If you love dysfunctional family novels, this is one doozy of a story—and a must-read. When two rookie cops who meet at the NYC Police Academy strike up a friendship, it sets in motion a tragic chain of events that echo through the decades, through the lives of their children and their children’s children. I found this book exceptionally difficult to read—it’s depressing and dark and triggers abound—yet I was eager to find out what would happen next to these doomed families, and the astonishing developments of the last 75 pages vaulted this to my best-of-the-year list. A poignant story of grace, forgiveness, and redemption, for fans of Atonement and Little Fires Everywhere.

From the author of Ask Again, Yes, a devastating yet hopeful portrait of a marriage in crisis. Malcolm and Jess are at a crossroads: the longtime bartender and now bar owner is hiding exorbitant debt from Jess, who is weary from years of infertility treatments and the toll they’ve taken on their marriage. Told over the course of one tumultuous week, a confluence of events—a blizzard, a missing person, and a shocking revelation—leads the couple to reckon with their past, and decide whether there's hope for their future. I drank down this story about love and family, loyalty and despair, about making choices and making a life. For fans of Tracey Lange’s We Are the Brennans and Jennifer Close’s Marrying the Ketchups.

From the publisher: "On the eve of the 20th century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Amid a growing public health panic, a determined 'medical engineer' noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked and identified her as an 'asymptomatic carrier' of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was quarantined in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet for Mary—proud of her former status and passionate about cooking—the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict. Bringing Gilded Age New York City alive—the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers—Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine."