“Kin” by Tayari Jones
An emotionally rich novel from the award-winning author of “An American Marriage,” Tayari Jones’s “Kin” follows two motherless best friends, Vernice (Niecy) and Annie, coming of age as Black women in the segregated Jim Crow South of Louisiana.
Their lives diverge sharply. Niecy, raised by a devoted aunt after her mother’s death, attends Spelman College, where she glimpses affluence, ambition, and the potential of power. Annie, haunted by the mother who abandoned her, is drawn into the harsher world of brothels and bars, where she finds adversity and peril.
As the women move through starkly different worlds — privilege and aspiration on one side, inequality and constraint on the other — Jones reveals the shared struggle beneath their choices: their search for identity and love. When tragedy eventually pulls them together after many years, the enduring force of sisterhood comes back into focus. With intelligence and compassion, Jones writes a luminous novel about motherhood, female friendship, and the complicated bonds that shape women’s lives in the American South.
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai
This nearly 700-page novel is not your typical romance of star-crossed lovers. It took the author, Kiran Desai, 19 years after winning the Man Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss” to craft this ambitious saga, which was also shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Desai traces the lives of Sonia and Sunny, two Indian immigrants in America bound by loneliness and alienation, and laden with the weight of meddling families and familial obligations. Sonia, a college student scarred by an abusive older lover, delves into the art world; Sunny, a journalist with an overbearing mother, grapples with cultural confusion and racial identity in a 9/11-era America.
Years earlier, a family-arranged match between them was sabotaged. When a chance meeting on a train in India sparks a connection — one rooted in their shared history of isolation — forces intervene again to pull them apart. Years will past before they can test the endurance of their bond.
Desai’s dense and winding prose demands patience from the reader. At times the novel’s pace is slow and repetitive (and the length could arguably be pared down), but overall, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” emerges as an immersive and subtle reflection on class, race, and the persistence of human hope.
“Departure(s)” by Julian Barnes
From Julian Barnes, the Man Booker Prize-winning author of “The Sense of an Ending,” (2011), comes “Departure(s),” a book the author says will be his last. Now 80, Barnes offers a swan song for fans that blends memoir and fiction: autofiction that is both playful and profound.
Acknowledging his age and real-life diagnosis of a rare blood cancer, Barnes reckons with ageing, illness, and his mortality. The narrator — also named Julian — is a writer with a blood disorder who meditates on memory as an unreliable lens on the past. He reflects on love, time, and loss, deliberately blurring the line between personal reflections and fictitious invention.
At the center of this slender book is a love story involving two friends Julian met at Oxford in the 60s. Having once played matchmaker, he revisits their relationship decades later, heavily invested in its success or failure. He ruminates about its chances for happiness only to have the woman confess, “Happiness doesn’t make me happy.”
Barnes depicts himself/Julian tapping away at a typewriter, lamenting the indignities of age and disease with self-mockery — his way of raging against the dying of the light. As he writes, this book is “my official departure, my final conversation with you.” Barnes also reminds us that novelists seek “to entertain, to reveal truths, to move, to provoke reverie.” “Departure(s)” does all of that with intimacy and grace.
“The News from Dublin: Stories” by Colm Tóibín
Acclaimed author Colm Tóibín (“Brooklyn,” “Long Island”) returns with a collection of short stories spanning Dublin, Spain, and America. The prose still carries his signature insight and sense of place, but the darker and more disturbing themes may have some readers missing the quietly resonant journey of Eilis Lacey, the Irish immigrant, from his earlier longer narrative novels.
“Vigil” by George Saunders
Booker Prize winner George Saunders (“Lincoln in the Bardo”) offers another ghost-inflected novel — this time centering on an angel attempting to steer a dying oil tycoon toward redemption. With echoes
of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the book blends some heavy-handed moral messages about environmental peril and capitalist villainy with Saunders’s absurdist humor, but the question of who deserves absolution stops short of delivering emotional poignancy.
