Read WithJenna.

Sunlight Finds You

Laura Moriarty

In postwar Florida, a teenage girl's forbidden attraction opens possibilities far beyond the life her family expects for her. Following the consequences across time, the novel explores desire, prejudice, motherhood, and the choices that shape a woman's independence.

The Shampoo Effect

Jenny Jackson

An ambitious newcomer enters a close-knit social circle in a Massachusetts seaside town, unsettling its friendships and marriages. Attraction, money, and an unexpected pregnancy expose the insecurities beneath the group's comfortable lives and force its members to reconsider what they want.

The Children

Melissa Albert

The estranged children of a celebrated fantasy author reunite after years of living in the shadow of her work. As memories of their unusual upbringing resurface, the boundaries between the stories she created and the lives she shaped become increasingly unsettling.

Caller Unknown

Gillian McAllister

Simone and her teenage daughter, Lucy, travel from the UK to Texas for one last trip together before Lucy leaves for university. But on their first night in a remote cabin in the Texas desert, Simone wakes to find Lucy gone—and a mobile phone left behind. When the phone rings, a stranger gives Simone a set of instructions: don’t call the police, go to a specific location, and be prepared to make a deal. Determined to get her daughter back, Simone finds herself pushed into increasingly dangerous choices and begins to question whether the kidnappers’ real target might be her.

Upward Bound

Woody Brown

At an adult day care center in Southern California, the lives of disabled clients and the people who care for them intersect. Through an ensemble of perspectives, the novel examines dignity, communication, institutional routines, and the connections within a community often overlooked by outsiders.

Wait for Me

Amy Jo Burns

The lives of two female folk singers become linked through the music they make and the relationships they cannot leave behind. Their intertwined stories follow artistic ambition, complicated love, and the personal costs of pursuing a voice that others will hear.

One & Only

Maurene Goo

A woman whose family has a remarkable gift for identifying soulmates begins questioning the future that gift promises her. An unexpected attraction and a hidden family history complicate the relationship she thought was destined, forcing her to reconsider what choosing love really means.

Homeschooled

Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan Merrill Block recalls a childhood dominated by his mother's decision to homeschool him and restrict his access to the outside world. His memoir traces isolation, a complicated bond with his mother, and the difficult process of finding knowledge, independence, and a life beyond home.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Elizabeth Bennet's first impressions of the wealthy Mr. Darcy seem to confirm his arrogance, while her family's circumstances make marriage an urgent concern. Misunderstandings, class expectations, and personal growth reshape their relationship in Austen's witty examination of courtship and judgment.

Cursed Daughters

Oyinkan Braithwaite

A young Nigerian woman grows up under a family curse and the belief that she is the reincarnation of a cousin who died. As she seeks a future of her own, the women around her confront love, jealousy, superstition, and the possibility of escaping inherited patterns.

The Irish Goodbye

Heather Aimee O'Neill

Three Irish American sisters return to their Long Island family home, where a holiday gathering revives longstanding resentments. Relationships, concealed histories, and the aftermath of an old tragedy force them to question the versions of their family story they have learned to accept.

Buckeye

Patrick Ryan

The lives of two families in a small Ohio town become intertwined during World War II. Following them across the following decades, the novel explores love, secrets, parenthood, and the lasting effects of choices made when the future still seemed uncertain.

My Other Heart

Emma Nanami Strenner

A mother's search for her missing daughter intersects with the lives of two young Asian American friends discovering who they are. Across countries and years, their stories examine belonging, adoption, friendship, and the powerful connections between mothers and daughters.

Happy Wife

Meredith Lavender, Kendall Shores

A young woman marries a wealthy attorney and enters an exclusive Florida community that views her with suspicion. When her husband disappears after an anniversary celebration, the mystery exposes tensions within their marriage and the secrets behind their enviable surroundings.

A Family Matter

Claire Lynch

A daughter's understanding of her parents' separation begins to change when the past resurfaces decades later. Moving between 1980s Britain and the present, the novel examines a custody battle, prejudice against a queer mother, and the consequences of treating injustice as a private family matter.

The Names

Florence Knapp

A mother deciding what to name her newborn son sets three possible lives in motion. The novel follows each alternative across decades, exploring how a name, an abusive father's influence, and the choices of other family members can alter a child's future.

Heartwood

Amity Gaige

When an experienced hiker disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine, a search draws together a game warden, an elderly amateur investigator, and the missing woman's hidden history. Their efforts reveal how loss, endurance, and the desire for connection shape a person's life.

The Dream Hotel

Laila Lalami

After an algorithm interprets her dreams as evidence that she might commit a crime, a woman is detained in a facility she cannot easily leave. Her efforts to return to her family expose a surveillance system that turns private thoughts into grounds for indefinite confinement.

This Is a Love Story

Jessica Soffer

The history of a long marriage unfolds alongside other lives connected to New York's Central Park. Through shifting perspectives, the novel examines artistic ambition, illness, parenthood, and the changing forms of love that sustain people across decades.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

Emma Knight

A Canadian student arriving at the University of Edinburgh investigates a mystery linking her father to an old family friend. New friendships and competing ideas about adulthood lead her toward questions about inheritance, motherhood, and the private lives concealed by familiar people.

Devotions

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver selects poems from across her career, bringing together reflections on the natural world, attention, love, mortality, and gratitude. The collection invites readers to look closely at ordinary creatures and landscapes while considering how to inhabit a meaningful life.

This Motherless Land

Nikki May

After tragedy uproots her life in Nigeria, Funke is sent to live with her mother's English relatives. Her friendship with her cousin Liv develops under the pressures of racism, class, and family loyalties in a contemporary reimagining of Mansfield Park.

The Mighty Red

Louise Erdrich

Set in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, the novel centers on Kismet Poe, a young woman caught between Gary Geist, the heir to two farms who is determined to marry her, and Hugo, the unconventional young man who loves her. Around them, their families and community grapple with marriage, desire, financial instability, environmental damage, and the consequences of choices that ripple across generations. Erdrich blends a coming-of-age story with themes of love, family, land, spirituality, agriculture, and the economic upheaval surrounding the 2008 financial crisis.

Blue Sisters

Coco Mellors

Three sisters return to New York after the death of a fourth threatens their connection to their childhood home. Each carries private struggles with identity, ambition, or addiction, and their reunion forces them to face grief and the complicated intimacy of sisterhood.

The Wedding People

Alison Espach

A woman arriving alone at a Rhode Island hotel finds herself surrounded by guests attending an elaborate wedding. Her unexpected bond with the bride disrupts both women's plans and opens a story about loneliness, honesty, and the possibility of beginning again.

All the Colors of the Dark

Chris Whitaker

A boy's attempt to protect a girl from a dangerous stranger changes both their lives. Following the consequences across decades in a Missouri town, the novel intertwines a missing-person mystery with artistic ambition, obsession, friendship, and the enduring hope of reunion.

Swift River

Essie Chambers

A biracial teenager growing up in a declining New England town lives with the mystery of her father's disappearance. A letter from a distant relative introduces another version of her family history and helps her imagine an identity beyond the town's assumptions.

Real Americans

Rachel Khong

A Chinese American woman's romance with a wealthy heir begins a story spanning three generations. As her son investigates the circumstances shaping his life, family secrets connect privilege, immigration, ambition, and the ethical consequences of trying to control the future.

The Husbands

Holly Gramazio

A London woman comes home to discover a husband she has never met, then learns that her attic can produce replacements and reshape her life around them. Faced with apparently endless alternatives, she must decide what commitment means when another option is always available.

The Great Divide

Cristina Henríquez

During construction of the Panama Canal, workers, activists, doctors, and their families encounter one another around a project promising progress at enormous human cost. Their stories illuminate migration, resistance, inequality, and the overlooked people whose lives sustain grand historical achievements.

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

Through linked vignettes, Esperanza Cordero describes growing up in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Her observations of neighbors, friends, and family explore belonging, poverty, gender expectations, and her determination to create a home and future of her own.

Good Material

Dolly Alderton

After his girlfriend ends their relationship, a struggling comedian tries to understand what went wrong while his friends appear to move ahead in life. His efforts to repair his career and self-image reveal how differently two people can experience the same romance.

The Waters

Bonnie Jo Campbell

On an island in a Michigan swamp, an independent healer raises her granddaughter apart from the surrounding community. The girl's curiosity and the return of her mother draw their household into conflicts over healing, desire, family, and the natural world sustaining them.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves

Lauren Grodstein

In the Warsaw Ghetto, a teacher joins a clandestine effort to preserve accounts of Jewish life under Nazi occupation. Recording the stories of students, neighbors, and families gives him a purpose while survival, loyalty, and unexpected love become increasingly difficult to separate.

The Sun Sets in Singapore

Kehinde Fadipe

Three ambitious Nigerian women have built different lives in Singapore, but professional pressures and the arrival of a charismatic newcomer unsettle their relationships. Their intertwined experiences explore friendship, money, status, cultural identity, and the compromises involved in starting over far from home.

How to Say Babylon

Safiya Sinclair

Safiya Sinclair recounts growing up in Jamaica under her father's strict Rastafarian beliefs and his suspicion of the outside world. Reading and poetry become tools for resistance as she struggles to claim education, artistic expression, and freedom from the expectations governing her childhood.

Amazing Grace Adams

Fran Littlewood

Determined to deliver a birthday cake to her estranged teenage daughter, Grace Adams abandons her car and walks across London. Memories of her marriage, family, and earlier self unfold along the journey, revealing the losses behind her seemingly inexplicable behavior.

Summer Sisters

Judy Blume

Two girls from very different families form an intense friendship during summers on Martha's Vineyard. Following their lives into adulthood, the novel explores desire, class, jealousy, and the ways an early bond can continue shaping relationships long after childhood ends.

Banyan Moon

Thao Thai

After her grandmother dies, a young Vietnamese American woman returns to the Florida home she left behind. Her strained reunion with her mother uncovers stories from Vietnam and family secrets that connect three generations through love, migration, sacrifice, and inheritance.

The Celebrants

Steven Rowley

College friends make a pact to hold living funerals whenever one of them needs a reminder that their life matters. Their reunions over the years bring grief, strained relationships, and private crises into view, testing the promises they made when they were young.

Chain Gang All Stars

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

In a future American prison system, incarcerated people can pursue freedom by fighting in televised death matches. Two celebrated women combatants navigate love, survival, and public spectacle while the novel exposes the machinery of punishment, profit, and racist violence behind the entertainment.

Camp Zero

Michelle Min Sterling

A remote northern settlement offers refuge from a climate-damaged world, but its promises conceal conflicting agendas. The lives of a sex worker, a teacher, and a group of women researchers reveal who gets protected, who gets exploited, and what survival may require.

Black Candle Women

Diane Marie Brown

Four generations of Black women have organized their lives around rituals and a curse threatening anyone they love. When the youngest develops a crush, hidden histories and conflicting desires push the family to question the beliefs that have protected and constrained them.

Maame

Jessica George

A young British Ghanaian woman has spent years caring for her father and meeting her family's expectations. Moving out and trying new relationships gives Maddie room to discover herself, but grief and responsibility complicate her attempt to build an independent adult life.

Sam

Allegra Goodman

Following a girl from childhood into early adulthood, the novel traces the changing influence of an unreliable father, a hardworking mother, and the sport of climbing. Sam's growing strength emerges through disappointment, ambition, and the difficult work of understanding her own worth.

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

An outsider joins a small group of classics students at an exclusive Vermont college and becomes captivated by their intellectual world. Their pursuit of extraordinary experience leads to violence, and the consequences reveal the moral emptiness beneath their cultivated sophistication.

The Cloisters

Katy Hays

A young researcher arrives at a New York museum devoted to medieval art and becomes involved in a colleague's fascination with divination. An unusual deck of tarot cards and a dangerous rivalry draw her into questions about fate, ambition, and who controls the future.

The Whalebone Theatre

Joanna Quinn

Three children raised on an English country estate transform a whale skeleton into the center of their imaginative world. As they grow up and war arrives, theatrical play gives way to resistance, espionage, and choices that test the bonds of their shared childhood.

Solito

Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora recounts traveling from El Salvador to the United States at nine years old to reunite with his parents. Told through his childhood perspective, the memoir follows the dangers of the journey and the strangers whose care made survival possible.

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Jamie Ford

A poet experiencing emotional instability investigates the inherited trauma linking women across seven generations of her family. Their lives unfold across different eras, connecting love, loss, migration, and the possibility of breaking patterns that have shaped descendants who never knew one another.

The Measure

Nikki Erlick

Adults around the world receive mysterious boxes containing strings that apparently reveal the lengths of their lives. As individuals and institutions decide whether to trust this knowledge, the novel follows relationships and political divisions transformed by the prospect of knowing one's fate.

These Impossible Things

Salma El-Wardany

Three British Muslim friends navigate adulthood while trying to reconcile their relationships with family and religious expectations. Decisions about sex, marriage, and independence strain their bond, revealing how differently people can respond to the pressures they once shared.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt

A widowed aquarium cleaner forms an unusual connection with a remarkably observant octopus. Her unresolved grief over her son's disappearance intersects with a young man's search for his father, bringing unexpected companionship and new possibilities for understanding the past.

Memphis

Tara M. Stringfellow

The lives of three generations of Black women unfold around a family home in Memphis. Through changing voices and decades, the novel explores violence, migration, artistic promise, and the care through which women protect one another while seeking futures beyond inherited pain.

Groundskeeping

Lee Cole

An aspiring writer returns to Kentucky and takes work at a college, where he meets a visiting author from a very different background. Their relationship brings class, family loyalty, political divisions, and the unequal freedom to leave home into sharp focus.

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson

After their mother dies, two estranged siblings receive recordings revealing a life they scarcely knew. Her story connects a Caribbean childhood, a disappearance, migration to Britain, and a family recipe, forcing them to reconsider the secrets behind their own identities.

The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan

A mother's lapse in judgment brings her under government scrutiny and into a program designed to train acceptable parents. Separated from her daughter, she must navigate increasingly intrusive assessments in a novel about surveillance, cultural expectations, and the power to define a good mother.

Bright Burning Things

Lisa Harding

A former performer struggling with addiction tries to raise her young son while her life grows increasingly unstable. Her attempts to recover and rebuild their connection expose the tensions between love, personal freedom, and the institutions deciding whether she can care for him.

The Family

Naomi Krupitsky

Two girls grow up in adjoining Brooklyn households linked to the Mafia, sharing an intimate friendship and a dangerous inheritance. Following them into adulthood, the novel examines the cost of loyalty and the ways family power can both protect and imprison.

The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles

In 1954, a young man leaving a juvenile work farm plans to travel west with his little brother, but two former companions redirect their journey toward New York. Their contrasting ambitions turn a fresh start into an unpredictable exploration of loyalty and possibility.

Beautiful Country

Qian Julie Wang

Qian Julie Wang recalls arriving in New York from China as a child and growing up undocumented. Poverty, fear of discovery, and her parents' struggle to survive shape a memoir about finding language, education, and belonging in a country offering both promise and exclusion.

The Turnout

Megan Abbott

Two sisters and one sister's husband run the ballet school inherited from their mother. A contractor's arrival after a fire unsettles their tightly controlled world, exposing buried family history and dangerous relationships beneath the rituals of an annual Nutcracker production.

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

A Black writer travels on a promotional tour while another narrative follows a boy growing up under the threat of racist violence. Blurring reality and imagination, the novel examines identity, storytelling, public grief, and the burden of representing experiences that others want simplified.

Malibu Rising

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Four famous siblings prepare to host their annual party in Malibu, unaware that the night will end in disaster. The gathering brings family secrets and private disappointments to the surface, while their shared history reveals the sacrifices behind their apparent success.

Great Circle

Maggie Shipstead

A pioneering female aviator's quest to circle the globe unfolds alongside the modern actress preparing to portray her. Their parallel lives explore risk, ambition, freedom, and the stories people construct around women who refuse the roles assigned to them.

Good Company

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

A woman finds the wedding ring her husband supposedly lost years earlier, unsettling her understanding of their marriage. Her discovery also threatens a longstanding friendship, opening questions about fidelity, professional ambition, and the compromises behind an apparently happy shared life.

What's Mine and Yours

Naima Coster

A school integration initiative brings two North Carolina families into contact, connecting their children in ways that extend across decades. Through their intertwined histories, the novel examines race, parental ambition, grief, and the consequences of decisions made in the name of protection.

Send for Me

Lauren Fox

A young Jewish woman in Germany leaves for America as Nazi persecution intensifies, separated from relatives who cannot follow. Decades later, her granddaughter discovers family letters, connecting her own decisions about love and belonging to an earlier generation's struggle to survive.

The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah

During the Dust Bowl, a Texas mother faces the collapse of her family's farm and the decision to seek work in California. Her journey with her children exposes poverty, labor exploitation, and the courage required to pursue a future when every choice carries loss.

Black Buck

Mateo Askaripour

A young Black man leaves his coffee-shop job for a sales position at a powerful startup, where success requires a carefully fashioned identity. His rise and growing commitment to helping others expose racism, corporate ambition, and the unstable promises of the American dream.

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison

Pecola, a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio, longs for blue eyes because she believes they will make her loved. Her story exposes the harm inflicted by racist beauty ideals, poverty, sexual violence, and the failures of family and community.

White Ivy

Susie Yang

A Chinese American woman hoping to escape her upbringing reconnects with an affluent former classmate and enters his privileged circle. Her ambitions become complicated by a childhood acquaintance, exposing the ways class aspiration, desire, and deception can shape a life.

Leave the World Behind

Rumaan Alam

A family's holiday in a rented Long Island house is interrupted when its owners arrive reporting a major blackout. With communications failing and unexplained disturbances growing, the two families must navigate fear, mistrust, and uncertainty about what is happening beyond their isolated refuge.

Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

A Ghanaian American neuroscientist studies addiction while caring for her depressed mother and grieving her brother's death. Her investigation of behavior intersects with memories of childhood faith, immigration, and family loss, raising questions that science alone cannot answer.

Here for it

R. Eric Thomas

R. Eric Thomas recounts the experiences that shaped his understanding of race, sexuality, faith, and belonging. Through humorous personal essays, he considers growing up as an outsider and finding ways to inhabit his identity in a world that keeps assigning him conflicting roles.

The Comeback

Ella Berman

A former Hollywood star returns after a period of disappearance and crisis, hoping to regain control of her life and career. Her story gradually reveals the manipulation and abuse behind her success and the difficult choices involved in reclaiming her own voice.

Friends and Strangers

J. Courtney Sullivan

A new mother hires a college student to care for her baby, and the two become increasingly involved in one another's lives. Their relationship exposes class differences, family tensions, and the limits of intimacy when money and unequal opportunity shape the connection.

A Burning

Megha Majumdar

After a young woman is accused of involvement in a terrorist attack, two people with knowledge of her life face choices about speaking up. Their intersecting ambitions reveal how nationalism, class inequality, and the desire for advancement can turn an ordinary person into a public enemy.

All Adults Here

Emma Straub

An unexpected death prompts a mother to reconsider the decisions she made while raising her three children. Their own lives are also changing, and the family's encounters with truth, identity, and responsibility expose the mistakes and tenderness carried across generations.

Valentine

Elizabeth Wetmore

After an assault on a teenage Mexican girl in 1970s West Texas, several women's lives become connected by the community's response. Their different circumstances reveal the forces of racism, sexism, isolation, and solidarity operating in an oil town that prizes male power.

Writers & Lovers

Lily King

A struggling writer works as a waitress while grieving her mother and trying to complete a novel. Relationships with two very different men complicate her already precarious life, creating a story about artistic persistence, financial insecurity, and the risk of choosing one's own direction.

The Girl with the Louding Voice

Abi Daré

A Nigerian teenager longing for an education is forced into marriage and later domestic servitude. Despite repeated threats to her future, Adunni seeks the language, knowledge, and support that will allow her to speak for herself and pursue a different life.

Dear Edward

Ann Napolitano

A twelve-year-old boy becomes the sole survivor of a plane crash that kills his family and other passengers. As he grows up with relatives, the stories of those who died and the connections left behind help him face grief and discover a reason to live.

Late Migrations

Margaret Renkl

Margaret Renkl intertwines memories of her Southern family with close observations of birds, plants, and animals around her Nashville home. The brief essays consider caregiving, death, and the cycles of the natural world, finding beauty without dismissing the losses that accompany love.

Nothing to See Here

Kevin Wilson

A woman with few prospects accepts a job caring for her wealthy friend's stepchildren, whose distress causes them to burst into flames. Protecting them from the adults managing their image becomes an unexpected path toward belonging and a different understanding of family.

The Dutch House

Ann Patchett

A brother and sister are expelled from their childhood home after their father remarries. Over the following decades, their attachment to the grand house and the people who occupied it shapes their relationships, ambitions, and struggle to move beyond a shared grievance.

The Dearly Beloved

Cara Wall

Two ministers and their wives build intertwined lives around a New York church from the 1960s onward. Their different relationships to faith, marriage, parenthood, and doubt create a portrait of the friendships that endure when certainty gives way to experience.

Patsy

Nicole Dennis-Benn

A Jamaican woman leaves her young daughter to pursue a new life and an old love in Brooklyn. Her experiences as an undocumented immigrant unfold alongside the daughter's adolescence, exploring identity, desire, responsibility, and the costs of seeking freedom across borders.

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Linda Holmes

A recently widowed woman in Maine rents part of her house to a former baseball pitcher whose career has collapsed. Their growing friendship offers both a refuge, but moving toward love requires confronting the private truths behind the losses everyone else thinks they understand.

Searching for Sylvie Lee

Jean Kwok

A young woman travels to Europe after her accomplished older sister disappears while visiting relatives. Her search uncovers conflicting accounts of the family's immigrant history, exposing secrets that complicate her understanding of the sister she admired and the parents who raised them.

A Woman Is No Man

Etaf Rum

Three generations of Palestinian American women face restrictive expectations within a Brooklyn family. As a young woman questions the arranged marriage planned for her, secrets from her mother's life reveal the connections between silence, violence, tradition, and the desire for independence.

The Unwinding of the Miracle

Julie Yip-Williams

Julie Yip-Williams recounts living with terminal cancer while reflecting on her childhood, migration, marriage, and motherhood. Her memoir confronts mortality directly, exploring the contradictions of hope and grief and the desire to leave her daughters an honest account of her life.

The Last Romantics

Tara Conklin

An aging poet recalls the childhood crisis that reshaped her relationship with her three siblings. Their lives unfold through loyalty, loss, ambition, and changing forms of love, revealing the lasting power of the stories a family tells about itself.