Kara Cesare’s
Fiction Must-Reads

Nothing says escapism like a novel set in the Mediterranean, where you can travel from Italy to Spain to Greece without leaving home. And no one does family dysfunction–and fun!–better than Amanda Eyre Ward. She has such compassion for her characters, flaws and all, and writes so vividly about places I wish I could visit now more than ever. Losing myself in the world she created was as entertaining as it was moving.

I’ve been obsessed with the Ferriday family ever since I read Martha Hall Kelly’s Lilac Girls. In her second novel, Martha fictionalizes the story of Eliza Ferriday, who was instrumental in helping Russian immigrants who escaped the revolution settle in New York. I feel utterly transported to a different time and place in Martha’s capable hands. This enlightening historical novel is as compulsively readable as a finely wrought suspense novel.

This is the kind of big novel that is so captivating that you can sink into a chair and get lost in it for days. It’s the story of a young woman who attends Harvard on the heels of her brother’s suicide to find out the truth behind his death. While it’s a novel with a mystery at its core, it is also about science and literature–and yes, ghosts, real or imagined. Ultimately, it’s a novel about a sister grieving the loss of her brother. I was moved to tears by the end and so impressed with Francesca’s debut.