Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey (Ecco)
At age 19, Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and two-time U.S. poet laureate, lost her mother after she was murdered by Trethewey’s stepfather. Memorial Drive explores the poet’s life growing up in Mississippi with a Black mother and a white father, the pain of losing her mother so tragically, and how those experiences and others have influenced her creative life. (Available now.)
Sea Wife by Amity Gaige (Knopf)
Juliet and Michael’s life could use a boost. Juliet, a poet, is struggling with the demands of marriage, motherhood, and finishing her dissertation. And Michael needs a change of scenery. He buys a sailboat and soon the couple and their two young children are off on an adventure. But things don’t go to plan. This literary thriller alternates between Juliet’s telling of what went wrong and Michael’s captain’s log. (Available now.)
Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle (Algonquin Books)
Frank and Lil each lost a parent when they were children, so their bond comes easily. They marry and start a family of their own. But now in their retirement years, settled in North Carolina, the couple start to dig through their pasts. Frank becomes obsessed with a house in town that he thinks might fill in some of his own history’s gaps, leaving the owner of the home, Shelley, forced to confront her own troubling memories. (Available now.)
Riding with the Ghost by Justin Taylor (Random House)
After his father’s failed suicide attempt, Taylor’s life was transformed. In his memoir, alternating between events before and after his father’s brush with death, Taylor explores his father’s past, including his struggles with depression and chronic illness. And in learning more about his own father, Taylor is forced to reckon with the ways in which he experiences some of those same struggles and how they shape the world around him. (Available now.)