28 Summers (2020) was written by American author Elin Hilderbrand. The romance novel is an example of early 21st-century women’s fiction. Hilderbrand is the author of 26 novels as of April 2021, including The Perfect Couple (2018) and Summer of '69 (2019), and has lived on Nantucket, where many of her books are set, since 1993.This guide uses the hardcover first edition from Little, Brown and Company (2020).Plot SummaryAt the age of 24, Mallory Blessing... Read 28 Summers Summary

A Farewell to Arms, written by Ernest Hemingway and published in 1929, is the story of Frederic Henry, an officer with the Italian army in World War I, and his relationship with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Some have noted the similarities between the main character and Hemingway, who also served in the Italian army as an ambulance driver in 1918, and his nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, who cared for Hemingway after he was wounded.The... Read A Farewell to Arms Summary

All the Light We Cannot See is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Anthony Doerr published in 2014. This historical fiction novel alternates between the lives of its two central characters: Marie-Laure Leblanc, a girl who grows up in Paris and loses her eyesight to cataracts at age six, and Werner Pfennig, a boy from a German mining town who joins the Nazi military to escape working in the mines.In August 1944, Marie-Laure and Werner are... Read All the Light We Cannot See Summary

Emily Henry’s Beach Read is a contemporary romance novel published in May 2020. Set in the late 2010s, the narrative follows 29-year-old protagonist January Andrews, a millennial romance author coming to terms with her father’s death and her recent breakup as she attempts to write her next bestseller with a shattered view of romance. The story is told through January’s first-person narration as she describes her changing outlook on the world as well as her... Read Beach Read Summary

Black Cake (2022) is a family saga that chronicles more than half a century of one family’s journey, including its thwarted dreams, star-crossed loves, and dark secrets. Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel, it centers on the story of Eleanor Bennett, a 70-something first-generation Caribbean immigrant living in Southern California. Her death opens the historical fiction novel. Her two grown children, Benny and Byron, are to listen to a recording she made shortly before her death that... Read Black Cake Summary

City of Girls is the third novel by author Elizabeth Gilbert, published in 2019. Gilbert is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels include Stern Men (2000) and The Signature of All Things (2013). A noted writer of nonfiction, she has also written a biography entitled The Last American Man (2002), as well as several memoirs including Eat Pray Love (2006), Committed (2010), and Big Magic (2015). Eat Pray Love became a worldwide bestseller... Read City of Girls Summary

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a 2017 comic novel about human connection. The title character, Eleanor Oliphant, narrates the story, introducing herself as an office worker with a solitary life in present-day Glasgow, Scotland. Eleanor spends her free time doing crosswords, listening to the radio, drinking vodka, and reading classic literature. She does not socialize with anyone, and her only family is a spiteful mother who calls from prison once a week. One night... Read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine Summary

Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021) is a debut young adult thriller by Angeline Boulley. The novel’s plot centers on Daunis Fontaine, an 18-year-old girl with a French mother and an Ojibwe father, who often feels torn between cultures. When she witnesses a murder and goes undercover for the FBI, Daunis uses her knowledge of both cultures to unravel the case. Themes include navigating ancestry, embracing community, and the dangers of punitive justice. Boulley is a member of... Read Firekeeper's Daughter Summary

Funny You Should Ask is the first adult romance novel by Elissa Sussman, who previously wrote young adult novels. The book was released by Random House in 2022. Told in sections that alternate between past and present, interspersed with fictional news clippings of reviews and other articles, the novel describes the weekend-long interactions between Chani Horowitz, a journalist, and Gabe Parker, a Hollywood “heartthrob.” Chani’s first profile on Gabe establishes her career, but they both... Read Funny You Should Ask Summary

Geek Love is a 1989 dystopian novel by Katherine Dunn. The novel is structured as a memoir written by Olympia “Oly” Binewski, an albino hunchback dwarf, as she chronicles the bizarre story of her family of carnival freaks. Her parents, Aloysius “Al” and Lillian “Lil, Lily, or Crystal Lil” Binewski, had sought to prop up their faltering traveling carnival by breeding their own children into freaks through the prenatal use of illicit drugs, poison, and radiation. The family believes that “norms,”... Read Geek Love Summary

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is a psychological thriller: a tale of a marriage gone cold and a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get revenge. Echoing the domestic noir genre, Flynn takes that genre one step further by incorporating several plot twists that subvert the reader’s expectations. Chief among the subverted expectations is the reader’s ability to trust the narrator. The novel consists of alternating chapters: one told by husband, Nick, and the... Read Gone Girl Summary

Alan Gratz’s seventh novel, Grenade (2018), is a work of historical fiction set during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, an infamously bloody battle that took place in the Pacific Theater of World War II (WWII). Gratz’s novel, which is aimed at middle-grade readers but may also appeal to adults and young adults, follows the journeys of a US Marine and an Okinawan boy. Grenade won numerous awards, including the 2019 Bank Street Best Children’s Book... Read Grenade Summary

Infinite Country is a 2021 novel by the Colombian/American novelist Patricia Engel. It is a general fiction work covering a 20-year period during which a Colombian wife and husband emigrate to the United States, remaining as illegal aliens after their six-month travel visas expire. Their story is complex in that Mauro, the husband, is deported while Elena, the wife, remains in the United States with the older two of their three children. The heart of... Read Infinite Country Summary

Drawing on the rich tradition in both film and fiction of romance stories set in the Tuscany region of central Italy, Jenna Evans Welch’s romantic comedy Love & Gelato (2016) tells the story of 16-year-old Lina Emerson. Reeling from the death of her mother, a noted photographer, Lina reluctantly sets off from her home in Seattle to spend the summer in Florence with a father she has never met. Reading her mother’s entries in a... Read Love & Gelato Summary

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2021 novel Malibu Rising takes place over the course of one day, August 27, 1983, in Malibu, California, centering on themes of family, fame, and parenthood. The plot revolves around an annual summer party hosted by Nina Riva and her childhood with her three siblings, Jay, Hud, and Kit—the children of Mick Riva, a famous singer, whose fame they’re forced to reckon with every day of their lives.Malibu Rising is the seventh... Read Malibu Rising Summary

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of twenty-seven essays exploring the author’s childhood in North Carolina, his relationship with his family, his time living in France, and observations about American social life. The book is comprised of two sections, Part One and Part Deux in which the latter half focuses primarily on Sedaris’s time in Normandy, France. Told with sardonic humor, each chapter deploys various levels of fantasy, irony, and other... Read Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

Mrs. Everything is a bestselling women’s fiction novel by Jennifer Weiner published in 2019. This “Best Book of Summer” pick traces the lives of two Jewish sisters, Jo and Bethie, who are polar opposites, and their relationship with their mother, Sarah, and Jo’s future daughters. The book follows Jo and Bethie from their childhood in the 1950s to present day (2022), chronicling their struggles to find authentic identities and joy. Though lesbian Jo is viewed... Read Mrs. Everything Summary

My Brilliant Friend is the first book in Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s world-acclaimed quartet of Neapolitan novels, which documents the friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo. It was originally published in 2011. Narrated in first person from Elena’s perspective, the novel opens with a present-day Prologue, in which Lila stages the ultimate disappearance. She not only vanishes in body but takes her possessions and cuts out her face from photographs, so as “to eliminate... Read My Brilliant Friend Summary

In No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates a sudden spate of murders in his typically quiet corner of the Texas borderlands. Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet and hunter, gets caught up in the aftermath of a drug-deal gone wrong, and soon both Sheriff Bell and a mysterious hit-man race to be the first to track Moss down: one with the intention of saving his life and the other... Read No Country for Old Men Summary

Of Women and Salt (2021) is the first novel by Gabriela Garcia. A work of literary fiction, it explores themes of family, patriarchy, feminism, race, colonialism, and immigration. The story touches several generations, from 1866 to 2019, but takes place primarily in 21st-century Miami and Cuba. Plot SummaryRather than presenting events chronologically, Of Women and Salt jumps backward and forward in time, and the point of view changes with each chapter. This summary places the... Read Of Women and Salt Summary