NH and Mass Book Club

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

Taut and unnerving, The Turnout is Megan Abbott at the height of her game. With uncanny insight and hypnotic writing, it is a sharp and strange dissection of family ties and sexuality, femininity and power, and a tale that is both alarming and irresistible.

In the middle of the bustle of London’s Soho, among the theaters and sex shops and pubs, there sits a building. It isn’t par­ticularly assuming, but its location is prime, and Agatha Howard, a young millionaire with a fortune of mysterious provenance, has decided it’s the perfect spot to build condos. First, though, she has to kick out all the tenants. And Precious and Tabitha, two of the women who live and work in a brothel housed in the building, are determined not to go quietly.

A colorful assortment of other charac­ters also find themselves caught up in the fate of this property: Robert, a one-time member of a far-right group and enforcer for Agatha’s father; Bastian, a rich and dissatisfied party boy who pines for an ex-girlfriend; Jackie, a policewoman intent on making London a safer place for all women; and Cheryl, one of the many homeless people who occupy the building’s basement. As their lives converge, surpris­ing hidden connections emerge, shadowy pasts are uncovered, and the fight over the property boils over into a hot stew.