Maame, by Jessica George
Maame is a family nickname for Maddie, a young Londoner with a lot on her plate. Her mother spends large stretches of time in her birth country of Ghana, working in a family business. Her brother is local but unreliable. Maddie is left with the combined privilege/burden of being the primary caregiver to her father, who has late-stage Parkinson’s disease, while holding down a full-time but not-great job and attempting to jump-start the next phase of her life. At “closer to thirty than twenty,” she has almost no experience with the traditional signifiers of young adulthood — roommates, dinners out, dating, sex. When her mother finally returns, Maddie moves out to share a flat with two roommates, finds a better job that gives her ambition some room to flex, and starts dating. Not everything goes as planned; deep loss accompanies the more mundane ups and downs of romantic entanglements, friendship struggles, and workplace politics. The narrator’s witty, smart, hilarious voice — and her telling Google searches, which are sprinkled throughout the book — made this hard to put down.
Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano
This family saga, which has parallels to and makes direct reference to “Little Women,” begins in 1960 and ends almost 50 years later. It opens with the perspective of William Waters, who grows up in a household irretrievably broken by the death of his toddler sister just days after his birth. Ignored by his emotionally scarred parents, he finds solace first in basketball — which takes him to Northwestern University — and then in the large, welcoming family of his girlfriend, Julia Padavano. William and Julia begin a promising life together which she has largely shaped and which he, to devastating effect, ultimately cannot find his place in. William’s viewpoint chapters alternate with the perspectives of Julia; Sylvie, one of her three sisters; and later, Alice, Julia and William’s daughter. The main characters are exquisitely developed and are given room to make and defend their own difficult choices even as we see how inherited trauma and the hand of fate shape their lives. As with “Little Women,” keep Kleenex handy.
In Memoriam, by Alice Winn
The first-time novelist got the idea for this book while digging through the digital archives of her old British boarding school. She found copies of the school newspaper from the WWI era, when young men were signing up for what they thought would be a tremendous adventure and a chance to prove themselves while fighting for England. Instead, they found themselves in a brutal war that killed hundreds of their classmates and school alumni — later memorialized in the pages of the paper. “In Memoriam” begins at a fictionalized version of that school, and tells the story of two young men: Henry Gaunt, who is half-German and thus finds himself and his family the target of suspicion as the war ramps up, and Sidney Ellwood, a rich kid who loves poetry. They have strong, not fully acknowledged feelings for each other, and when Gaunt enlists to prove his loyalty to England, Ellwood soon follows. The horrors of the war envelop both of them, in different ways, and as they lose and find and lose each other, their feelings intensify. Devastating and beautiful.