Fiction Five: Coming Home

Check out five new novels that explore the hospitality and the challenges of having a place to call home. Whether it is returning to the comfortable sanctity of a childhood home or finding a new home within an unfamiliar community, setting features heavily in these September releases.

The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O'Neill

It’s been years since the three Ryan sisters were all together at their family’s beloved house on the shore of Long Island. Two decades ago their lives were upended by an accident on their brother Topher’s boat. A friend’s brother was killed, the lawsuit nearly bankrupted their parents and Topher spiraled into a depression, eventually taking his life. Now the Ryan women are back for Thanksgiving eager to reconnect, but each is carrying a heavy secret.

The eldest, Cait, is still holding guilt for the role no one knows she played in the boat accident. She rekindles a flame with her high school crush, Topher’s best friend and the brother of the boy who died. Middle sister Alice has been thrown a curveball threatening the career she’s restarting. She faces a difficult decision that may doom her marriage. The youngest, Maggie, is finally taking the risk to bring the woman she loves home to her devoutly Catholic mother. Infusing everything is the grief for Topher that none of the Ryans have figured out how to carry together.

When Cait invites a guest to Thanksgiving dinner old tensions boil over and new truths surface, nearly overpowering the flickering light of their family bond.

“The family saga we all need ― utterly un-put downable, beautifully drawn, thrilling and heartfelt at once and totally not to be missed. Heather Aimee O'Neill has arrived with gorgeous skills and a keen eye for what drives families apart, and brings them together, too.” ― Jessica Soffer, New York Times bestselling author of This Is a Love Story

Boy from the North Country by Sam Sussman

When Evan, 26, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. Evan still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father. He doesn't know the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. Evan also doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.

In this deeply moving debut novel Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and devastating mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother in real time and helplessly watching her fail even as she finally begins to tell him the truths he has waited so long to hear. Evan comes to understand what a gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him. 

“Come for the riveting father-son mystery, stay for the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.” — Kirkus (starred review)

What a Time to Be Alive by Jade Chang

Lola Treasure Gold can’t figure out her life. She’s broke, unemployed and back in her childhood home, a crumbling cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Worse, one of her closest friends just died. So nobody is more surprised than Lola when a jackpot falls in her lap. She stars in a Very Viral Video, opening a strange path for her to become a self-help guru. 

With the encouragement of her other best friend Lola embraces the public interest in her perceived message. But is she a scammer or a sage? Just as Lola is telling others to be their own guiding lights she can’t seem to find hers. Lola’s grieving, she’s accused of using the notoriety of her friend’s death to fuel her rise, and she’s full of questions about the fate of her mother who has totally disappeared. Her mother came to America pregnant fleeing China’s one-child policy and she got deported when Lola was 8.  

Chang’s kaleidoscopic new novel is a deep examination of the ways we commodify belief, the power and precarity of fame, and the delicious terror of being truly seen.

“What a Time to Be Alive is a consummate coming-of-age tale for our uncanny, screen-mediated era. It’s part madcap journey of self-actualization, part love song to Los Angeles, part ode to friendship, and part meditation on grief—entirely witty and vibrantly alive.”  — Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

Great Disasters by Grady Chambers

In the early 2000s six young men start high school in Chicago. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them. Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it. They all learn to lose themselves in alcohol.

We follow them as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond. They form new relationships with partners and children, and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country. With each passing year the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

Grady Chambers’ debut novel moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction and more. Great Disasters is an intimate portrait of disasters big and small, personal and political, and the ways these are all intertwined.

"Great Disasters is an elegiac and moving first novel. Chambers writes beautiful, precise prose that carefully narrates the story of his characters’ high school years: reckless and callow, but also formative and tender. With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence." ― Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

Ripeness by Sarah Moss

Just out of school, Edith has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s and her mother issued strict instructions:

• tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy
• help at the birth
• make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home.

Decades later Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. She's happily divorced, recently moved and full of new energy. Then Edith's best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child Maebh's mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent the baby away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?

“Tender and rueful, Ripeness is a tale of being a foreigner that moves between 1960s Italy and 2020s Ireland, finding pain and bliss in both. Working at the height of her mature powers, Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence.” ― Emma Donoghue, author of The Paris Express