February Books We're Buzzing About

Her kids don’t trust her to take care of herself, and with good reason: 82-year-old Cora Sledge is obese, diabetic hooked on pills, and hasn’t been quite right since her husband died a few years ago. To get even with her family for “locking her up” at The Palisades, an assisted-living facility, Cora decides to write a tell-all journal revealing once and for all the tragic events of her life.

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In her mid-forties, Shapiro is on edge—racked by her father’s early death, her son’s life-threatening illness and her troubled relationship with her mother. What does it all mean? And what does she believe? In an attempt to answer life’s big, nagging questions, Shapiro sets out on a spiritual quest. The result is Devotion, an exploration of everything from the rituals of her Orthodox Jewish relatives to meditation retreats.

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Rachel, the orphaned daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., goes to live with her strict African American grandmother in 1980s Chicago. In her new, mostly black community Rachel confronts her own identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as black or white.

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Butturini and her husband John met as foreign correspondents in Italy, fell in love, and four year later, married in Rome. But not even a month after their wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred away from their Italian paradise when John was shot and nearly killed. To heal, the couple returns to the place they love—and find a lifeline.

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Keyes’s tenth novel follows seven neighbors whose lives become entangled when a sassy and prescient spirit pays a visit to their Dublin town house with the intent of changing at least one of their lives.

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When Irene America discovers her husband Gil has been reading her diary, she begins a secret “Blue Notebook,” as much the truth about her life and marriage as the “Red Diary”—hidden where he can find it—is a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two narratives, Erdrich creates a compelling story of one family’s struggle for survival.

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“The gifts that would turn Eunice Waymon into Nina Simone were apparent by the time she was three, though the passions, the mood swings, and the ferocious intensity that marked her adult life were buried for years under her talent,” writes Cohodas in her portrait of the famed singer.

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Johnson’s witty ode to librarians argues that the work they do—in a world of streaming media, digital archives, and Google everything—is as important as ever.

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When her handsome husband does not come on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch boards a plane for the first time in her life in pursuit of him across America, discovering a boundless supply of human kindness in unexpected places.

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Grace Hawkes reconnects with her estranged father when her family rushes to his side after a stroke. In the hospital, they meet his pseudo-kindly second wife. But the more the original Hawkes clan discovers about this manipulative woman, the more their family threatens to break apart once again.

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Braestrup follows up her award-winning memoir Here if You Need Me with this meditation on love and commitment.

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A female war correspondent and a Vietnamese photographer fall in love in Saigon. Then, after narrowly escaping death during an ambush, the two find themselves the prisoners of three Vietcong soldiers who have been separated from their unit.

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A debut novel about one woman’s struggle to find herself after 25 years of being a wife and mother.

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McBride dedicates this guilty pleasure novel to “all the women who’ve achieved their greatest success and found their truest love after forty.”

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Its 1982 and the Finley family is awaiting the arrival of the baby boy they’re due to adopt. Oliver, just seven, is eager for a playmate to join him and hist sister. But when their father dies, Mrs. Finley decides she can’t proceed with the adoption. Twenty-one years later Oliver goes in search of the boy who was supposed to be his brother.

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After thirteen years of marriage, Annabelle and Jeff have found “We’re just not that into us.” But instead of giving up, they’ve held their relationship together by ignoring conventional widsom and fostering a lack of intimacy, using parenting as a competitive sport and dropping out of couples therapy.

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A modern-day homage to Sense and Sensibility set in Westport, Connecticut.

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To get to know her eccentric father better, Borel proposes a drunken father-daughter road trip through the wine regions of France. The result is this poignant, funny memoir.

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McClean, the host of a popular radio show called The Vinyl Cafe (think A Prairie Home Companion), shares heartwarming stories about the absurdities of modern family life in his new collection.

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“I slept with my French husband halfway through our first date. I say halfway because we had finished lunch but not yet ordered coffee,” Bard writes in her memoir, which chronicles a fateful weekend in Paris that turns in to much more.

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Award-winning author DeLillo takes on the secret strategists in America’s war machine in his new novel, set in the middle of a desert.

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In the aftermath of an earthquake, nine wildly disparate people find themselves trapped together in a visa and passport office in an unnamed U.S. city.

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In his new novel based on the life of one of America’s greatest writers, Charyn brings to life Dickinson’s eccentric genius.

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