The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry

This is an "it goes from bad to worse" kind of a story. Tom Rourke is an Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. He has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east. Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium. He’s no horseman, and yet the animal calls to him. The second is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington. The three of them take off on the run and it goes very very poorly.

Lessons by Ian McEwan

This is a tale of sexual abuse in a young boy. In life these mostly involve young boys being raped by men, but the story here of an early teen boy and his mid-20's piano teacher is not as rare as you might think, and when I see it professionally, it has this same long shadow cast across a lifetime, with a slightly different bent from other trauma, but no less life changing. This is a life long portrayal of Roland Baines and the way a too-early sexual experience permanently stains Roland’s romantic expectations. In his aching memories of his months of endless sex, we see Miss Cornell’s perverse desires through the boy’s pride excitement. To us, she’s a fiend of manipulation, but to young Roland — adrift in a world bracing for nuclear annihilation sparked by Kennedy or Khrushchev — Miss Cornell looks like salvation itself. He drops all his academic desires at her behest and becomes a bit of a sexual slave, something he is delirious about at the time, but comes to see, eventually, as having rewired his brain differently and left him with little in the way of ability to be in an intimate relationship of any kind.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

It is hard to describe what happens in this book without giving it all away, so I am going to be brief. The first thing is that this book, much like the author's previous book, The Martian, is largely a system based novel that a character driven one, and as such, there are a lot of descriptions of what is happening rather than why they are, and there are only two characters and one human. What I can say is that tells the story of Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship in a different star system with no memory of how he got there. He quickly figures out that he’s been sent on a mission to save our solar system from a microorganism called the Astrophage, which is essentially eating our sun. If Ryland doesn’t succeed, the Earth will enter a new ice age that kills billions of people. There are many twists and turns and it adds up to a very enjoyable read.

The Color of Water by James McBride

The author is the very best kind of memoir writer--a writer well established in writing award winning fiction, who is writing about his mother well before she is actually dead. She is a white woman who is the child Polish Jews who is evasive with her children about both her race and her past. She lives in the black community because that is where she feels most at home, and has 12 children with 2 different men, choosing to remarry a black man after McBride's father, a black minister, dies before he is born of cancer. She has a multiply traumatic past, with prejudice and the Holocaust in the near past, and sexual abuse by her father fueling her escape from her family of origin. She is fierce and complicated, and as McBride unpeels the layers of who she is, there is much to be amazed by. It is a loving tribute that inherently explores race and parenthood, opportunity and choices, and what it means to him to be both black and Jewish. The author notes in the reprint that by writing this, which it appears he did with the aid of his mother, but perhaps without the permission of his siblings, at least at first, that talking about family is not only complicated but it can stir intense feelings in others.