I am at the exact stage of life for this pitch-perfect midlife tale to resonate deeply. For what may be the last time, fifty-something Rocky and her husband cram into a tiny Cape Cod beach house for one glorious week, along with their two kids, one girlfriend, and Rocky’s aging parents. Emotions are running high, as Rocky, nostalgic and menopausal, wants to relish every moment with her adult children and increasingly fragile parents. Their time together is precious, and also turbulent, as it is revealed that various family members have been hiding shattering truths for decades—out of love, yes, but hiding them all the same. I read it in two days and put it straight on my Best of the Year list.

Newman’s latest midlife novel is a follow up to Sandwich. While Sandwich took place over the course of a week at fifty-something Rocky’s Cape Cod beach house, this story unfolds over a longer time frame and is set two years later at her home in Western Massachusetts. At the beginning of the story, a twenty-something man Rocky's kids know is killed in a train wreck in town, and it sets her family and the wider community reeling—contemplating chance, corporate responsibility, and mortality. Meanwhile, Rocky starts experiencing weird medical symptoms and it turns out there are no easy answers about why she’s experiencing them. In the midst of medical uncertainty and grief, she’s trying to take care of her husband, adult children, and her father the best she can. The Thanksgiving feast made me wish I could join them at the table. (This can be read as a standalone but I recommend reading Sandwich first if you think you might want to read it.)

Edi and Ashley have been best friends their entire lives—more than four decades—and now, three years after her ovarian cancer diagnosis, Edi is ceasing treatments and entering hospice care. It's gutting: Edi's dying too young, in pain, and making impossible decisions like how to say goodbye to her 7-year-old son. Ash is desperately trying to hide her grief from her friend, but it's making itself felt in big and small ways. It's all so hard to read. But this novel is also filled with so much life and humor, on practically every page. For while Edi's suburban hospice may be filled with the dying, it is also still filled with life, and with forty years of memories from an exceptional, joy-filled, through-thick-and-thin friendship. I noticed the German translation bears a different title, which gets more directly at the coexistence of joy and pain in this novel: Und wir tanzen, und wir fallen: "And We Dance, and We Fall." The audio version, narrated by Jane Oppenheimer, was an excellent choice for this first person story.