The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

From Westchester Library System Booklist Review:

Waters' darkly atmospheric fifth novel is set at a decaying mansion in postwar England. The narrator, Dr. Faraday, first visited Hundreds Hall as a child, when his mother, a servant at the great manor, brought him there for a party. Nearly three decades later, he returns on a professional call and soon finds himself growing close to the owners: the widowed Mrs. Ayers, who has never gotten over the death of her oldest daughter, and her two adult children, Caroline and Roderick. Faraday treats Roderick's war injury but watches helplessly as the young man, who is convinced there is an evil presence in the house, slides into madness. After a devastating incident involving a young neighbor, Faraday finds he has no choice but to commit Roderick to a mental institution. Faraday finally faces the feelings he's developed for Caroline, but the malevolent force shadowing Hundreds Hall hasn't finished with the Ayers family yet. An eerie ghost story mixed with piercing class commentary, Waters' latest is downright haunting.

I really enjoyed reading this book. A good story, page-turner, interesting characters, good social commentary.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: it's Franny and Jim's thirty-fifth anniversary, and their daughter has graduated from high school. The sunlit island also promises an escape from the tensions simmering at home. But all does not go according to plan: secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

From Amazon:

From the beginning, no one is particularly thrilled about this sojourn. Initially booked as a 35th wedding anniversary present, the Post marriage is now in flux. 60 year old Jim has recently been forced to resign as the editor of a New York Magazine for his dalliance with a 23 year old intern. His wife Fanny is a writer "going around the world and writing about what she ate" is deciding what her next course of action might be. Sylvia, their 18 year old daughter, is ready to begin Brown University in the fall and wants to lose her virginity. She is disheartened to see the fighting among her parents and has recently gone through her own angst due to her girl /boyfriend's duplicitous actions. 28 year old Bobby is a realtor and lives in Florida. He is a casualty of the real-estate bubble. He has been living with his girlfriend Carmen, who is 10 years older, for seven years without making a commitment. Carmen is an instructor at the Total Body Power and feels like an outsider, everything she does in order to please her boyfriend's family "never seemed to be right". Charles is Fanny's best friend and he and husband Lawrence have been trying to adopt a baby to complete their family.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

I enjoyed this book very much, but it did feel a bit too long.  The writing was very good and the characters carefully drawn and developed, but in my opinion, the story could have been told in fewer pages.  Here is a review from Publisher's Weekly:

In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman's life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu. Eileen Tumulty was born in the early '40s, the only child and dutiful caretaker of alcoholic parents. As a young woman, she hopes to leave her family's dingy apartment in Woodside, Queens, and move up the social ladder. Eileen falls in love with and marries Ed Leary, a quiet neuroscientist whom she sees as the means to an upper-middle-class future. But Ed is dedicated to pure scientific research, and he turns down lucrative job offers from pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. The couple's apartment in Jackson Heights is a step up from Eileen's parents' apartment, but she wants a home in tony Westchester County. Later, Eileen pursues an arduous career as a nursing administrator to secure a future for their son, Connell. But once she gets her gracious but dilapidated fixer-upper in Bronxville, in southern Westchester, Ed is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and the family slowly endures "the encroaching of a fathomless darkness." Thomas works on a large canvas to create a memorable depiction of Eileen's vibrant spirit, the intimacy of her love for Ed, and the desperate stoicism she exhibits as reality narrows her dreams. Her life, observed over a span of six decades, comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas's emotional truthfulness combines with the novel's texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative.

I didn't really love Eileen, but I guess I was  not supposed to....that was one issue I had with the book. I wanted to feel her pain a little more deeply, but her character flaws prevented that. Still, it was a really interesting view of what a family would go through when encountering Early Alzheimer's disease. Scary!