Memorial Days: A Memoir
Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 224 pages | Published February 4, 2025
Memoirs about the unanticipated loss of a spouse can be tough to read, and novelist Geraldine Brooks’ memoir is no exception. She maps her grief following the death of her husband (journalist Tony Horwitz) as she navigates the red tape of hospitals and insurance. The immediacy of these memories is tempered by her reflections on life three years later; isolating herself on a remote Australian island, she imagines what resurrection might look like in a rebuilt life. For those fortunate enough to be untouched by loss, Memorial Days offers insight into the nonlinear stages of grief and healing. At the same time, those who can relate more personally may find Brooks’ writing cathartic.
Stone Yard Devotional: A Novel
Charlotte Wood
Riverhead Books, 304 pages | Published February 11, 2025
“It would be impossible to explain to anyone from my old life why or how this – whatever it is; servitude? – fills me with such peace,” says the middle-aged atheist at the center of Charlotte Wood’s sparsely written novel. After seeking refuge with a rural sisterhood in Australia, she chooses to remain, inviting new rhythms for sustainable living, despite plagues of mice and unwelcome memories. With its themes of memory, forgiveness, understanding and making peace with childhood wrongs (both those done to us and those thoughtlessly participated in), Stone Yard Devotional is powerful in its gentle prose.
Casualties of Truth
Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, 272 pages | Published February 11, 2025
How does violence beget even more violence? And how do we move forward when it hits too close to home? Lauren Francis-Sharma tackles these questions with an unsettling work of fiction that integrates apartheid-era injustice and personal trauma. Prudence – now part of a Black power couple in Washington, D.C., and stay-at-home-mother to an autistic son – once observed post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation hearings and experienced horrors of her own while serving as a law intern in South Africa. Casualties of Truth explores personal repercussions while wondering how collective trauma can lie beneath the surface.
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