Sybil's List: October 2021

The family of a minister in a 1970s mid-western congregation endures a hidden crisis as each one strives to observe Christian morality while hiding secrets, desires and plans to escape

A wildly inventive plot spans centuries and teems with characters, settings, and a variety of plots and celebrates the wisdom of books and the consolations of stories throughout human history.

A pragmatic Black man who does what it takes to get ahead in the brilliantly evoked Black community of Harlem is the protagonist of this rollicking literary crime novel.

Ebullient escapades propel this picaresque novel in which four boys embark on a journey across America where they encounter colorful characters and fulfill a quest.

The life of the Nobel prize-winning German author Thomas Mann assumes dramatic tension in a searching psychological novel that spans five decades.

Two young women, best friends for years, exchange opinions on the meaning of life and the men they love in an epistolary novel.

The real-life 12th century woman poet who restored a poverty-stricken nunnery and became its abbess inspired this resonant and radiant novel.

The unknown universe and the loss of the natural world concern a widowed astrobiologist and his precocious but troubled young son.

The author’s own Milwaukee bookstore is the setting of a clever ghost story in which all the staff members are Native Americans.

After a nine-year-old girl is expelled from a Canadian school she exchanges funny and poignant letters with her irrepressible grandmother.

A British novelist evokes the complex life of D. H. Lawrence during the years he was inspired to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The issues that concern a contemporary upper middle class Black family alternate with flashbacks to the stories of their ancestors who were in bondage.

Georgia towards the end of the Civil War is the setting for this debut novel in which a bereaved white farmer befriends two newly freed slaves.

A posthumous debut of a collection of powerful stories that center on Cambodian American identity that showcases gay men who search for love and acceptance.

A mid-life crisis prompts a woman to leave her husband and her upper middle class house in Syracuse for a derelict home in the inner city.

In flashbacks to a Warsaw orphanage during WW II, a survivor pays homage to the memory of the children who put on a play by Rabindrath Tagore before they are sent to the concentration camp, Treblinka.

An upper middle class Manhattan family grapples with the changes inflicted on a brilliant Shakespearean professor by the progress of Alzheimer’s disease.

The story of Andrew Haswell Green, who helped establish the New York Public library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, and the Bronx Zoo who was brutally murdered in broad daylight in 1903.

An art historian leaves her French husband and returns to her native San Francisco where she encounters numerous family problems in this perceptive comedy of manners.

A young Frenchwoman who marries a soldier from Morocco feels a perpetual sense of alienation when she spends the rest of her life on the hardscrabble farm where they raise their family.

A mother and two adult sons, refugees from Vietnam, struggle to establish their new lives in New Orleans, a more difficult aspiration for one son who is gay.

Verging on magical realism but inspired by realistic social pressures, this clever story satirizes the ways that immigrants from India strive to get their kids into Ivy League colleges while preserving their minority culture.

This hilarious satire is partly based on the life of the author’s father, who juggled five marriages and various precarious financial situations.

A rootless but highly educated woman who hopes to find a spiritual home goes to The Hague where she works at the international court.

When a distinguished elderly professor is hospitalized while he’s on sabbatical at a college in New Mexico, his wife is breathlessly frightened in this novel that reads as a fever dream.

Hoping for a family reconciliation, a 90-year-old woman returns to the island prison where she was held by dictator Tito’s government after she made a decision that caused her to abandon her young daughter.

In this satire of the publishing industry and the CIA, a young editor is charged with editing an atrocious bodice-ripper novel based on the life of Ethel Rosenberg.

In the near future when water has become a rare commodity and life is verging on the surreal, a novelist goes to Hollywood to work on the movie version of his book.

The real-life mother of the brilliant astronomer and Imperial Mathematician Johannes Keppler was accused of witchcraft in 1618.

Living on the verge of poverty in a Boston suburb, a devoted son cares for his valiant single mother despite the malevolent actions of his often-absent father.

In the irresistible lilt of Irish prose, a proud, stubborn octogenarian spends a night reflecting on the central episode in his life and his love and failures as a husband and father.

Sigrid Schultz, who lived in Westport, is among the six heroic women journalists who were on the front lines in World War II. To be published in November.

The extraordinary life of a woman from Milwaukee who married a German academic, moved with him to Berlin and joined the resistance underground against Hitler.

An indispensable examination of the issue of a woman’s access to abortion as it was achieved and now is direly threatened by repressive political and religious forces.

The Poet Laureate’s second memoir flows between prose, poetry, and song as she relates how she fused the stories of her Native American ancestors into her life’s journey.

Samuel Antek wrote a classic book about playing in the NBC orchestra under the brilliant maestro Arturo Toscanini. His daughter has interspersed her own memories in this poignant memoir.

When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Zauner halted her promising musical career and devoted herself to making the Korean foods that her mother used to cook.

Among the 23 engaging essays in this collection, the title piece is a moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that changed her life.

A fresh look at the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning takes her from a tomboy childhood through years as an invalid, from social isolation to elopement, motherhood and fame.

Secrets of her parentage and a lower-middle-class childhood didn’t keep Turkle from achieving academic renown as a clinical psychologist known for her research in how technology affects our minds.

The compulsion to commit suicide is a disease rather than the choice of a depressed person as Antrim describes in a moving memoir of survival.

Dog lovers are not the only ones who will appreciate Shaw’s moving meditation how she survived emotional difficulties by bonding with canine pets.

In this third volume of British author Levy’s autobiographical quest for identity the author ruminates about the real meaning of home.