Arranged marriages are an uncommon concern in American fiction. We belong to a culture ideologically committed to love matches, but the two main characters in Varun Gauri’s debut novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, don’t. Meena and Avi are a young Indian couple living in small-town America, though neither are profoundly traditional, despite their best efforts.

Meena has several advanced degrees and has spent her time prior to this arranged marriage in an adulterous affair with an American academic colleague. Avi is an attorney running for office in the anonymous midwestern town of Southgate, home to strip malls, parking lots, and maybe an industrial park. Both, for reasons mysterious even to them, decide on a traditional arranged marriage and meet—in a very nontraditional approach—online to facilitate it. Generally, such unions are shepherded through by the betrothed’s families. But this is the 21st century, and customs must adapt.

This Westernized Indian wife enthuses over her discovery of ancient mores: “Her father had been right. Arranged marriage was good, it was better. This way, sensuality was a gift. Not something you earned, supposedly, through courtship, through seduction, high heels and perfume. Not something you supposedly deserved for who you were, so pretty and so smart. That was a vanity. This, on the other hand, was unexpected, a gift, a blessing.” If this seems like a thin justification for linking one’s life to a stranger’s, Gauri is well aware of such reservations. At one point Avi likens his arranged marriage to a kind of burden in the same way as caring for a lost child.

For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus’ portrait of an Indian American community in a nearly featureless Midwestern town makes clear the author lived this reality. Gauri, who now lives in Bethesda, was raised in the midwest. Likewise, Avi grew up in Southgate and has big ambitions for his compatriots there; Meena, a newcomer, is clearly less gung ho. Indeed, her reserve verges on a tendency to carp that, at the first sign of trouble for the couple, breaks out into open rejection, even scorn. She tries hard to be a good traditional wife, but Gauri conveys rather pointedly that on some profound level, Meena is playacting. She has grown up as a secular cosmopolitan, traveling the world in her youth and trained to value educational achievement above all else. However, her attachment to her traditional father is greater than to her very modern mother. Hence her dive into an arranged marriage. Unfortunately, her father is dead and thus unable to counsel her on how to move forward with the stranger she married.

Predictably, things do not go smoothly for the couple and as the plot grows more complicated, their union slowly begins to resemble a more Americanized marriage. Avi’s Indian friends, uncles, and associates, looking from the outside in, are regularly shocked that the pair’s marriage doesn’t conform to the type of arranged unions they’re familiar with. And as others in the town’s small community of immigrants and first-generation Americans attempt arranged marriage, the difficulties of following through with it in our American culture cannot be ignored. The Western cult of love is too strong, and, with European roots dating back to the legend of Tristan and Isolde, it proves impossible to extricate from Avi and Meena’s hearts. As a Western reader, this reviewer found such a conclusion rather reassuring.

Because while American culture indulges selfishness, love matches are far from the worst of its excesses. Marriage between two people in love, at least in theory if not always in practice, promotes happiness. Arranged marriage, with its indifference to love, does not fit well in a country built on stories of romance. Gauri’s novel depicts how and why that is. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus wonders if arranged marriage still works well in India—where Meena’s sister, who married for love, seems to exist in a cloud of marital ecstasy.

As the story progresses, Avi and Meena’s marriage morphs into a friendship with the possibility of becoming more, with all the difficulties and wonders such a union involves. They also discover the depths of their ignorance of India’s centuries-old customs and are more than a little abashed at their earlier naivete. Their marriage turns out to be as unique and complicated as anybody’s—or at least anybody who takes the institution seriously. The portrait of their growing awareness of what they really want and how little they understood it, makes For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, fundamentally, a psychological novel. It is Avi’s and Meena’s growing self-knowledge that moves the plot and that makes, at last, for an ambiguous though possibly better marriage.

Published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and winner of its 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize, Varun Gauri’s For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is now on sale. 

Gauri joins WWPH’s 2024 Nonfiction Award winner Megan Doney for their joint book launch at 5 p.m. on Oct. 13 at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue location. politics-prose.com. Free.

Crime novels often feature hit men, but the best portray complex personalities rather than mere murderous thugs. And while hit men with psychological issues may be something of a comic television trope, that doesn’t make them any less engaging in print. Indeed, that engaging complexity is what characterizes Lucky, the star killer in E.A. Aymar’s new thriller, When She Left. 

Stressed out about his marriage, Lucky dissolves into copious tears when assigned his next hit, much to the embarrassment of his tough guy boss. Later, having broken into a house and tied up its occupants, he discovers one is a therapist and unburdens his emotional woes to her, while she’s bound to a chair, with her protesting that these circumstances are not conducive to helpful therapy. There are other instances of such incongruity, as one line sums up: “Lucky covered his mouth with his hands and wondered, very calmly, if he was losing his mind.”

The comic aspect of this disjunction notwithstanding, When She Left is a fast-paced, gripping thriller. Set in the D.C. metro area, the author (longtime host of D.C.’s Noir at the Bar, who has previously written for City Paper) peppers the action with social insights. “He knew what men wanted, what they trusted. Men will believe anything if it has a sense of superiority to it. For some it was wealth, for others strength,” Lucky thinks at one point in regard to belonging to the male cop crowd. Later, when considering women while one shares an awful update in just a few words, the narrator observes, “the communication unique to women, when something wrong is conveyed in a short, understated phrase.”

The novel is darkly humorous, its shades of night deriving mostly from the crime family employing Lucky, the Winters. “The Winterses were never interested in sending a message or torturing someone to prove a point. Death was the most effective message there was,” Aymar writes of the family. The Winters’ shadow envelops everyone in this novel and its depictions of extremely brutal violence. From the first scene to the last, leading characters are running for their lives, pursued by implacable murderers who wreak havoc, mayhem, and, ultimately, death on anyone who gets in their way.

This gangster empire, of course, rots from top to bottom. Its front is a commercial real estate firm in D.C. “Their operation was,” Aymar writes, “like the most callous criminal enterprises, ostensibly legal, a business powered by ruthless capitalism and tireless expansion.” The firm stretches from D.C. into Maryland and Virginia, “visiting neighborhoods decimated by poverty … Gentrification tied to the enticement of a Black-free block, the photos … on their advertisements showing cheery white families.” The Winters’ crimes include human trafficking and gun smuggling, and their recent history has made them notorious: When their don, Victor Winters, was murdered, scandal erupted, so afterward, the crime syndicate kept a much lower real estate profile.

What causes the plot’s violent chaos? Why the incessant bloodshed? Because a crime boss’ girlfriend walks out on him (hence the title). Determined to kill her and her new boyfriend, the capo’s orders result in a trail of blood, wherever the pair is to be found. When She Left serves up nonstop collateral damage, alongside the ambiguous souls of those associated with a gangster empire. In this, the novel is deeply and expertly true crime fiction, fans of which will enjoy its page-turning action.

The narrative switches between the viewpoints of four main characters. Each gets their own chapters, all of which interweave, creating a plot full of surprises and alarmingly expendable minor characters. With occasional detours into suspicions and subplots that don’t pan out but which do heighten the drama, the plot barrels on to its inevitable gory conclusion, as assassins stalk their prey and each other.

Threading through this blood-red tapestry is a theme about Panamanian immigrants to the U.S. One main character, Melissa Cruz, is originally from Panama: “She had a couple of close Latina girlfriends, but like her, there was an embarrassed loss of identity, Spanish only spoken when they wanted to convey something secretive—and more often than not, they didn’t use the right words.” The author, likely thanks in part to his own Panamanian roots, handles this theme knowledgeably and deftly. It’s a rare distraction from the story’s blood-covered juggernaut of a plot.

But it never distracts for long. That’s because Lucky often takes center stage, and his life motto is “Slaughter everyone standing in the way of his happiness.”

E.A. Aymar’s When She Left, published by Thomas & Mercer on Feb. 6, is now available. eaymarwrites.com.

Getting started in life has its difficulties. In recent years, thanks to crippling student debt and, eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic, young people have found it harder than ever, with record numbers either returning home to live in the family manse after college or never leaving in the first place. Millennials were the first generation of Americans to come of age bankrupt, so it’s not surprising to see this new, depressing reality reflected in fiction. What is surprising is seeing it treated with a light, cheerful touch and a narrator who does not dwell on the all-too-obvious downsides. But that is exactly what Maryland author Eden Appiah–Kubi pulls off in her new novel, Her Own Happiness.

This story zooms in on the relationship between Maya, a 31-year-old queer woman, and her best friend, the younger and asexual Ant. Both are Black, and much is made of Maya being fat—not in a fat-shaming way, but to show that it’s a big part of her consciousness, self-conception, and identity. Both characters are at loose ends, though Maya more so. She has finally finished college with a social work degree and has a job lined up in Honolulu. But a freak accident leaves her with no prospects, so she heads back to her parents’ house in the D.C. area. Ant follows because he can’t imagine life without Maya. He quickly snags a job; Maya does not. She stays in bed for weeks on end, coping with “the octopus”—her word for depression.

However, a scene at an airport portrays Maya as the one who copes, remaining calm and preventing Ant from dissolving into a puddle of terror at the thought of air travel. “You should know that I’m not just an emergency support human—I’m also a witch, specializing in the magic of holding hands,” Maya tells Ant. Thus Maya buoys her friend’s mood, while her own—pre-depression—soars. “Now she was flying first class and she had a surprise cookie? Her birthday was truly starting to look up.” 

Maya’s basic cheerfulness saves her until she settles into her childhood bedroom. Then a sense of failure, misery, and uncertainty takes over. “Her Hawaiian dream was over. Now all she had was the rest of her life,” Appiah-Kubi writes.

Maya’s parents are uncommonly understanding. They open their house to her and make no remark when she stays in bed for weeks on end. Their lives have contracted too, largely due to COVID-19. Both are older and living with health conditions, so they are at greater risk from the virus. The pandemic is a major player in Her Own Happiness—the last section is titled “Enter Omicron.” The novel successfully conjures the panic and caution the virus caused at its height. But don’t expect the darkness and death of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is, instead, relentlessly upbeat.

None of the main characters get sick. Peripheral ones do, but the virus is mainly an omnipresent threat. The characters structure their lives around it. They wear masks, avoid socializing, and when someone’s exposed, that person and everyone they could have infected, moves into a hotel. Though Her Own Happiness omits the anti-vax hallucination and does not portray those afflicted with it, the story remains an artifact of the pandemic, one that depicts life at an extraordinarily dismal historical moment.

This may have something to do with the novel’s light, happy optimism. It suggests that while all this dreadful disease and death is happening, people still struggle to get their lives together, to work, love, and stay cheerful. Just as the book shows that even getting a late start in life—that failing to “launch” with society’s expected quick rigor—need not be a catastrophe. Her Own Happiness tackles these two difficulties head on and shows how people overcome them without losing their enjoyment of life. In fact, as the title suggests with its allusion to Jane Austen’s Emma (it’s actually a direct quote from Emma Woodhouse herself), it is a novel about happiness, and how neither pandemic nor getting a late start in life can defeat love and joy.

Her Own Happiness, by Eden Appiah-Kubi and released by Montlake Romance, is now available.

In my opinion, every season is reading season, but there’s something about fall that makes you want to nestle down with a good book and a good drink. And with the new season comes an abundance of new books all vying for your attention. Below, City Paper’s book critics have dug into some upcoming and recent releases with local ties that span genres and styles to give you a head start on your fall reading list. It’s also another reminder that great things come from D.C. —Sarah Marloff

Her Own Happiness by Eden Appiah-Kubi

Release date: Sept. 5, via Montlake Romance

Genre: Romance

From Amazon Publishing’s Montlake romance imprint comes Her Own Happiness, a cheerful sophomore effort from the D.C.-born Maryland native Eden Appiah–Kubi, loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma. (Appiah-Kubi’s first novel, 2021’s The Bennet Women, also bears the imprint of another, even better known, Austen classic.) In Her Own Happiness, best friends Maya, a plus-size, pansexual artist, and Ant, an asexual lover of plants and nature, exemplify the beauty and strength of platonic Black love … at least, at first. But can their blossoming, romantic feelings survive the machinations of celebrity “girlboss for good” Emme Vivant, who sets Maya in her mentorship sights?

Emma is perhaps more of a launching pad for Her Own Happiness than a direct blueprint. If Austen is an arch, at times cynical, witness to societal foibles, Appiah-Kubi is perhaps the sweeter sister, critical of class inequality but earnest and broadly optimistic when it comes to human behavior. All the same, Austen fans will seize on the references; in (fictional) coverage, Vivant is described by Washingtonian as “handsome (WTF?), clever, and rich,” while Maya muses, “Truth was, there’s no perfect place for a Black queer woman, especially one without a small fortune.” 

At heart, Her Own Happiness is a cozy, good-natured tale of love and friendship, following characters who do not define themselves by their hip body piercings or artsy tattoos but, rather, through kindness toward others. Appiah-Kubi combines escapist descriptions of fashion and travel with an honest look at how so many of our lives have been shaped by COVID-related isolation and uncertainty. Residents of the DMV will delight in regionally specific callouts, including Rock Creek Park, Takoma Park, and Washington City Paper (hey, that’s us!). —Annie Berke

Unreliable Narrator by Aparna Nancherla

Release date:  Sept. 19, via Viking Press

Genre: Memoir 

Who am I to hold forth on comedian Aparna Nancherla’s new essay collection Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome? This debut book is an insightful, savvy read. It recognizes up front that “impostor syndrome—like probiotic yogurt—does primarily get marketed toward women and minorities.” Clearly, Nancherla’s wholesome and society-critiquing voice deserves the pop cultural space to be understood as panoramically human. “I’ll never find all the answers. But there’s meaning in trying, and meaning can be everything,” she writes.

Now based in Los Angeles, the D.C.-born, McLean-raised Nancherla was perceived by her physician parents and older sister as a shy, passionate kid who didn’t quit, who first told jokes in public at an open-mic night in Tysons. She turned 30 before her first big break as a writer-performer on the 2012–2013 TV show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell. With her ever-bigger jobs and personality-specific opportunities that followed, she explains, “Every day was Take Your Doubter to Work Day!” 

Deemed a “unicorn” in show business, Nancherla has built a versatile career as a second-generation Indian American woman who leans into onstage jokes about treating her anxiety and depression. “I think it’s hard, in comedy, or in any field maybe, to not have people put you in a box,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “But I don’t think of myself as ‘the Mental Health Comic.’” 

Her wide-ranging book also delves into her creative process, being online, and finding love that feels like home, as well as filler bits of uneven quality. Some major pieces stay on thematic task by dissecting her experiences through an informed lens of destigmatizing all mental illnesses. While documenting her eponymous topic was “an extremely agitating and disorienting process,” Nancherla stays brave because she can. “Being completely, painfully honest is the only worthwhile place I know to begin,” she writes. “Life can so often be a grotesque maze of smoke and mirrors.” 

Everybody hurts, even as the era shapes any humor in our public responses to that private fact. Way back in 2012, Nancherla tweeted, “Any pizza can be a personal one if you cry while you eat it.” Seemingly reasonable self-doubt in a world this duct-taped may indeed be an unreliable narrator. But that voice inside, the one that wants to dream and do, is reliable. It’s all we’ve got.  —Diana Michele Yap

Scenic Overlook by Anne Ray

Release date: Oct. 1, via Awst Press

Genre: Fiction, Novel-in-stories

Recalling a childhood memory of her father digging in the front yard, the protagonist of Anne Ray’s evocative Scenic Overlook explains, “I think of that day now and half of it has the flatness of looking into a television, a projection. The other half has the roundness, sharpness, of looking through a telescope.” This novel-in-stories from independent, Austin-based Awst Press follows Katie, a college dropout with a bone-deep loneliness and a penchant for wandering, as she grows up, moves away, and makes various homes for herself in the American West. Scenic Overlook, as the title suggests, is more about what Katie sees than who she is, and her desire to become more than an absence, a void, in her own life, carries across the book’s 13 chapters. 

Of these installments, “Answering Machine” stands out as a topical treatment of abortion that delves deeply into the intricacies of women’s friendships. Of her relationship with her friend Yahlie, with whom she lives and shares not just expenses but emotional intimacy, Katie says, “These days we’re more like two pioneer women who’d met face to face on the Oregon Trail and became traveling companions after losing their wagon trains in a snowstorm.” 

Characters like Yahlie and Katie’s brother, Danny, are delicately rendered; together with the snapshot quality of the collection and the reflective quality of the narration, Scenic Overlook reads more like a memoir than a novel. An Elliott City native currently working as a digital archivist of radical and historical press materials, Ray has produced a skillful debut that will appeal to readers and viewers of Into the Wild and Nomadland. —Annie Berke

Company by Shannon Sanders

Release date: Oct. 3, via Graywolf Press

Genre: Short stories

D.C.-area writer Shannon Sanders won the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers with her story “The Good, Good Men.” It’s a stunner of a piece, an exploration of the growing distance between two brothers as they prepare to run off yet another opportunistic boyfriend from their mother’s life. The story was originally published in Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series in 2019, and it’s the opener for her new short story collection, Company, that comes out from Graywolf Press on Oct. 3.

“The Good, Good Men” is the perfect introduction to Sanders’ writing. Her voice and style are reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout and Deesha Philyaw, with her beautiful, layered plotlines and character-based world building. This is not a loud collection, but instead a deeply moving one. The stories are linked, the feel almost novel-like, with every character offered the chance to step into the spotlight. Each story becomes a hero’s tale—even characters we were sure, earlier on, were the villains. Sanders’ craft is precise, her writing absolutely gorgeous, but it’s this care and love for the flawed humans she’s created that captures our hearts as we read. Her work is quietly propulsive, the collection a fast, often funny read despite its thorny subject matter. Families are complicated, loving, and sometimes even terrible, Sanders shows us, but also funny as hell.

We’re right there with her the entire time. It’s not hyperbole to say that I laughed, cried, and was completely devastated by the end of this collection. I’d fallen so in love with this world, and with Sanders’ writing, that it was very hard to put Company down. (Sanders will read from Company at 7 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Politics and Prose.) —Hannah Grieco

Bad Questions by Len Kruger

Release date: Oct. 3, via Washington Writers’ Publishing House

Genre: Fiction

Novels that are very funny and truly sad are rare, but Washington metro area writer Len Kruger’s Bad Questions is one. Set in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland, in the late 1960s, it traces the mistakes, confusion, and above all questions of seventh grader Billy Blumberg, whose father, his Hebrew school principal, has just committed suicide. It’s impossible to read this book and not get frustrated with Billy—the way you get frustrated with any stubborn adolescent, especially one who won’t stop asking questions that turn into, and turn their answers into, pretzels. “I could think of plenty of questions,” Billy tells the reader. “I was the Albert Einstein of questions. They came to me when I blinked my eyes, when I heard houses settling and telephones ringing, when I shoveled macaroni and cheese into my mouth.”

But then, given the strangely unexpected plot, it is really very fitting that this kid would make so many unlikely inquiries. To avoid a spoiler, all I’ll say is that the plot involves a junior high teacher, who tells her class, “At some point in your lives your minds will snap. All of you. Do you understand? Snap. Crackle. Pop … You—each and every one of you—will enter the Kingdom of Madness. It may be for the briefest of seconds. It may be for a week. It may be for a year … But it will happen … And there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

This somewhat crazed teacher delivers this oration at the novel’s beginning, then pops up later, weirder than ever, and alters the course of Billy’s interior life. He also gets into trouble, but that’s to be expected of a solitary, introverted, somewhat wacky teenager, whose very depressed father has just killed himself. Suicide looms over the book and, naturally, Billy’s entire life. Indeed, the novel begins with Billy lighting his father’s yahrzeit, the candle in memory of the dead, and ends with it. In between, the story is filled with narrator Billy Blumberg asking, as always, lots of questions. —Eve Ottenberg

Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession by  Laurence Leamer

Release date: Oct. 10, via G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Genre: Biography 

In Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, Washington, D.C.-based author Laurence Leamer (Capote’s Women) peels away the glamour of Hollywood to detail the director’s troubling relationships with eight high-profile blonds who starred in his movies. These actors include Ingrid Bergman (Notorious), Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), and June Howard-Tripp (The Lodger).

Readers unfamiliar with Alfred Hitchcock’s methods will learn about his obsession with these women and, explicitly, how he controlled every aspect of their lives including what they wore and how they styled their hair. On set, Hitchcock made his stars uncomfortable. During the filming of Vertigo, he placed a plucked chicken inside Novak’s dressing room, and he bombarded Hedren with dirty jokes throughout a lunch date. But he really crossed the line when he made “a sexual proposition so unspeakably crude that for the rest of her life [Tippi] could not even repeat his words,” Leamer notes in the book.

Leamer also guides readers through the actors’ personal lives starting with Bergman’s divorce from Petter Lindström and her marriage to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. He then delves into Novak’s battle with bipolar disorder and Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. 

Hitchcock was a master craftsman, but his seedy behavior, which would not be tolerated today, diminishes his accomplishments. Hitchcock’s actions, which Leamer so astutely documents, would make a cogent horror film—no editing required.  —Wayne Catan

Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, edited by Hannah Grieco

Release date:  Nov. 14, via Alan Squire Publishing

Genre: Short stories

There’s something deeply human about the urge to run away. We all, at one point or another, have longed for escape—be it from the mundane, the stress, or the fear that exists in our daily lives. Those feelings are captured succinctly, and sometimes beautifully, in the new release of short stories from Alan Squire Publishing. Edited by City Paper contributor Hannah Grieco, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away is a compact collection, totaling just over 200 pages, which means most of the aforementioned 40 stories are on the extreme end of short. Though the quick reads make it difficult for the reader to submerge themselves in, they offer brief moments of that craved escapism: We can run away in these pages and come back however quickly we like.

The collection features 40 writers (for the 40 stories), including local fiction author Amber Sparks, whose 2020 short story collection And I Do Not Forgive You was named a best of the year by NPR and the Washington Post; Aubrey Hirsch, whose byline frequently appears in my email via Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell At Me newsletter. Hirsch’s story in Already Gone is a haunting and sexually gruesome reimagining of the biblical tale of Lot’s wife; like the bruises mentioned in the pages, the story lingers. However, it’s Deesha Philyaw’s “Mother’s Day” that stands out most for me. Author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (being adapted for television with Tessa Thompson executive producing), Philyaw’s short is a beautiful story of a mother choosing herself over her adult children. It pulls you into the bright colors of Miami and offers thoughts on family and commitment that are worthy of reflection. If you long for a quick kind of escapism, this collection is for you. —Sarah Marloff

A good thriller keeps you guessing. Who’s not what they say they are? What happens next? Who really committed the crimes? If the thriller works, its revelations startle you. You don’t necessarily read thrillers for depth of character or philosophical profundities, but instead for plot, and there’s no shame in that. The better the plot, the more murderous the characters, the better the thriller. On both counts, Liv Constantine’s new novel, The Senator’s Wife, delivers.

Focusing on a senator Whit Montgomery, and his ill wife, Sloane, the novel traces her declining health against a background of political corruption and skullduggery. As the bodies pile up, the main characters grow increasingly suspicious, and the pile gets higher. Each chapter zooms in on a different person, but Sloane fills most of the book, as her health goes south, portrayed in painful but utterly convincing detail. It doesn’t help that she is fabulously rich and therefore a target for the unscrupulous.

Much of this thriller has to do with wealth—a growing trend across all forms of pop culture from TV’s White Lotus to last year’s Academy Awards Best Picture nominee Triangle of Sadness. How Sloane grew up in great affluence and married into even more money is elaborately laid out. So are the reactions to her wealth from those around her. One caregiver’s envy of her employers is so understatedly presented it’s hard not to sympathize. “Athena picked them up, noticing they were Prada.” Or, later, beyond understated: “And it didn’t escape her notice that Sloane introduced Athena as if she were a friend, never referring to the fact that Athena worked for her.”

But not everyone is so generous in their assessments of the rich. The senator himself harbors bitter memories of his somewhat shabby origins. “He hadn’t been more than 10 years old when he came to understand that those who had more looked down on those who had less.” This senator has pulled himself up by latching on to those more powerful and wealthier than he. This leads him to cut corners and conceal his tackier moves from his wife, who is, by comparison, a paragon of dignity and integrity.

The novel convincingly depicts the repellent milieu of Washington powerhouses—senators, donors, and even a vice president. With frank verisimilitude, this world is shown as corrupt and, in some quarters, depraved. Yet all that is concealed from do-gooders such as Sloane and her mother-in-law, Rosemary—they know of it, of course, but avoid it like the plague. However, the novel reveals how even the best efforts of good people cannot stop Washington rot from spreading.

Sloane’s caregiver, Athena, is pivotal to the plot and thus very carefully sketched. The reader knows from the start that she is not what she seems, but what is she? The author sedulously conceals this until the end, where the revelation puts all the puzzle pieces into place. Until then, Athena remains a sympathetic character, even though the reader wonders what she’s up to. As Athena skulks and snoops around, it certainly looks like she’s up to no good. But Sloane doesn’t become suspicious until very late, and by then her condition has seriously deteriorated.

The novel’s villain has a Machiavellian plot of such complexity, with so many moving parts, that it’s astonishing to see it pulled off. The reader’s correct suspicions are at every point sidetracked, so that by the end, the final reveal does come as a shock. It’s no surprise that the author is, in fact, a team of two sisters, Lynne and Valerie Constantine: For one person to map out each cog in this incredibly complicated machine would be difficult. Two authors make more sense, with them correcting each other and backing each other up to make sure there are no loose ends.

“If she’d learned one thing in her 82 years,” Rosemary thinks, “it was that most things are out of our control. The best we can do is live with integrity and try our utmost to do our best.” Such virtue comes under mortal assault in this thriller, and while, in life, most things may very well be out of our control, in fiction they aren’t. That’s what these two authors demonstrate, by propelling the reader through a tale of murder, betrayal, and revenge, a tale whose true villains remain hidden most of the time and whose heroine is nearly helpless and bedridden.

The Senator’s Wife by Liv Constantine; Bantam Books, 304 pages. livconstantine.com. $28

If ever there was a symbol of American aristocracy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was, for certain generations, it. Many biographies have been written about her, and for years in the 1960s and ’70s, her actions consistently made front-page news. Part of the cause of her stupendous celebrity was her privileged upbringing, though she was glad to have “escaped” that. As she told a friend once, on a beach: “Do you realize how lucky we are? To have gotten out of that world we came from. That narrow world of Newport … you and I have taken such a big bite out of life.”

This quote appears in a new biography, Finding Jackie, by Oline Eaton. The book covers everything, though most meticulously her two marriages. There’s less about her Manhattan life, working at Viking Press after the death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. And yet, perhaps because it’s glossed over, that period beckons as somehow the most interesting, the period in which she became her own woman, not merely the wife of an internationally powerful man. Nonetheless, it was Jackie the wife and widow of John F. Kennedy and Onassis who transfixed the world.

Her celebrity grew to such fantastic proportions by the 1970s, with Jackie constantly on the covers of magazines, that it became a national fixation. When married to Onassis, she sued photographer Ron Galella, who pursued her like a madman, and she managed, partially, to bring him to heel. Galella was only the most aggressive of the pack of Jackie watchers, of whom Truman Capote said: “There was always, underneath all that adulation, a tremendous resentment and envy.” How else to explain the obsession with everything she did, said, or bought, from designer ensembles to toothbrushes.

But there was a reason for the envy: Jackie lived like nobility. For this, columnist Jack Anderson criticized her “for shirking her responsibility—‘the staggering opportunity to serve mankind’ that fate bestowed on her—and ‘pursuing instead a life of luxury, languor, gowns, jewels and the wheedling of unearned wealth.’”

That changed slightly after Onassis’ death, when she started working at Viking. As one writer observed, Jackie was everything: “socialite, working girl, bride, grieving mother, wronged wife, widow, expatriate, proud mother, fashion plate, career woman, grandmother.” This period after the death of her second husband was also one of financial security—she inherited millions from him. But though Jackie was everything, what originally hooked Americans was her being Kennedy’s widow, the first lady who sat next to the president when he was shot, whose world collapsed so publicly, on film even. Though Finding Jackie does not emphasize this point, anyone who lived through the Jackie years, even as a child, knew that deep down, the public’s attachment to her stemmed from the horror of the assassination, of feeling like they went through it with her.

When the book does focus on her time as first lady, it does not delve much into the Kennedy administration, the president’s policies, or what might have caused something many cannot shake as a conviction—that some part of the government conspired to kill him. He wanted to dismantle the CIA. He negotiated closely with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a time when many in the Pentagon were gearing up for the Cold War to become a hot one and thus regarded such unorthodox diplomacy dyspeptically, at best, and as treason at worst. The flimsy case against Lee Harvey Oswald, his all-too-convenient murder by Jack Ruby rivaling the so-called suicide of Jeffrey Epstein for suspiciousness and unbelievability—none of this was ever satisfactorily dealt with, and uncertainty persisted. Surely it must have affected the president’s widow, but just as surely, if it did, she kept quiet about it, making it all but impossible for a biographer to record her views.

Instead we get a portrait of an incredibly pampered aristocrat, a member of the glitterati, busy looking out for herself. Many might ask why she shouldn’t do that. After all, she went through hell in Dallas during her husband’s last moments. And yet, as Anderson indicated, she fell short. In the end, like most people, Jackie took care of herself and did very little else. That just makes her rather ordinary. This may not be what Eaton intended to discover, but this is the Jackie her new book finds.

Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented by Oline Eaton was published by Diversion Books on Jan. 31. Hardcover, 349 pages.

Scavenger Hunt, Chad Boudreaux’s debut novel, demonstrates the absurdity and awfulness of the early aughts’ war on terror. The better the thriller, the clearer the reality: Since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. has pivoted from a terror war in the Middle East to a great powers competition, including, potentially, nuclear confrontation. That doesn’t mean U.S. troops have actually retreated from the global war on terror; they remain scattered throughout the Middle East. But that conflict is on a low simmer, rather than the rapid boil it reached before Biden.

Boudreaux’s skillful war-on-terror thriller, Scavenger Hunt, is immersed in the zeitgeist of that rapid boil. Published on Jan. 31, the novel chronicles the desperate survival struggle of Blake Hudson, a Justice Department lawyer caught up in an off-the-books anti-terror op that goes bad. Blake, like the book’s narrator, has no doubts about the necessity of the global war on terror, but, for those who believe its emblems, such as the Patriot Act, trashed the Bill of Rights, the gung-ho warrior on terror is not someone with whom they have much in common. The book shares the worldview of the anti-terror TV show 24, though with a sprinkling of legal doubts and reservations about U.S. special operations going too far.

Set contemporarily, the novel opens with a legal “catastrophe”: A judge has ruled that an individual held on terrorism charges may have “unmonitored” access to counsel. This mindset, in which the lawyer-client privilege should be ditched to suit the conflict’s convenience, offends lots of Americans. But it wouldn’t have in 2002. That was when Washington denizens first began bandying about terms such as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture, and the notion that the Bill of Rights should be more elastic under periods of duress. So Scavenger Hunt succeeds totally in bringing the spirit of that era back to life. It’s a spirit many Americans may prefer to forget, but it was real, as Boudreaux correctly reminds us, in a way that unintentionally reveals its datedness. “We’ve seen before where a terrorist’s lawyer acts as a liaison, a conduit of information between a detainee and his terrorist cell,” warns one character early on. This view would not go over so well today, when many people feel the war on terror’s infringements on civil liberties went too far.

Like many thrillers, this book severs the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys. It’s what keeps the pages turning. It’s even acknowledged in the text itself: “Any guilt borne by the casualties wrought by his hands had long ago been buried by the honor of his cause. He’d been programmed to think about the cause. Nothing else mattered. He knew that by exterminating the bad guys, he was protecting the good guys.” 

But what happens when one of those bad guys burrows deep into the counterterrorism apparatus? Well, then the good guys must run for their lives, as the novel shows.

This book’s milieu is mostly the Justice Department in D.C. Though it cuts to some exotic locales, D.C. remains central, and within it, the workings of government. At one point, the U.S. Attorney General meets with members of Congress to argue for more powers, as seemed to happen weekly after 9/11. “I’m here to ask Congress to pass emergency legislation to create a new legal construct for terrorism-related cases. The existing legal structure—composed of the federal criminal system and military tribunals—just doesn’t work,” the AG tells a legislative committee. These remarks enhance the post-9/11 atmosphere, in which actions at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba showcased the loosening definition of torture that became part of mainstream news and culture.

The novel reveals a detailed grasp of anti-terror laws—after all, Boudreaux was a Justice Department attorney who was hired by the U.S. Attorney General the night before the Sept. 11 attacks—and the narrator’s low tolerance for people of the politically left persuasion. (After leaving the DOJ, Boudreaux served as deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security; currently he’s the chief legal officer of the country’s largest military shipbuilder.) In one scene, as senators discuss the Patriot Act, those more sensitive to protecting citizen’s rights are portrayed quite unsympathetically. Indeed, they “yammered away with their sophistry and word salads.” At times like this, the narrator seems to grind the George W. Bush administration’s ax against the objections of civil libertarians. But this does not happen often, for the simple reason that nonstop action occupies most of the book and the narrator.

This thriller presents an alternative history, in which there have been multiple massive terror attacks post-9/11, right up to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, Boudreaux renders his hard-line anti-terror views more contemporary and justifies the extreme solutions advanced. In light of these, however, and of the mayhem caused by continuing terrorism, most readers will doubtless be relieved to recall that, after all, 9/11 was just a one-off.

Scavenger Hunt by Chad Boudreaux was published via Morgan James Fiction on Jan. 31. Paperback, 296 pages.

Bars and restaurants provide good settings for comedy—witness the success of the 1980s sitcom Cheers, and both Friends and Seinfeld loved a public eatery scene. What’s true for the screen also holds true for books, as demonstrated by D.C.-based author Jennifer Close’s new novel, Marrying the Ketchups. This story of the Sullivan family and their eponymous restaurant in Chicago zips from one-liner to one-liner, with well-drawn and humorous characters. It makes for enjoyable reading.

Three central millennials share one thing besides family: Their love lives are disasters. As they recover from various breakups, acts of cheating, and a failed marriage, they gravitate to Sullivan’s, their grandfather’s Oak Park restaurant that their parents now manage. Before uprooting to Chicago, Gretchen Sullivan is in a New York band. Describing it, one of her bandmates says, “‘It gives us more time for our own artistic pursuits.’ By ‘artistic pursuits,’ Gretchen could only imagine he meant getting stoned and watching cartoons.” Which is what she does, too. Suffice it to say, before she returns to Chicago, her life is a mess.

Then there’s her cousin Teddy, whose boyfriend just ditched him and who now mopes around with his pals. At one point, his disdain falls upon a friend’s partner:  “Cindy’s boyfriend had the personality of dry toast, but Teddy tried to be charitable.” Teddy spends a lot of time contemplating Cindy’s boyfriend Brad’s limitations. “That Brad had made it to his thirties without understanding the function of a shower curtain was extremely upsetting.” Whenever the narrator gets inside Teddy’s head, the zingers start to fly, but the same holds true for his cousins.

Jane, on the other hand, is the cousin who did everything right. She finished college, married her boyfriend, bought a house in the Chicago suburbs, and had two kids. And then everything falls apart. Much of Marrying the Ketchups concerns Jane’s collapse, and the message is clear: No one can escape the lousy vagaries of life. “Maybe this is what the divorce expert means by ups and downs,” Jane muses midway through the novel. “Maybe she means learning that you are living with a stranger who doesn’t appear to be a nice person and wondering how you could’ve made such a huge and horrible mistake.” Throughout the book, Jane is continuously faced with the discovery of what it is like for life to work out badly. At another point, Jane offers, “It turns out that being separated from your husband feels like you are constantly five minutes away from starting your period.”

Other characters lurk in the wings for occasional cameos: Rose, the grandmother, who has been rather unceremoniously dumped in assisted living, which she hates; Jane and Gretchen’s parents, who run the restaurant along with Teddy’s mother; Riley, Teddy’s sardonic, teenage half sister, as well as the bartender, chef, and others who work at Sullivan’s and the cousins’ assorted friends. Mostly the narrator sticks to the three 30-somethings who, in addition to their personal problems, have been shocked into a near frenzy, as most Democrats were, by the 2016 election results. That’s when the story takes place, and Trump’s incoming presidency looms over everyone like an advancing tornado.

The characters’ frantic fears about how they will survive under Trump still seem relevant, though most people and even the government survived—even though he did try to overthrow it. 

To get over being dumped, Gretchen tries online dating and suffers the consequences: As the narrator notes, she keeps “getting matched with her friend’s uncle, who was 65 years old and deceased.” Meanwhile Teddy invents extravagant lies to conceal hooking up with his ex. “Gretchen didn’t bother asking him why he was lying, because she really didn’t care. He probably wanted to organize his spices or hand-wash all of his cashmere.” Everybody bounces off everybody else at the restaurant—dealing with each other’s highs and lows—and no one manages to keep a secret for long. For those readers who have worked in food service, that really is verisimilitude.

In Marrying the Ketchups, some relationships die, but new ones start. At times serious, it’s basically a light-hearted novel, in which all the endings, even the funerals, are somehow fun. But that’s what you’d expect of a restaurant story where how to pair up half-empty ketchup bottles resonates in all its characters’ lives.

Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close is available from Knopf publishing. penguinrandomhouse.com. $28.

Families drift apart for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s geography, sometimes it’s more complicated: aging, death, trauma, or hidden dislike. On the surface the cause may be unclear, leaving people to wonder why a sibling never calls. But the person who drifts away knows why, even if they never explain it. Such intricacies form the warp and weft of Anne Tyler’s new novel, French Braid, released on March 22. 

In modern, hyper-mobile America, this separation happens a lot. People leave home and move around the country. It becomes an excuse for children to see little of parents and siblings less of one another. In her latest work, the Baltimore-based author follows the Garretts, a family also based in Baltimore, over three generations—deftly documenting the separating family and the role loneliness plays. She delineates their love and the distance caused by pain in a book that, despite its pervasive cheer, asks why people gently abandon each other.

Especially well-depicted in French Braid is the Garretts’ puzzlement over a brother’s total removal of himself from the family. Living in the Philadelphia suburbs, which are not all that far from Baltimore, he makes the miles seem farther. Everyone wonders why—even the reader—until it is finally sketched with a few revealing strokes. The cause is almost mundane, and yet seemingly small actions loom so large in his history that he drifts away from his family. It’s something most anyone can relate to.

By the time the book reaches the third generation of Garretts, it’s hard to keep track of all of them. But Tyler sidesteps this difficulty by zeroing in on a handful of the younger generation at moments of profound separation from the family. Those separations may appear superficial, with an aunt moving away, for instance, but their implications reverberate for those left behind until there’s only one remaining clan member in Baltimore. Other separations are more shocking, but in either case, they herald an ending and usher in a new stage of loneliness.

Still some of these endings lead to new beginnings, new friends, new spouses. Life goes on and it—and Tyler’s book—is not all about loss, but also about how people can recover from loss. This is all done with Tyler’s characteristic light touch. A somber theme set off by her gentle, cheerful style. The melancholy glimmers mostly below a bright, acute, and often funny surface.

“He and Bentley liked to stand waist deep, with their arms folded across their chests and talk about sewage or something,” Tyler writes, describing two plumbers on vacation at Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake.

She also includes dry, lambent observations: “There were advantages to being a girl and having nothing much expected of you,” says one of the plumber’s daughters during the same vacation. 

But if the surface sparkle and occasional levity becomes so enchanting that you mistake this book as a bit of entertaining fluff, you’ll miss the whole picture. This White, middle class family is the type you’d expect to have, or want, a white picket fence. But in French Braid, “ordinary” is a tricky category where truth and authenticity reside. “Ordinary” is the repository of life’s complications. For instance, after dropping their son off at college, two empty nesters start internal emotional journeys in opposite directions as soon as they begin the drive home. “Generally they stayed sunk in the sort of silence that radiates unspoken thoughts—complicated conflicting thoughts cluttering the air inside the car.”

As the title suggests, this book braids together unique, singular strands. The eight characters presented in depth, stand forth in their carefully depicted individuality, a few in their irreducible aloneness, like a mother who believes her children don’t know that she has abandoned their father. As with so many of Tyler’s creations, they stay with you a long time—sometimes you see aspects of them in people you know. The humility, the modesty of the presentation can mislead the inattentive reader. Everyone here has depths from which issues rise noisily to the surface, so they cannot be ignored.

Throughout it all is Tyler’s attentive ear for American life. This novel takes place along the Acela corridor, spanning Baltimore, Manhattan, and the outskirts of Philadelphia. For the many of us who’ve lived along the East Coast, French Braid captures the region with subtle hints. Though centered in Baltimore, the story nonetheless reaches out beyond it, just as the characters, deceivingly simple, reveal truths about life that are anything but. 

French Braid, by Anne Tyler, is is available wherever books are sold. annetyler.com.

A novel, set in 1944, about loss, an unwed pregnancy, and succeeding as a multiracial career woman, might seem, at first, improbable. After all, during  those years in the U.S., women’s aspirations were supposed to end at being wives and homemakers, while Jim Crow ruled the roost in the South (and influenced the rest of the country). The treatment of women and people of color wasn’t much better in the U.K., where Dorine Andrews’ new book, Jack’s Gift, is set. And yet Andrews, a local author and blogger, makes it believable. The feat would be easier to achieve by setting the story in the 1970s, but by pushing her story farther into the past, Andrews gilds it with a touch of fairy tale, one she convinces her readers could have happened.

It’s true that women were briefly liberated in the 1940s, when so many English and American men were fighting in World War II, and women filled their jobs in factories and offices. But post-war, most returned to domesticity, largely until the feminist movement of the late 1960s. Jack’s Gift follows the life of one woman, Amahli. A British Indian living in the U.K., Amahli does not accept the push to return to the kitchens when the men return home from war. This is a women’s liberation story set at a time when there was little liberation to be had. Unwed mothers were shamed and shunned, people of color rarely advanced in business and government, and a career-woman was an oddity.

Andrews cleverly lays out Amahli’s unique circumstances: Her family, unusual for this time, does not reject her. She needs that support—without it she’d likely be forced to abandon her baby to adoption. Her British father and Hindu mother, who married for love, however, rise to the occasion—clearly ahead of their time.

Still, Amahli knows well what time she lives in. Jack was Amahli’s fiancé, an American pilot stationed in Great Britain who was shot down over Europe during WWII. As she pictures her dead lover’s family, she says: “What would you say if your twenty-two-year-old son fathered a bastard halfway around the world with a mixed-race five-foot-ten Amazon of a woman? And she was four years older than him and he only knew her for five months?” Amahli expects rejection from Jack’s family—but not from her own. Her parents do not belong to the era. They quickly defy its prejudices. One of my few concerns about this book is that it did not expand on how they got that way.

Amahli’s mother tells her that “nothing protects a woman,” but she could have added “except her family,” because she and her husband do just that. They proceed to protect their daughter. They also assist in her career; though loath for her father to pull strings, she quickly learns that anyone who can does exactly that. This plot device injects a healthy dose of reality into a portrait of her upward career trajectory. Yes, a handful of women made careers for themselves in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but few looked and lived like Amahli. Bigotry was far too ferocious for that. But in Andrews’ world, Amahli can display a photo of her child on her office desk— the implication being that her male co-workers know she’s a single mother and don’t object.

The story’s arc follows Amahli’s character and how she’s able  to forge her path forward. Complications arise, however, when Jack’s family eventually enters the picture. Each member has their own take on Amahli, her child, and how both families should, or shouldn’t, blend. The differences of ideas make sparks fly and illuminate one person, in particular, as a bigoted manipulator.

Despite some slightly jarring details, overall Amahli’s story convinces readers. Her unique parental support, her education, and the career leverage provided by her father enable her success. But the critical element, of course, is her character. Amahli does not long to be married and she doesn’t want men interfering with her career. She is happy raising her child with her parents’ help. In short, aside from her father, she is eager not to owe anything to any man. She creates her career on her terms. If this sounds more 1990s than 1950s, well, it is. But it’s interesting to imagine someone in this situation roughly 70 years ago. Amahli is that person.

Jack’s Gift, by Dorine Andrews, is available wherever books are sold. dorineandrews.com.