Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
by Bess Kalb ’10 (Knopf)

Bobby Bell is gone but she’s still talking. That’s the premise of Kalb’s intriguing debut, a memoir told through a scrim of fiction. Barbara “Bobby” Bell, Kalb’s grandmother, lived to be 90—and Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, conjures her brassy, advice-laden...

Likes
by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum ’95 (FSG)

In the title story of this exquisite collection, a father tries to decode his taciturn 12-year-old daughter’s life by scrolling through her Instagram posts. It’s a quiet, moving drama as he worries the mystery, afraid his daughter’s silence might be his fault. For many of Bynum’s characters,...

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
by Larry Tye ’77 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Tye’s eighth book brings Joe McCarthy back in ways that make the self-aggrandizing senator seem both more sinister and surprisingly human. This illuminating look at McCarthy’s rise, beginning with growing up on a Wisconsin farm, and final...

The Book of V
by Anna Solomon ’98 (Henry Holt)

Hopscotching across time, this vivid, entrancing novel, Solomon’s third, layers together the stories of three women—Lily, a mother of two in 2016 Brooklyn; Vee, the D.C. wife of a senator in 1973; and the teenage girl in ancient Persia who is about to become the...

Sea Wife
by Amity Gaige ’95 (Knopf)

Gaige’s fourth novel (Schroder, O My Darling, The Folded World) begins with Juliet Partlow back home in Connecticut, huddled in a closet, trying to pinpoint the mistake. Was it her marriage to Michael or was it going along with his dream of buying a 44-foot yacht and fleeing...

Agnes at the End of the World
by Kelly McWilliams ’11 (Little Brown Books For Young Readers)

In this dystopian YA novel Agnes is growing up in a double-wide trailer in rural Red Creek surrounded by forest and canyons, but as part of a strict religious cult led by the Prophet Jacob Rollins. Agnes...

44 Poems For You
by Sarah Ruhl ’97 ’01 MFA (Copper Canyon)

Before she became a Tony-nominated playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sarah Ruhl was a poet. And in this moving, witty debut you’ll find intimate meditations on slowness, marriage, loss and longing, miscarriage, and childhood. They span the time before and after Ruhl...

Not Exactly Retired: A Life-Changing Journey on the Road and in the Peace Corps 
by David Jarmul ’75 (Peace Corps Writers)

Jarmul first served in the Peace Corps in the late 1970s and was stationed in Nepal, where he met his wife, Champa. As he reached his sixties, Jarmul and his wife both felt a...

The Gringa
by Andrew Altschul ’91 (Melville House)

In his ambitious third novel Altschul (Lady Lazarus, Deus Ex Machina) uses the real-life story of Lori Berenson, an American who spent years in a Peruvian prison after falling in with a revolutionary group, as the template for a rich and sprawling narrative. Here Berenson becomes Lenora Gelb, a...