The War: A Memoir

by Marguerite Duras

Old Filth

by Jane Gardam

The Rising Tide

by Molly Keane

The Land in Winter

by Andrew Miller

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

by Brian Moore

The Country Girls

by Edna O’Brien

One Fine Day

by Mollie Panter-Downes

I hesitate to use an overworked booksellers’ phrase, but I can’t get around the fact that this 1947 novel epitomizes the “rediscovered gem.” It’s a 170-page story about a woman, a family, and a village on one radiant summer day a year after the end of WWII. Panter-Downes is a meticulous craftsperson and her descriptions are charmingly apt. Sheep run with the “rapid little steps of elderly ladies trying to catch a bus," two matrons of different classes wage an undeclared war, “pitting the sniff delicate against the sniff insolent”—and the written world is visible, audible. Her wistful, but not mournful, rumination on the ways war reshaped the English caste system makes the book veddy, veddy British, but I shared the uneasiness of those who had just come through an ordeal personally unscathed but unable to regain their balance. While light and compact, this book holds hints of the weighty vastness of history and time. Read savoringly.

Katalin Street

by Magda Szabo

Flesh

by David Szalay

If the first thing you think when you finish a book is, “How did he do that!?”, you can be sure the author has pulled off something remarkable. I’ve long admired Szalay’s style and enjoyed his previous novels, but in his latest, the medium somehow IS the message. With spare, straightforward prose, and dialogue laconic in the extreme, Szalay portrays István, from age 15 to about 65. What he undergoes during that half-century is out-of-the ordinary, yet his story is, at bottom, about our common human experience. Physical and emotional, personal and geopolitical, it examines our bodies’ interface between our inner selves and the outer world. While Szalay has a quietly goofy humor that just tickled me, he also brought me to tears. But it wasn’t distress I was feeling, it was catharsis. And I realized that’s exactly what I’ve been needing these days. —Liz

P.S. I know it’s early, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Flesh was a Booker nominee. It’s definitely going to be on my personal 2025 Top Ten.

The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig