The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

I enjoyed this book so much, especially the ending.  It's rare lately (or so it seems) to be happy at the end of a book - to be happy with the happy ending!  (I shouldn't have given that away.)

I can see this book being bought up and ending up on screen.  It's a delight.  The New York Times reviewer mentioned similarities with two authors: Ann Tyler and Sally Rooney. I agree. There is humor and pathos and very likeable characters.  

From the Washington Post review: 

Although the novel opens in 2022, most of the story takes place back around 2010, cast in the heat of regret and the glow of nostalgia. The narrator, Rachel Murray, recalls living in Cork while finishing up an English degree. One of the many lovable things about this novel is O’Donoghue’s kindhearted perspective on the awkwardness of the college years, that weird period when you’re self-conscious enough to be embarrassed but not quite self-controlled enough to feign maturity.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein

Not sure where I heard about this but it was a good read.  The story takes place in the Warsaw Ghetto and while I feel like I have read so much about this in the past, this book had another twist.  The protagonist is a teacher who is given the job to document the people's lives who he encounters in the ghetto, with the reason that the stories need to be told, before they cannot ever be told again.....the people may be gone.  From the New York Times:

Lauren Grodstein’s new novel takes place in the Warsaw ghetto, where a secret group of archivists made sure the truth survived.

Sharing an apartment with 10 others and teaching English in a crumbling basement, Adam signs on to interview his neighbors for the Oneg Shabbat project, a clandestine effort to gather accounts of life in the ghetto for posterity. Grodstein’s tale is clearly informed by those actual witness records, some of which survived the destruction of the ghetto and the deaths — from starvation, disease or “Grossaktion” deportation to camps like Treblinka — of most of its inhabitants. 

This is a tender, heartbreaking novel that grapples with timeless questions. Is collaboration forgivable? Can sparks of human kindness, however tiny, fend off hopelessness in the face of evil? In the spring of 1942, Adam learns that the Nazis will begin deporting some 6,000 Jews from the ghetto to the camps each day. Mystified and despairing, he wonders, “What had happened to them in their lives that they couldn’t let us live ours?”