Best books...chosen by Amy Sohn

Amy Sohn’s new novel, Motherland, returns to Park Slope, Brooklyn, to continue the satirical tale of young mothers that she began in 2009’s Prospect Park West. Below, the former magazine editor names six books she used as inspiration.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (Harper, $14). This comedic drama about 20-somethings in 1970s San Francisco was the primary inspiration for my Park Slope novels. Maupin’s plotlines can be soapy, but his characters have humanity and his laconic humor pervades.

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe (Penguin, $16). Though Jaffe’s novel follows a group of late-1950s women, its subject matter— elusive men, workplace sex, abortion, depression, and suicide—is shockingly au courant. Whether you read this 1958 book as camp, social commentary on working women, or a snapshot of a lost New York, you won’t stop reading.

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