Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: General/Literary Fiction

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least.
(Description from NoveList)

One night, Louisa and her father walk on the beach. He carries a flashlight but cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found washed up, barely alive, and her father is gone. She is ten years old. Susan Choi's Flashlight explores the shockwaves of this catastrophe through shifting perspectives.
(Description from NoveList)

Long estranged after being adopted into different families, twin sisters Clara and Dempsey encounter a woman identical to their vanished mother who seems to have lived a childless life, and their opposing views on her true identity push them toward a confrontation.
(Description from NoveList)

A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot-air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.
(Description from NoveList)

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.
(Description from NoveList)

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family.
(Description from NoveList)

During a sweltering European heatwave, four siblings gather at their family lake house to investigate the mysterious death of their renowned artist father--who vanished after remarrying a younger woman, leaving behind an unfinished masterpiece--while confronting long-hidden familial wounds and an enigmatic stepmother's influence.
(Description from NoveList)

Decades after a tangled college love triangle shaped her life, a woman is forced to confront her old choices and hidden truths in this intimate novel of friendship and desire from the bestselling author of Writers & Lovers.
(Description from NoveList)

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him?
(Description from NoveList)

The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 National Book Award winner and bestseller Hell of a Book.
(Description from NoveList)

In Prague, a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting, on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie, Hero Tojosoa finds the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation blurring as tensions between the friends' different accounts of the past reach a new level.
(Description from NoveList)

When Nikki visits her estranged grandmother in Western North Carolina, she uncovers a hidden legacy tied to a forgotten kingdom of freed people, unraveling her family’s secrets and her own identity while fighting to protect their endangered heritage.
(Description from NoveList)

A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, the Bradford-Shmulkins love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds.
(Description from NoveList)

A missing child, two girls in search of their true identities -- a stunning novel of mothers, daughters and best friends.
(Description from NoveList)

In the struggling town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai is saved from despair by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia, forging an unexpected bond that reshapes their lives and reveals dynamics of love, memory, and resilience on the margins of society.
(Description from NoveList)

A poignant coming-of-age story about a young boy wrestling with his sexuality as war breaks out in modern Ukraine.
(Description from NoveList)

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.
(Description from NoveList)

In 1968 Buffalo, six teenage girls are sent to the Good Shepherd Refuge, an institution controlled by the Sisters of Charity, for reasons ranging from being gay to rebellious, where they face forced labor, exploitation, and personal struggles while finding strength and solidarity.
(Description from NoveList)

Providence Dare vanishes during a steamship disaster near Winthrop Island in 1846, leaving behind a trail of mystery that resurfaces two centuries later when chef Audrey Fisher and her actress mother Meredith uncover hidden paintings and long-buried family secrets that link past and present across generations.
(Description from NoveList)

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony -- a celebration that ultimately never took place.
(Description from catalog)