The Last Secret
by Mary McGarry Morris
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The Family Man
by Elinor Lipman
(Houghton Mifflin, $25)
“Just because something is ‘light’ doesn’t mean it’s not masterful,” said Carolyn See in The Washington Post. The primary love story in Elinor Lipman’s latest concerns a gay New York lawyer’s paternal love for an actress-stepdaughter with whom he’s reconnected after 25 years. Around them swirls a likable cast and a variety of minor troubles and romances. But who needs more? “There’s no way I can explain to you” just how “utterly perfect” Lipman’s delivery can be. Her novel “mesmerized me.”
The Scenic Route
by Binnie Kirshenbaum
(Harper, $14)
When is a novel about a European road trip that a divorcée takes with a man from Tuscany not escapist fantasy? asked Taylor Antrim in The Dailybeast.com. Binnie Kirshenbaum has turned a familiar midlife-crisis plot into “a reality check.” Narrator Sylvia Landsman is a chatterbox; most of the book consists of her “enjoyably rambling” family anecdotes and encyclopedic non sequiturs. Yet The Scenic Route isn’t about smelling the roses. Rather, it’s about carrying on when “the best is behind us.” Its ending “packs an unexpectedly emotional wallop.”
The Act of Love
by Howard Jacobson
(Simon & Schuster, $25)
Howard Jacobson’s portrait of a snobbish masochist offers “a fascinating sneak into love’s darkest alleys,” said Cynthia MacDonald in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The narrator, an antiquarian bookseller, “seeks out women who will cheat on him,” and eventually finds one to marry, whom he rightly adores. As our antihero labors to arrange for his own abasement, this “wickedly terrific” novel proves to be, like love itself, “funny, cruel, sick—and always worth one’s while.”