Maureen Corrigan

Her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, expands upon Just Kids, her 2010 memoir that's since become a classic.

Smith delves into more intimate material here, like the secret of her paternity, her sense of her own sexuality, and her 14-year marriage to the late musician Fred Sonic Smith.

If Patti Smith's title references angels, Stephen Greenblatt's Dark Renaissance invokes the somewhat devilish figure of playwright Christopher Marlowe.

I can think of nobody who brings the world of the English Renaissance to life with the verb and erudition of Greenblatt.

Here, he explores the mysteries of Marlowe's originality and his murder at age 29.

In 2017, historian Judith Geisberg and her team of grad student researchers launched a website called Last Seen, Finding Family After Slavery.

It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by once-enslaved people hoping to find loved ones.

Geisberg's arresting book, also called Last Seen, closely reads ten of those ads, giving readers a deeper sense of the lived experience of slavery and its aftermath.

My final best book pick is A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, which is part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on marriage.

In 1972, Morris and Marilyn Bailey spent four months adrift in the middle of the Pacific after a whale knocked a hole in their wooden sloop.

They held themselves together mentally by focusing on small things, like the card games that Marilyn devised.

Not bad advice, perhaps, for all of us in challenging times ahead.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Is there anything you wouldn't do for a loved one if they were dying?

That's a morbid question for sure, but the dilemma at the center of Some Bright Nowhere and Packer's new novel makes a reader wonder about such things.

Packer's main characters, Claire and Elliot, are a couple in their 60s who've been married for almost four decades.

For the past eight years, Claire has been battling cancer, and Elliot has been a diligent caretaker.

Caretaking, he reflects, is a daily amalgam of helping, soothing, driving, phoning, cooking, listening, tending, waiting, learning, remembering, deciding, foregoing, a lot of foregoing.

When the novel opens, Claire and Elliot have just walked out of their final appointment with Claire's oncologist.

Final because there's nothing more to be done.