Stories about the people you choose
15 books
A solitary case worker is sent to a sun-warmed island full of magical orphans. The book everyone hands their friend who needs a hug in novel form.
A lawyer dies and ends up at a tea shop run by a ferryman. The afterlife as the family he didn't know he was looking for.
A multispecies crew on a wormhole-tunnelling ship. The plot is the trip; the substance is the dinners and the small kindnesses.
An AI in an illegal humanoid body and a tech who survived a slave shipyard. Two characters, two timelines, one of the warmest SF novels of the decade.
A failed bank robber takes hostages at an apartment viewing. By the end of the day, none of them are quite who they were that morning.
A Swedish forest town built around its junior hockey team. A teenage star, a thing he does, and a community that has to choose. Backman's hardest book and his best.
A widower decides to die. The new neighbours and a stray cat have other plans. Backman built his career on this novel and it earns the foundation.
A woman between life and death browses every life she could have lived. Haig writes the regrets gently and the lessons without pretending.
A Glaswegian office worker who is, demonstrably, not fine. The colleague and the IT guy who become her people accidentally.
A chemist, her dog, her daughter, and the rowing team that ends up adopting them. Garmus builds the household reader by reader.
A grumpy widower bookseller finds a toddler abandoned in his shop. Zevin writes the slow accidental fatherhood in chapters named after stories.
A pregnant teenager, two elderly cattle ranchers, a high-school teacher with twin sons. Haruf writes a Colorado town in flat prose and the shape of family is what's left.
Two friends who make video games together for thirty years. The chosen family is the work and the work is the family.
Six teenage criminals try to break into the most secure prison in the world. The heist is the plot; the people they decide are theirs is the novel.
A Russian count under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol for thirty-two years. The waiter, the actress, the seamstress, the daughter — Towles assembles a life one floor at a time.
