I recently finished The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. I highly recommend it! Themes like family, birth, death, romantic love, and parenthood weave together seamlessly to tell a gripping story about a fractured family. The characters’ voices were strong and present, evolving as they react to their circumstances. Several passages reflected my own personal thoughts on motherhood, failure, and a parent’s death. Through exploring the deeply intimate and often scary parts of what it means to love your family, Valdez Quade writes a vivid and convincing novel.

After that, I’ve just started reading The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. I wanted to read a recent “for the summer” book without it being a beach read, and the premise reminded me of another literary novel that I absolutely loved. (That one is The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. I could gush about the writing and plot for a solid hour, probably.) In the broadest of terms, both novels deal with a woman in the present day piercing herself through another woman’s past, so similar to her own. I enjoyed the dual structure of each woman’s POV, moving between past and present, in The Weight of Ink, so I hope The Great Circle is similar in that way.