![\"book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/c6987ae4db5649958e9b6b6379b1a472.png\")
It\u2019s been years since the three Ryan sisters were all together at their family\u2019s beloved house on the shore of Long Island. Two decades ago their lives were upended by an accident on their brother Topher\u2019s boat. A friend\u2019s brother was killed, the lawsuit nearly bankrupted their parents and Topher spiraled into a depression, eventually taking his life. Now the Ryan women are back for Thanksgiving eager to reconnect, but each is carrying a heavy secret.<\/p>\n
The eldest, Cait, is still holding guilt for the role no one knows she played in the boat accident. She rekindles a flame with her high school crush, Topher\u2019s best friend and the brother of the boy who died. Middle sister Alice has been thrown a curveball threatening the career she\u2019s restarting. She faces a difficult decision that may doom her marriage. The youngest, Maggie, is finally taking the risk to bring the woman she loves home to her devoutly Catholic mother. Infusing everything is the grief for Topher that none of the Ryans have figured out how to carry together.<\/p>\n
When Cait invites a guest to Thanksgiving dinner old tensions boil over and new truths surface, nearly overpowering the flickering light of their family bond.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe family saga we all need \u2015 utterly un-put downable, beautifully drawn, thrilling and heartfelt at once and totally not to be missed. Heather Aimee O’Neill has arrived with gorgeous skills and a keen eye for what drives families apart, and brings them together, too.\u201d \u2015 Jessica Soffer,\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestselling author of\u00a0This Is a Love Story<\/p>\n
Boy from the North Country<\/a> by Sam Sussman<\/p>\n In this deeply moving debut novel Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and devastating mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother in real time and helplessly watching her fail even as she finally begins to tell him the truths he has waited so long to hear. Evan comes to understand what a gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCome for the riveting father-son mystery, stay for the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus\u00a0(starred review)<\/p>\n What a Time to Be Alive<\/a> by Jade Chang<\/p>\n With the encouragement of her other best friend Lola embraces the public interest in her perceived message. But is she a scammer or a sage? Just as Lola is telling others to be their own guiding lights she can\u2019t seem to find hers. Lola\u2019s grieving, she\u2019s accused of using the notoriety of her friend\u2019s death to fuel her rise, and she\u2019s full of questions about the fate of her mother who has totally disappeared. Her mother came to America pregnant fleeing China\u2019s one-child policy and she got deported when Lola was 8.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Chang\u2019s kaleidoscopic new novel is a deep examination of the ways we commodify belief, the power and precarity of fame, and the delicious terror of being truly seen.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat a Time to Be Alive\u00a0is a consummate coming-of-age tale for our uncanny, screen-mediated era. It\u2019s part madcap journey of self-actualization, part love song to Los Angeles, part ode to friendship, and part meditation on grief\u2014entirely witty and vibrantly alive.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0Rachel Khong, author of\u00a0Real Americans<\/p>\n Great Disasters<\/a> by Grady Chambers<\/p>\n We follow them as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond. They form new relationships with partners and children, and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country. With each passing year the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?<\/p>\n Grady Chambers\u2019\u00a0debut novel\u00a0moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction and more. Great Disasters\u00a0is an intimate portrait of disasters big and small, personal and political, and the ways these are all intertwined.<\/p>\n “Great Disasters\u00a0is an elegiac and moving first novel. Chambers writes beautiful, precise prose that carefully narrates the story of his characters\u2019 high school years: reckless and callow, but also formative and tender. With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence.” \u2015\u00a0Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward<\/a><\/p>\n Ripeness<\/a> by Sarah Moss<\/p>\n \ttend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy Decades later\u00a0Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. She’s happily divorced, recently moved and full of new energy.\u00a0Then Edith’s best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child Maebh’s mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent the baby away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?<\/p>\n \u201cTender and rueful,\u00a0Ripeness\u00a0is a tale of being a foreigner that moves between 1960s Italy and 2020s Ireland, finding pain and bliss in both. Working at the height of her mature powers, Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence.\u201d \u2015 Emma Donoghue, author of\u00a0The Paris Express<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Check out five new novels that explore the hospitality and the challenges of having a place to call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-13192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/2ba0685ac4d149e1b2085aa8aa363b32.png\")
When Evan, 26, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn\u2019t know his mother is dying. Evan still doesn\u2019t know the identity of his biological father. He doesn’t know the elusive story of his mother\u2019s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. Evan also doesn\u2019t know the secrets of his mother\u2019s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.<\/p>\n![\"book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/26f3e4505447465fb9313e95d83c6346.png\")
Lola Treasure Gold can\u2019t figure out her life. She\u2019s broke, unemployed and back in her childhood home, a crumbling cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Worse, one of her closest friends just died. So nobody is more surprised than Lola when a jackpot falls in her lap. She stars in a Very Viral Video, opening a strange path for her to become a self-help guru.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/66c4d610273a4ab3ace87a137e237242.png\")
In the early 2000s six young men start high school in Chicago. Though they\u2019ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them. Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it. They all learn to lose themselves in alcohol.<\/p>\n![\"book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/c8e16a1dad68483a95d8888655ae6a11.png\")
Just out of school, Edith has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s and her mother issued strict instructions:<\/p>\n
\n\thelp at the birth
\n\tmake a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home.<\/p>\n