In the 1980s, when journalist Amy Wilentz first visited Haiti, Fred Voodoo was veteran reporters’ slang for the man or woman on the street, tapped for quick local-color interviews but otherwise unconsidered. Wilentz went deep; she learned Creole and established abiding relationships in a country that still enchants and confounds her. Farewell, Fred Voodoo (Simon & Schuster), an account of her return to Haiti after the earthquake of 2010, is savvy, acerbically affectionate and unsparingly probing, especially on the motivations of the hordes of helpers who descended on the island post-tragedy. The cast of characters—among them a dedicated young doctor, resourceful survivors and, yes, Sean Penn—are people you’re glad to know. Each vignette helps readers explore, in a nuanced way, our questions about this perpetually hard-hit place, starting with “What the hell?” particularly enlightening are Wilentz’s lucid recaps of Haiti’s history, revealing European and American complicity in the nation’s descent into misery. -Judith Stone

Buy it here

In her lively, intelligent new novel, Carlene Bauer creates two characters who are so present on the page, we seem to be eavesdropping on their conversation. This illusion is sharpened by the fact that Frances and Bernard (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is written in epistolary form, so the relationship unfolds with the unnerving intimacy that personal letters can create. Loosely based on Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor—he’s a patrician, womanizing poet; she’s a cranky, small-town -novelist—the two share a profound interest in Catholicism, and their letters dance and sparkle with the passion of two minds delighting in each other. Frances seems to gather strength as she writes, while Bernard declines into neediness and mania (as Lowell did). The love that grows between them is complicated and unfulfilled, but the novel itself is not: It’s a small gem, reflecting the rare joy of finding someone who is, quixotically, counter-intuitively and completely, yours. —Elaina Richardson

Buy it here

The beauty of News from Heaven (Harper), Jennifer Haigh’s new collection of linked stories, has everything to do with the Pennsylvania coal town she calls Bakerton, a seedbed of ambition and heartbreak. From the pretty, young Polish-American housekeeper whose desires flatline on Manhattan’s West Side to the widowed ex-schoolteacher who learns at last that marriage has a steep learning curve, these delicately drawn characters are bound to the place they recognize, willingly or not, as home. -Cathleen Medwick

Buy it here

On screen, being married is “the hangover, the ‘after’ of the happily-ever-after,” film historian Jeanine Basinger writes in this vibrant take on wedlock. So filmmakers often seduce their audiences with exotic adventure (send Garbo to China to have an affair!) while reassuring them that domestic life is the ultimate prize. Women can identify when Jean Arthur accidentally, comically ties the knot twice in Too Many Husbands, because infidelity is a safe fantasy. And they are comforted by alliances far worse than their own. As Basinger wryly points out, “When you marry a murderer, your marriage is in trouble.” -Caryn James

Buy it here

Every female friendship has a script of its own. The one playing out in this debut novel is a gripping hybrid—Beaches crossed with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Rebecca, the narrator, is a bookish teen when she meets rich, beautiful, flamboyant Alex: “It was as though life were a Christmas tree and I’d discovered the hidden switch, the whole thing lighting up in a blaze of color.” Alex is a would-be actress; Rebecca, dissecting a frog in biology class, discovers her desire to be a doctor. “I had that exquisite sense of focus that came from being lost in one of my books,” she says. “I unwrapped the wet skein of the intestines and pulled them taut against my palm . . .” But this is 1958, and the prefeminist culture clips these young women’s wings as efficiently as Rebecca sliced out her frog’s heart—though not nearly so delicately. Pressured into giving up their dreams, the two careen into marriage and motherhood, still friends but separated by a continent. When reunited, they are too thwarted and angry to band together; like George and Martha, each confronts the other with her failures, snipping away whatever illusions may remain. And yet their connection holds, providing, in the end, a moment of grace. -Judith Coyne

Buy it here

Next: Q&A with Katherine Bouton

Want MORE? Sign up for our newsletter here!