Staff Picks: Alexander Rigby’s Favorites

This deeply memorable and emotional novel explores love, grief, and the complexity of human connection through the eyes of 14-year-old June. After the death of her beloved uncle Finn, a renowned painter who was also her closest confidant, June is left adrift — until she secretly forms an unexpected bond with Toby, Finn’s grieving partner. As their unlikely friendship deepens, June begins to uncover hidden truths about her uncle’s life, the stigma surrounding his death from AIDS in the 1980s, and the ways love can transcend loss. The tenderness of June’s relationship with Finn and the healing power of her connection with Toby make this book a poignant, unforgettable journey through mourning, forgiveness, and coming of age. I am dying for Brunt to write another novel!

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is a dazzling, genre-bending masterpiece that stands out for its bold originality and intricate structure. Told as a series of nested narratives that span centuries — from a 19th-century Pacific voyage to a dystopian future Korea and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii — the novel weaves six distinct stories, each with its own voice, setting, and protagonist, including a shipwrecked notary, a troubled composer, an investigative journalist, a vanity publisher, a cloned fabricant, and a tribesman. The novel’s structure is uniquely palindromic, with each story unfolding halfway before giving way to the next, then resolving in reverse order. As the characters’ lives echo and ripple across time, Cloud Atlas becomes a profound meditation on human ambition, oppression, connection, and rebirth — making it an unforgettable work of speculative literary fiction. This was the first book I read by David Mitchell, and it made me a huge fan! His other recently published novels are fantastic too.