Sarah McGrath’s
Literary Fiction Favorites

If your quarantine was anything like mine, you got to know your family better than ever, making this the perfect time to indulge in All Adults Here. Come see how another family brings out the best and worst in each other, how they deal with seeing their own good and bad traits reflected back at close distance. Emma Straub is a master at capturing parent-child and sibling relationships with warmth, humor, and surprises. This is the big-hearted, rewarding read that you earned by staying home!

Bittersweet, sexy, and morally fraught, this is a novel about young love and a big secret in a small community. The Mothers is a story that asks “what if.” What if you’d lived your life differently? What if you had chosen differently about that boy, that friend, that baby? Must we always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves? Now is the perfect time to read this emotionally riveting novel, to accompany Brit Bennett’s equally immersive and provocative bestseller, The Vanishing Half.

It’s amazing to me that this novel is barely 200 pages, because it is one of the richest reading experiences I can remember. Jacqueline Woodson (National Book Award-winning author of the memoir Brown Girl Dreaming) tells a story like no one else. Red at the Bone is the story of the influence of history on the decisions made by one contemporary family. Exploring themes of sexual desire and identity, mother-daughter relationships, prejudice, class, ambition, and gentrification, it is a taut, powerful read. Profoundly moving.

I’ve thought a lot about this novel over the last 18 months, as I considered all the ways we are still connected even while apart. Written by the #1 bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, it’s a wise and beautiful story about the bonds that shape our lives. Moving from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek islands, it looks at the sacrifices we make for the people we love, and how the choices we make resonate through history.

This is that big, ambitious, immersive novel that will steal you out of your everyday life, make you feel you know the characters personally, and occupy your mind even when you’re not reading it. It’s a story of friendship in the face of tragedy and loss, set against the 1980s AIDS crisis and aftermath, but about so much more too. An emotionally absorbing story about what it’s like to live during a different time of crisis.