Authors who never let me down
These writers are my go-tos; I'll read whatever they write (and never regret it).
47 books
Ann Patchett
★ 5Whistler
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors for a reason; I couldn't put this down.
★ 5State of Wonder
Ann Patchett
A researcher heads into the Amazon to track down a vanished colleague and a secretive drug trial. Patchett at her most adventurous.
★ 5Bel Canto
Ann Patchett
Bel Canto by Anne Patchett is, I think, her masterpiece. (And I’ve read all of her books!) The plot sounds like it’s ripped from an airport thriller: An opera singer is performing at a millionaire’s birthday party when terrorists take the entire mansion hostage. But what happens next is anything but predictable, and the prose is gorgeous. I read it every few years and recommend it to all of my friends.
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
An older woman tells her daughters about the summer she spent performing alongside — and falling in love with — a now-famous actor. My friend Anna said her husband adored this book just as much as she did — impressive, considering he typically reads business non-fiction.
Truth & Beauty
Ann Patchett
Patchett's memoir of her fierce, complicated friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. One of the great books about platonic love.
The Dutch House
Ann Patchett
A brother and sister, exiled from their childhood home, keep circling back to it for decades. Patchett doing what she does best.
Commonwealth
Ann Patchett
One stolen kiss at a christening reshapes two families for fifty years. Patchett unspooling how the past haunts everyone.
Anne Tyler
★ 5Clock Dance
Anne Tyler
A woman who's spent her life being useful to others suddenly drops into a family of strangers who need her. One of Tyler's most tender.
★ 5French Braid
Anne Tyler
A Baltimore family traced across decades and all the small ways they drift apart and find each other again. Quintessential Anne Tyler.
★ 5Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
The Tull family, wounded and prickly, told through the meals that never quite go right. One of Tyler's most bittersweet.
★ 5The Amateur Marriage
Anne Tyler
A story about a marriage that shouldn’t have happened. A gorgeous recreation of Baltimore from 1940s to present-day. I recommended it to Aliza, and she left me multiple voice notes about how much she loved it.
Redhead by the Side of the Road
Anne Tyler
A set-in-his-ways tech-support guy has his small, tidy life gently upended. Classic Tyler, tender and a little funny about people who don't quite know themselves.
The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
A travel writer who hates leaving home, and the chaotic dog trainer who shakes him loose. One of Tyler's most beloved, and I get why.
Emma Straub
This Time Tomorrow
Emma Straub
A woman turns 40, then wakes up at 16 with her young, healthy father downstairs. A time-travel novel that's really about loving your parents. I teared up.
All Adults Here
Emma Straub
A grandmother witnesses a sudden death and starts telling her family the truths she's held back. Straub at her warm, generous best.
Modern Lovers
Emma Straub
College bandmates, now middle-aged Brooklyn parents, watching their kids stir up the past. Straub is such warm company.
The Vacationers
Emma Straub
One family, one Mallorca vacation, every simmering tension along for the trip. The perfect beach read from Straub.
Elinor Lipman
★ 5Ms. Demeanor
Elinor Lipman
A lawyer under house arrest strikes up a romance with a neighbor in the same boat, and starts cooking. Breezy and charming, classic Lipman.
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Elinor Lipman
A prickly, socially clueless surgical intern gets courted by a fast-talking charmer. Lipman is so good at awkward, funny people.
The Inn at Lake Devine (Vintage Contemporaries)
Elinor Lipman
A Jewish girl becomes quietly obsessed with a Vermont inn that won't take Jewish guests. Lipman turns prejudice into something wry and human without letting it off the hook.
The View From Penthouse B
Elinor Lipman
Newly single sisters share a Manhattan apartment and slowly rebuild. Gentle, funny, and very good company.
Lily King
★ 5Heart the Lover
Lily King
A college love triangle from the '80s reignites decades later when crisis pulls the three back together. Turns out it's Casey from Writers & Lovers all grown up, and King just keeps getting better.
★ 5Writers & Lovers
Lily King
The protagonist of Lily King’s novel Writers & Lovers lives in Cambridge, too, but Casey is older than Becky, a little more rudderless. Her mother has just died, her boyfriend has broken up with her, and she’s living in a garden shed splitting her time between waitressing and writing. It sounds depressing. It’s not. Casey’s wit, relatability, and dogged ambition make her easy to spend time with, and I ended the book almost hoping I’d run into her in Harvard Square.
The Pleasing Hour
Lily King
King's debut, about a young American au pair for a family in France with its own quiet fault lines. You can already feel the writer she'd become.
Annie Hartnett
★ 5Unlikely Animals
Annie Hartnett
A young woman comes home to care for her dying father, narrated by the town's cemetery dead. Odd, tender, and full of heart.
★ 5Rabbit Cake
Annie Hartnett
Narrated by a grief-stricken, wonderfully odd little girl after her mother drowns sleepwalking. Funny and sad in the same breath, and Hartnett never puts a foot wrong.
The Road to Tender Hearts
Annie Hartnett
An 80-year-old sets off across the country to win back his high school crush, then gets saddled with two orphaned grandkids and a cat who can predict death. Darkly funny and big-hearted at once.
Curtis Sittenfeld
★ 5Romantic Comedy
Curtis Sittenfeld
An SNL-style writer falls for the pop star hosting the show and refuses to believe it could work. Smart, swoony, very fun.
★ 5Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld
A modern-day Pride and Prejudice set in Cincinnati, and enormous fun. No one does banter and human foibles better than Sittenfeld.
Show Don't Tell
Curtis Sittenfeld
Sittenfeld's short stories are every bit as sharp and funny as her novels. She just gets people.
Dolly Alderton
★ 5Ghosts
Dolly Alderton
Its narrator, 32-year-old Nina Dean, is more established than Rooney’s heroines but just as relatable, quick-witted, and candid. Nina’s life is complete in all ways but one — her career as a food writer is thriving, she lives in a beautiful London apartment, and her platonic relationships are wonderful. She doesn’t, however, have a partner. Then she meets the perfect guy, and we’re off to the races. Until he ghosts her…
★ 5Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
Alderton's memoir of her twenties — the parties, the disasters, and the friendships that actually held her up. Hilarious and then, out of nowhere, moving.
Good Material
Dolly Alderton
A comedian falls apart after a breakup he doesn't understand, until the last act flips your whole read of it. Funny and true about heartbreak.
Catherine Newman
★ 5Sandwich
Catherine Newman
Sandwich, by Catherine Newman, describes a family’s week-long vacation in Wellfleet and instantly transported me back. It’s funny, moving, and relatable, much like Newman herself (Aliza and I saw her speak in Boston a few weeks ago.) If you just finished All Fours and aren’t ready to stop thinking/reading about menopause, try Sandwich next.
Wreck
Catherine Newman
Rocky's back, and this one's even funnier than Sandwich — but also more tender, as a sudden death and a mystery rash send her spiraling into every what-if. Newman never lets me down.
Anna Quindlen
More Than Enough
Anna Quindlen
A high school English teacher takes a joke ancestry test from her book club and gets a result that upends her whole family story. Classic Quindlen — warm, wise, all about friendship.
Still Life with Bread Crumbs
Anna Quindlen
A famous photographer, broke and past her prime, decamps to a rented cottage and finds an unexpected late-life romance. Warm and wise.
Liz Moore
★ 5The God of the Woods
Liz Moore
A girl vanishes from an Adirondacks summer camp, tangled up with a disappearance years earlier. A character-driven page-turner I tore through.
Long Bright River
Liz Moore
Two sisters in Philadelphia — one a cop, one lost to addiction — set against the opioid crisis. Part mystery, part family story, all propulsive.
Rachel Khong
★ 5Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong
A daughter moves home to help care for her father as his memory slips. Told in little diary entries that are funnier and more tender than that premise suggests.
My Dear You
Rachel Khong
Ten stories with premises that shouldn't work — a woman killed by a crocodile on her honeymoon picks out her appearance for the afterlife; a factory worker falls for an AI sex doll — and absolutely do. I've been a Khong fan since Goodbye, Vitamin, and this collection is her at her strangest and most playful.
Leslie Jamison
★ 5Splinters
Leslie Jamison
Jamison on new motherhood and the end of her marriage, all in that precise, aching prose. She never lets herself off the hook.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Leslie Jamison
Part memoir of her own drinking, part sweeping cultural history of addiction and the writers it claimed. Searching and ambitious.
Alice McDermott
★ 5At Weddings and Wakes
Alice McDermott
An Irish-Catholic family in New York, seen through the kids being shuttled to their grandmother's apartment. McDermott makes the ordinary ache.
★ 5Absolution
Alice McDermott
American wives in early-'60s Saigon and the good intentions that curdle. McDermott looking hard at who gets to feel virtuous.
Barbara Kingsolver
★ 5Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver reworks David Copperfield into Appalachia and the opioid crisis, and it's devastating. That kid's voice will wreck you.
Katherine Heiny
★ 5Games and Rituals
Katherine Heiny
Heiny's stories are wry, warm, and full of people making a mess of their lives. She's just so easy to love.