Also of interest ... novels of love and betrayal

The Last Secret

by Mary McGarry Morris

(Shaye Areheart, $25)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

How refreshing it is to lose yourself in a skillfully made story “where big, elemental feelings are coming at you all the time,” said Sophie Gee in The New York Times. National Book Award finalist Mary McGarry Morris is aiming for an Oprah audience with her new tale about a New England mother with a dark secret in her past and a husband who’s just made a shocking confession. But why has this sharp, observant writer saddled herself with a clichéd plot and contrived ending?

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.”