Someone Else's Husband

This suspenseful mystery is the newest novel from Kimberly McCreight (2026) which offers "plenty of surprising secondary twists" (Publishers Weekly). The Boston Globe similarly comments that "“Multiple sleights of hand propel this pleasurably head-spinning thriller."

Kirkus introduces their review with this summary: "When Gretchen Falk and her husband, Richard, are awakened in the wee hours by police officers pounding on the door of their Upper East Side apartment, neither knows anything about why an up-and-coming artist named Frankie Callahan is dead—but it turns out that Richard knew Frankie fairly well, the two having met on a climbing expedition of Mount Kilimanjaro. The narration switches between Gretchen as her family copes with Richard’s arrest on murder charges and Frankie in the week before her death as she’s concerned about a man from her past; there are also scenes from the Kilimanjaro trip, which involved a tragic fall..." They go on to note that "Much of what connects these characters has to do with American social class" and conclude with this lukewarm assessment "McCreight focuses on class tensions in a plot that doesn’t quite rise to the heights of her previous books."

The New York Times has a more positive review, calling this a "labyrinthine mystery, told from multiple points of view in multiple timelines. It’s far more complicated than it first appears, and it rewards patience." Publishers Weekly likewise praises "Dynamic characters and expert pacing further bolster the proceedings." I was surprised by the ending as we are offered several red herrings that suggest who the murderer might be, and I found the storyline engaging. Secondary characters are only minimally developed; however, they serve to highlight aspects of the main characters.

The Love of My Life

This book by Rosie Walsh will keep you guessing until the end. I felt like it dragged out the big reveal far too long. However, reviewers were much more complimentary. The Washington Post's Maureen Corrigan calls this a "masterful domestic thriller with a doozy of a plot,"  and I totally respect Ms. Corrigan's reviews. Corrigan goes on to say, "a classic example of the “I married a stranger” domestic suspense plot — with a twist. Usually, the partner with a secret triggers suspicion in us canny readers early on. ...But, Emma Merry Bigelow, the enigmatic heroine of Rosie Walsh’s “The Love of My Life,” seems so funny, warm, compassionate and kind that we readers root for her — even though we learn fairly quickly that she’s living under an assumed name and harbors a host of other secrets, something her adoring husband, Leo, doesn’t know about. Walsh just may have written the first domestic suspense novel in which the deceitful spouse is also a genuinely nice person. Maybe." Emma is an "intertidal biologist" and husband Leo is an obituary writer, which is how he discovers that the woman he is still madly in love with after 7 years of marriage isn't who he thought she was--at least not entirely.  He begins digging and fears he has uncovered infidelity and a criminal background. But it's not what he thinks.

Similarly, Kirkus calls the book "a propulsive thriller with heart that will keep readers guessing." Publishers Weekly calls it a "heartbreaking thriller" and agrees that it gets off to a slow start, but concludes  that it " builds to an emotionally raw yet satisfying conclusion."

Lady Clementine

 Marie Benedict writes about amazing women who have received little attention in history. Kirkus calls it a "rousing tale of ambition and love," and the ambition is not just on the part of Winston. Drawn together at a very fundamental level by their childhoods that were devoid of significant affection, Clemmie and Winston--or Cat and Pug as they affectionately called each other--form a bond so strong that it cannot be sundered by wars, flirtatious women or even the death of a daughter. Based on a voluminous correspondence between the two that was kept and published by their daughter, it is clear that Winston could not have succeeded without Clementine, and Clementine would have withered under the strictures imposed on women at the time without the dramatic stage of Winston's political career. Booklist summarizes the story this way: "Beginning on Clementine's wedding day in 1909 and tracing key events in her life for the next 35 years, the book focuses on Clementine's struggle to be both an emotional and intellectual support to her demanding husband, her mixed feelings about motherhood, and her own strongly held political beliefs, which she was often forced to sideline in service of her husband's ambition."

She supported Winston absolutely although she frequently reined in his harsh attacks on those who worked with him, offered advice that he would hear only from her, and often helped rewrite his speeches. She felt she was an inadequate mother, but she took up the cause of women and children with a vengeance, and was solely responsible for improving the conditions in air raid shelters. She talked to the people who were harmed by the war and carried their concerns to the top levels of government. She had her own struggles with depression as well as disapproval from family members and officials surrounding Churchill for the active role she took in political and government affairs. Having read two books about Churchill (The Splendid and the Vile and Hero of the Empire), this book offered a very different perspective on Churchill that painted him as a flawed human who thought himself destined for great things. Clementine helped hide the flaws and achieve his destiny. 

Publishers Weekly praised Benedict's novel: "Accurate era descriptions add to the realism of the story, and Benedict reveals the connection between Clementine's grounded energy and her thoughtful influence throughout times of war and peace."

The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty

This memoir by Carolyn G. Heilbrun was written 20 years ago and that was when I read it for the first time. I loved it then and so, when my book group agreed to have a thematic meeting on aging gracefully, I immediately thought of re-reading this book. Strangely enough, it did not resonate with me this time around to the same extent, even though I am now the age she was when she wrote it. Still, it is a lovely book with some great insights, and she is such a good writer that it is a pleasure to read.
The passages that spoke to me were often not about aging per se, but about the world in general, and it is staggering how pertinent to our present times her observations were:
"My sixties covered a period of pronounced meanness in the United States and in the world, meanness arising from a sense of righteousness and the need to punish, preferably with violence, those who do not share one's beliefs. For the first time in my life, I became fearful of institutionalized religion...I became awakened, sadly, to policies determined to transpose the symptoms of our societal failures into its causes: the poor, that is, were to be blamed for the failures of a mean-spirited nation that condemned them to poverty...What might be called political sadness arises...as an indirect response to organized and publicly condoned selfishness and revenge..."
And this on reading:
"True sadness which is not nostalgia can...be dispelled by reading...Lifelong readers continue to read, finding in books...the means to enjoy life or to endure it."
She does indeed talk about aging and quotes (indirectly) from Montaigne on the subject:
"Above all, now that I feel my life to be brief in time, do I seek to extend it in weight. I try to delay the velocity of its flight by the velocity with which I grasp it; and to compensate for the speed of its collapse by the zest which I throw into it. The shorter my hold on life, the deeper and fuller do I seek to rend it. Others feel the sweetness of contentment and well-being; I feel it just as much as they do, but not by letting it just slip away."
She also talks about outliving our time, when there is no further point in continuing. She had given herself permission to commit suicide at the age of 70 but now says, "I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as borrowed time. Each day one can say to oneself: I can always die; do I choose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnesly becasue it is a choice."  She goes on to caution against "...indifference's seduction; however often apathy assaults me in these last decades, I know it to be dangerous."
She, like others I have read on the subject, encourages focus on the present, eschewing time spent on memories. "Every time those of us in our last decades allow a memory to occur, we forget to look at what is in front of us." Among other things, she writes chapters on downsizing, her love of all things English, on not wearing dresses, on sadness, on listening to the young(er), on family and husbands, on sex and romance, and on technology. Here is a review from The New York Times, and a collection of quotes from the book in GoodReads. Well worth the read.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, born in 1926, was an academic at Columbia University and the first woman to receive tenure there in the English department. She was a prolific author of academic and non-fiction works on topics often related to feminism. Under her pen name, Amanda Cross, she also wrote a series of mysteries with a woman professor as the protagonist. She committed suicide in 2003.  There is a fabulous obituary in the New York Times, and an interview with her in the New York Times Magazine a decade before she died. There is a list of her books and more information about her also in this article from Wikipedia.

The Light of the World

This book by Elizabeth Alexander was one I read because I thought my friend, Joan* had recommended it. Turns out she told me she could NOT read it. But it was too late. I cried and I sighed and my heart broke and soared. It is a book about loss, specifically the death of her husband from a heart attack when he was barely 50 years old. He was a refugee from the wars in Eritrea, but embraced life with a fervor that perhaps sought to balance out the trauma he had endured.
So it is also a book about love and living life to the fullest. Not many of us will have a love or a marriage like Elizabeth and Ficre, but if we have loved at all, then we know that loss is the inevitable flip side of the coin. Whether or not this is a loss you have experienced personally, much will resonate as she describes her --and her sons'-- struggle to cope with life after Ficre.
Alexander is a poetry professor at Yale so it is not surprising that her writing is rich in sensory image, emotion and recollection. She read one of her poems at Obama's 2009 inauguration. Well worth reading. Much more comprehensive review here from the NYTimes and this much briefer but touching one from Kirkus.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

This novel by BBC playwright Rachel Joyce has certainly received a lot of positive press (The Guardian, NYT), but for me the compelling reason to read it was because my sister-in-law and I have been sharing more introspectively fueled thoughts of late and have labelled these conversations our "pilgrimage." The storyline is that one day Harold Fry receives a letter from a former co-worker, Queenie Hennessy, telling him that she is dying of cancer and wanted to say good-bye. Harold is overwhelmed, then jots a note, addresses it, and heads out the door to post it back to her. On his way to the mailbox, he starts to think about what an inadequate response this is to someone who had meant a lot to him, so he keeps walking and thinking and at some point decides he is going to walk from his home in the southwest corner of England to the hospice where Queenie currently reside in the northwest corner of the country--something over 500 miles. It is a roller coaster of a walk in so many ways. He is inspired by the stories of those he meets and alternately weighed down by them. He accumulates and then discards belongings. He is roiled with memories of the deterioration of his marriage, his failures as a husband, father and friend. People are, in turn, kind to him, inspired by him, and even dismissive of him. His walk becomes national news. He learns that his postcards to Queenie are indeed giving her a reason to hold on and continue living. Meanwhile, his estranged wife Maureen is having her own epiphanies about responsibility, blame and destroying the love of her life. Hang in there with Harold, Maureen and Queenie for a thought-provoking and ultimately rewarding journey.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

I did not finish this book by Matt Bell. I would characterize it as magical realism, not a favorite genre of mine to start with, but again I was enticed by glowing reviews. There is too much despair, too little storyline for me here. The description is well crafted. A man and a woman marry, move away from their family and friends to an isolated plot of land. He builds a house and they try to start a family. But time after time, she miscarries. Eventually, her ability to sing things into existence is put to full use as she creates a child. But he knows of the deception--that this being is not the result of their physical union and he begins to destroy the natural world around them while she places a threatening 2nd moon in the sky above. You can read more extended reviews in the New York Times, and at NPR, among others.

Committed

I didn't even read Elizabeth Gilbert's book before I went to see the movie version, Eat, Pray, Love. I'm pretty sure every woman I know--at least all the ones I talked to--HAD read the book. But based on rave reviews of that book by friends, and a favorable impression of the movie, when my friend Marianne offered to loan me the follow up to that story in audiobook form, I took it. It is basically about Gilbert's year long quest to learn everything she could about marriage in order to come to terms with the situation faced by her and her partner, Felipe. For reasons unknown, Homeland Security decided at some point in their commuter relationship that Felipe could no longer come to the United States. Didn't matter that he was an Australian citizen, that he had done business in the United States for years. He simply couldn't return. And they found this out while on the way home to Philadelphia when he was detained and questioned for several hours, then imprisoned until he could be flown out of the country. The only option was for them to marry, but neither of them really wanted to, due to bad divorces from their first spouses, and it wasn't all that easy to get permission. So in the intervening months, while an immigration lawyer worked on the beaurocratic hurdles, they tried to live as cheaply as possible in southeast Asia, eventually returning to Felipe's previous home in Bali. But in the meantime, Gilbert engaged in an unrelenting research project, reading everything she could get hands on and interviewing every person she came across. And we learn what she learns. I was reminded at times of starting to read Karen Armstrong's A History of God. I realized afresh, in connection with this specific social institution, that what we know today, what people tell us has been the history of marriage, is but a small fraction of it's overall role in the course of human civilization. The reasons people marry have changed, who gets to decide who gets married has changed, even whether or not marriage is a good thing has changed. Contrary to popular religious rhetoric, the Christian churches originally sought to stop all marriage--and of course sexual behavior. The pace of the book ebbs and flows, and occasionally her dithering gets a bit tedious, but I learned so much at an intellectual level, and resonated so often at a personal level, that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Committed. She writes wonderfully and that in and of itself is a treat.