This, coupled with the trials of stale love, and a fair few lies and secrets, comes together in a story that, at the heart of its 400-something pages, chips away at the stunning intimacy we can sometimes share with strangers. It’s a novel that reminds you just how hyper-aware the world has become since, say, the early 2010s-the war between genders, races, classes-and yet never loses sight of its timeless keystone: the strength of the bonds built by women, between women. Swirling around them are such attractions as a student rally against unequal pay for university workers, tiffs and tussles within a popular mommy Facebook blog, a social influencer chasing bikini-brand deals, and a book idea decrying the loss of the American identity. It follows Elisabeth, a New York writer displaced in the suburbs with her husband and newborn son, and Sam, a college student Elisabeth hires as a babysitter. Courtney Sullivan, out this summer from Knopf. (Vintage, 496 pp., $17.) While Sullivan covers “a lot of terrain” in this novel about the “intricate relationship” between a babysitter and her employer - from “the true definition of privilege” to “the politics of suburban book clubs” - what stands out, our reviewer, Claire Lombardo, noted, is her “spot-on minutiae,” her “honest rendering of what happens behind closed doors.Familiar facets of our modern existence-the kinds of things that trend on Twitter-loom large in Friends and Strangers, the fifth novel from J. Our Group Text columnist, Elisabeth Egan, called it “a puzzle wrapped in beautiful language,” raising tantalizingly important questions.įRIENDS AND STRANGERS, by J. (Riverhead, 256 pp., $17.) Set in a small Nigerian town, this “dazzling, devastating story of coming-of-age and coming out” explores whether the blindness of a young man’s family to his gender identity led to his death. THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI, by Akwaeke Emezi. His elegies, about the particular wound inflicted by 9/11 on American Muslims who had felt they were “at home,” are “sung,” as our reviewer, Hari Kunzru, put it, for a lost Whitmanesque dream combining selfhood and “national belonging.” (Back Bay, 368 pp., $16.99.) Like Akhtar, the narrator of this “moving and confrontational” novel - one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020 - is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist. “It might not cover everything, but it both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity.” (Grove, 192 pp., $16.) Harvey’s memoir of her 2016 insomnia is “like a small and well-worn eiderdown quilt,” our reviewer, Alexandra Jacobs, wrote.

THE SHAPELESS UNEASE: A Year of Not Sleeping, by Samantha Harvey.

Friends and strangers courtney sullivan