Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

I heard Dani Shapiro interviewed in the NY Times Book podcast and just HAD to read the book. Actually, I took it out as an audio book and was able to hear it read by Dani herself.

This is a fascinating memoir about a woman, the author herself, a early 50's married author with one son, a Sephardic Jew with a long line of Jews in her lineage.  She decides, on a whim, to do a DNA test (Ancestry.com or one of those) and finds out her father is not really her father.

Such a shock to her, but in the back of her mind, she has always felt that something is "not right." She is a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with no a single relative she resembles in any way.

I will not reveal what she learns, and what she learns about herself, through this revelation, but it's a fabulous book and a gripping memoir.

I highly recommend it!

From GoodReads:

The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets—a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden story of her own life

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Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Heard a lot about this book and was very excited to read it. I have to say that I started out lukewarm about it. I kept at it, however, and am SO glad that I did.  The final part of the book really nailed it all and put the whole thing in perspective.
This is a book about the challenges of marriage, the challenges of being female in a male world and the challenges of being human and a product of our upbringing.
The book was funny but also very poignant and touching, especially the final part (the shortest part, but the most challenging to read.  Each sentence held such insight and meaning. I want to meet and talk to Taffy. She is brilliant!

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

"Alicia Berenson is a famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, living in a posh area of London. One evening, her husband Gabriel returns home late. Alicia shoots him five times in the face and then never speaks another word."

This is a psychological thriller that did not really thrill me. It was gripping at the beginning but the ending left me cold.

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

Not sure how I heard about this book - probably a podcast - but I am sure glad I read it.

It is a novel full of empathy and pain, hurt and anger, but at the root is mental illness - which is not dealt with until it's too late. The book spans four decades and describes two neighboring families in Westchester (I am assuming) who strike up a friendship and have that broken by tragegy.

I must say that I thought the final fourth of the book could have been condensed a bit, but then I ask myself if it would have been at the expense of the character development.

In any event, I loved reading it, was totally caught up in the lives of these people and appreciated how they eveolved over time.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Amazing book!
Can't say enough about it. Takes place in a very interesting location, too.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I absolutely loved this book!  The depth of the writing, in expressing the two main characters and who they are is brilliant. They change, evolve in interesting ways, interact with each other in sometimes strange, but powerful connections.
I savored the writing, read paragraphs two and three times, pondered over how it would end.
I am not telling any more. Just READ IT!

Great quote from NPR:

Normal People is a compulsive, psychologically astute will-they-or-won't-they love story involving two of the most sympathetic people you're liable to meet between covers. Although hailed as a voice of millennials, Rooney offers plenty to appeal to readers across genders and generations.

🌟 The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

LOVED this sad and touching book.  Takes place in two time spans:  1980s during AIDS crisis in Chicago and then 30 years later. Most of the men from the first part of the book have died.
Took me back to that time in NY but how I was so removed from it....being a busy new mom.  I feel that I was so insulated from reality when I think back on those days of young motherhood.

This is a terrific book.  It made me cry at the end and I don't cry too much when reading. Michael Cunningham writes in his NY Times book review:

The novel tells, in alternating chapters, about a group of friends, most of them gay men, in Chicago in the mid-to-late 1980s, and about a woman in 2015 who has gone to Paris in search of her estranged daughter. I’m afraid the very phrase “a group of friends, most of them gay men” immediately implies the nature of the mortality that’s central to the book. “The Great Believers” is, as far as I know, among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present — among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades. Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors.