Maureen Corrigan

There's commotion in the streets, and because Margaret's husband is in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening.

It turns out Germany has surrendered.

Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal, and married man Cal likes it.

Throughout the novel, Ryan's narrator underscores how chance moments shape our lives.

Like Karen Russell, Kiran Desai has kept readers waiting for her second novel, but the loneliness of Sonia and Sonny makes the wait worthwhile.

At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India.

Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster.

Meanwhile, Sunny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother.

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 Lilly 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.