Maureen Corrigan

Desai's near 700-page novel ruminates on exile and displacement and tells a tangled love story with enough coincidences to make Dickens blush.

My last fiction pick is more in the Jane Austen miniaturist mode.

Heart the Lover is a companion novel to Lily King's 2020 novel, Writers and Lovers.

But the structure of this follow-up is so ingenious that you don't have to have read the earlier book.

This is an emotionally charged story about a young woman with literary ambitions, screwing up, wising up, finding herself, and realizing what she may have lost in the process.

On to nonfiction.

Gertrude Stein's writing, as the critic Wyndham Lewis put it, sometimes has the consistency of a cold black suet pudding, the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through.

And yet, maddening as she can be, many of us sense that when it comes to Stein's literary genius, there really was a there there.

Francesca Wade's lively, unconventional biography called Gertrude Stein and Afterlife doesn't end at Stein's death in 1946.

but also tells the story of the obsessive admirers who help Stein achieve serious, posthumous recognition.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is one of the most vivid and exquisitely written memoirs of a mother-daughter relationship I've ever read.

Roy's single mother was a beloved teacher who founded a school in India.

Roy and her brother, however, endured their erratic mother's rage.

And yet, Roy writes of her mother, I truly believed she would outlive me.

When she didn't, I was wrecked, heart smashed.

Like Gertrude Stein and Roy's mother, Patti Smith defies easy characterization.

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.