessons that are engaging and hard-hitting. Smith’s poetic descriptions can get heavy-handed at times but that’s a small price to pay for a gem of a book.

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

 

A snowy Christmas eve, when the Family Chao’s dog Alf disappears, is when things finally completely unravel for Leo and Minnie Chao and their three sons, William, Ming and James. Leo’s murder, which drives much of the plot, happens exactly at the halfway point. While the crime is intriguing, the novel’s focus on the forcedly insular Chao family, struggling to make it in an all-white Wisconsin town, is the real highlight. The otherization of the Chaos–Chang refers to the children’s fable, The Five Chinese Brothers, as an analogous situation–combined with classic relationship dysfunction, turns out to be a volatile combination.

Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan

 

A solitary beach house becomes the focal point of this riveting novel set in Rhode Island. As always, O’Nan has his finger on the pulse of working class folks and it’s what makes an already gripping story stand out because of excellent characterization. Provoked by jealously, high-schooler Angel commits murder but the novel does not spend much time on gory details. Instead it brilliantly explores the effects of that crime – and of a sibling’s separate and closed-off life – on Angel’s younger sister, Marie. Throw in high school manipulations and classism, and you have the recipe for a hit beach read.