Best Books From 2022

Book Summary

In this charming debut novel, Widower Tova works at the Sowell Bay Aquarium to occupy her mind and time. She takes pride in cleaning perfectly every night, even though she doesn’t need the money. She loves all the aquarium life but forms a special bond with the intelligent (and curmudgeonly) octopus named Marcellus.

He’s just as surprised to feel friendly toward this human who visits him nightly. Soon, he connects the sadness he sees in her with something he saw in the ocean long ago. Can he help her solve the mystery of her son’s disappearance 30 years ago?

Book Summary

This historical fiction novel is based on the true story of Lyudmila (Mila) Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian sniper who fought against the Nazis during WWII. The novel follows Mila’s journey from a young woman studying history in Kyiv to a decorated war hero known as “Lady Death.”

In the late 1930s, Mila is a 24-year-old student and library worker living in Kyiv. She is intelligent, independent, and fiercely patriotic. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, she joined the Red Army and quickly proved to be a natural sniper.

This novel is told in two timelines – the first being Mila’s time on the battlefield. The second timeline follows Mila’s press tour in Washington DC.

When news of her 300th kill makes her a national hero, she is sent to the United States on a 1942 goodwill tour. In the US, she pleads for the US to send weapons and troops to Europe to help stop the Germans. She also forms an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Throughout the novel, in addition to Mila’s perspective, we also see short notes from Eleanor Roosevelt and chapters from the point of view of an unnamed marksman who has been tasked with assassinating Franklin Roosevelt and framing Mila for the murder.

Book Summary

Through the true story of a racehorse named Lexington, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks manages to weave a tale of spirit and injustice over 150 years of American history.

The book has three timelines. In 1850, you’ll meet an enslaved horse groomer, Jarrett, in Kentucky, who has a special bond with Lexington. There is also a young artist who paints images of the horse. When the Civil War erupts, the artist fights for the union and runs into the young groom and stallion again far from the track.

In 1954, a gallery owner on Martha’s Vineyard took a special interest in a 19th-century equestrian painting, even though the artist and provenance are unknown.

In 2019, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia and a Nigerian-American art historian unexpectedly connected through a common interest in the painting as they looked for clues to the origin.

Book Summary

Alexis is a thirty-seven-year-old sophisticated city girl. Daniel is the twenty-eight-year-old small-town mayor who saves her when her car gets stuck in a ditch. They have almost nothing in common but a strong commitment to their respective communities. Nonetheless, their chemistry is undeniable!

She comes from an ultra-wealthy family who looks down on her for being a mere ER doctor (rather than carrying on the family legacy as a world-renowned surgeon). She’s also recovering from a toxic relationship.

As she spends time in Daniel’s tight-knit small town, she discovers what’s really important to her. But it seems impossible to reconcile these revelations with her obligations. Is there any chance that their fling could be anything more than that? How can she choose between her world and his?

Book Summary

This literary fiction set in 2018 follows Indian-American journalist Smita as she returns to India to investigate Meena’s story. Meena is a Hindu woman who was disfigured when her brothers set fire to her home because she married a Muslim man. 

Brave Meena fights back by taking her brothers to court for their brutal crime. While learning more about Meena and her relationship, Smita is surprised to find her own romantic connection in India.

Book Summary

Elizabeth Zott is a quirky and brilliant female chemist working with an all-male team at the Hastings Research Institute. But her scientific qualifications don’t stop the “good old boys” from being frustrated that she won’t get coffee or make copies for them. When Elizabeth meets Calvin Evans, another scientist at the Institute, another type of chemistry results.

Fast forward a few years. It’s 1961, and Elizabeth is a 30-year-old single mother, and her career has been detoured. Instead of working for Hastings, she’s now (somewhat reluctantly) the star of a much-loved cooking show called Supper at Six. Her cooking methods are unusual (“combine one tablespoon of acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”). As her popularity grows, it turns out she’s not just teaching women to cook, she’s also daring them to change the status quo.

Book Summary

On Mallow Island, off the coast of South Carolina, sits an old cobblestone building in the shape of a horseshoe. It’s called the Dellawisp, named after the tiny turquoise birds who reside there alongside its human tenants. The building has an air of magical secrecy.

When 19-year-old Zoe inherits her late mother’s apartment at the Dellawisp, she meets the quirky and secretive neighbors, including a henna artist, a lonely chef, middle-aged sisters (one of whom is a hoarder), and three ghosts. The property is overseen by Frasier, who has a special affinity for the birds.

When one of the residents turns up dead, the other neighbors search for answers, but each is also hiding secrets of their own. The investigation leads to the island’s famous but reclusive author and to a long-lost relative of the sisters.

Book Summary

Olivia has been raising her son, Asher, as a single mom ever since she fled her seemingly perfect marriage that was not as it appeared from the outside. When she left her abusive marriage to protect her son, she brought him to her small hometown in New Hampshire. Once home, she moved into her childhood house and took over her father’s beekeeping business.

Like Olivia, Lily is also familiar with starting over. She and her mom recently relocated to New Hampshire to give Lily a fresh start in her final year of high school.

Olivia and Lily’s lives cross paths when Asher begins dating and falls in love with the new girl in town. A few months later, Olivia is shocked to receive a phone call from Asher that he’s at the police station and Lily is dead. Asher is the only suspect in the case, but he insists he didn’t do it. Olivia is willing to give up everything she has to defend her son. But as the case moves toward trial, and as she discovers that Asher has hidden more from her than she realized, Olivia begins to question what traits her son may have inherited from his father.

Book Summary

Lillian was one of the most sought-after artist models in New York City, with statues based on her figure gracing famous landmarks throughout the city – from the Plaza Hotel to the Brooklyn Bridge. After losing her mother to the Spanish Flu outbreak, however, Lillian feels lost in the world.

Her work has mostly dried up, so when she’s offered a job as a personal secretary at the Frick mansion—a building that, ironically, bears her own visage—Lillian is eager to accept the opportunity. Working closely with Helen Frick, daughter of industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick, pulls Lillian into a privileged world and a tangled web of romantic trysts, stolen jewels, and family drama that might prove to be life or death.

Five decades later, in the 1960s, Veronica, an English model, is working in the former Frick residence, which has since been converted into one of New York City’s most impressive museums. After being dismissed from a Vogue shoot, she finds herself snowed into the mansion. When she and a young art curator stumble upon a series of hidden messages in the museum, they might discover the truth behind a decades-old murder.

Book Summary

In this 2022 memoir, poet Javier Zamora recounts his 3,000-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador to the US in the late 1990s.

When he was just five years old, his mother left for the United States and told Javier that one day he’d “take a trip” to join her and his father there. At the age of nine, Javier left behind his grandparents and aunt and set out to reunite with his parents.

This was no “trip” through – it was a two-month-long treacherous journey with a group of strangers and a coyote hired to lead the way. Javier somehow survived the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, and other dangers at every turn. Throughout this life-altering experience, the strangers he traveled with became like family, encircling him, protecting him, and guiding his way with unexpected kindness and love.

Book Summary

In 1989, Communist regimes were falling throughout Eastern Europe, but Romania was still under the control of a tyrant – Nicolae Ceaușescu. Seventeen-year-old Cristian wants to be a writer, but writing freely is not possible in his world.

When Cristian is forced to work as an informer for the secret police, he must decide whether he’s willing to betray those he loves or if he can use the terrible situation to help bring down Ceaușescu.

Book Summary

This novel opens in present-day California shortly after Eleanor’s death. She has left behind a voice recording for her two adult children – Byron and Benny. She’s also left them a traditional Caribbean black cake that she tells them to share “when the time is right.”

Her children, it turns out, only know a small part of their mom’s life story. Posthumously, Eleanor is finally ready to share her truth so that Byron and Benny can truly know and understand their family history.

As the story unfolds, everything that her children thought they knew about their lineage and themselves will be rocked to the core, and by the time they finally share the black cake, another person will be joining them at the table.

Book Summary

Although this book is classified as historical fiction, it’s based on a larger-than-life real woman with an equally large heart. In her childhood, Majorie worked on gluing cereal boxes together for her father, the creator of Grape-Nuts, followed by the successful Post cereal empire. His company led the family to extreme wealth, but Majorie wasn’t content to sit at home as American royalty.

While entertaining the rich and famous was part of her life, she also wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Her extraordinary life included everything from outrunning Nazis to serving the homeless during the Great Depression. She was also married four times and built impressive real estate along the way, including the now-infamous Mar-a-Lago.

Book Summary

Florence Day is a romance ghostwriter who no longer believes in romance. She has spent her career writing under the name of one of the most well-known romance authors in the industry. But after a recent breakup with a man who took advantage of her trust and destroyed her self-esteem, she no longer believes in love and can’t seem to write about it either.

With a major deadline looming, her career is in serious danger. Then she gets a call from home that shifts her priorities.

She had an unusual, but very happy childhood growing up in a funeral home in a small town in South Carolina. However, a controversy when she was a teen caused her to flee for college and never turn back. But now, she has no choice but to return home for the first time in a decade.

On her first night back, she finds a ghost standing on the front porch of her family’s funeral home. Florence was already convinced that romance is dead… but this complicates things further.

Book Summary

Beginning in the 1980s and spanning 30 years, this story follows the lives of Sam and Sadie as they continue to reconnect at various points in their lives. Their first meet as children in the hospital – Sadie is visiting her sister, and Sam is recovering from a terrible car accident. They bond over their love of video games, and their instant friendship helps pull Sam out of his depression. But eventually, they have a falling out, and they don’t meet again until Sam’s junior year of college at Harvard (she is a student at MIT). He’s exiting a subway car when he sees Sadie across the platform.

This unexpected reunion soon begets an incredible collaboration as Sam and Sadie create a legendary video game before they’ve even graduated from college. They are young, brilliant, rich, and successful, but none of these characteristics can protect them from their creative ambitions, future betrayals, and inevitable failures.

Book Summary

Book Lovers is about a literary agent named Nora. When Nora’s younger sister, Libby, begs her to take a month-long summer trip to a small town in North Carolina, she envisions all the possible romance novel tropes that could happen in her own life. Why couldn’t she run into a handsome country doctor and find her happily ever after?

Instead, Nora runs into Charlie, a brooding editor she has encountered several times back in the city. While neither of them is the ideal heroine or hero, they kept being thrown together in unlikely situations and must confront the stories they’d told themselves about who they are.

Book Summary

Twenty years ago, when Chloe was just twelve years old, six teenage girls went missing in her small hometown in Louisiana throughout one summer. Chloe’s father was arrested – accused of being a serial killer – and imprisoned for the murders.

After spending years dealing with the aftermath, Chloe has finally pieced together a happy life for herself in Baton Rouge. She’s preparing for her wedding and has a fulfilling career as a psychologist.

In her psychology practice, she works with troubled teens. When first one local teen girl and then another goes missing, the memories from that terrifying summer in her childhood come crashing back. She sees parallels – but are they really there, or is she just being paranoid? Is she about to unmask a killer for the second time in her life?

Book Summary

Sewanee “Swan” Chester was an up-and-coming actress, but following a tragic accident, her days on film sets are now long behind her, and she spends her days in the sound booth as an audiobook narrator. Despite finding early success narrating romance novels, Swan is a real-life romance skeptic, and she’s since moved on to narrating different genres.

After a trip to Vegas to moderate a panel at a book convention, she returns home to a job offer to narrate one last romance book alongside the industry’s hottest male voice – Brock McNight. The lucrative offer is too good to pass up, especially because she needs the funds to help her beloved, ailing grandmother. (We could go on and on about how much we love her grandma!)

Like Sewanee, her male counterpart narrates under a pseudonym. Since she and Brock live on opposite sides of the country, they collaborate via correspondence. This allows both of them to open up slowly. But even as they begin to form a genuine connection, Sewanee struggles to be honest with him about her accident because she doesn’t believe she deserves a happily ever after.

Book Summary

In 1912, Edwin, the teenage son of an earl, is exiled after an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He crosses the Atlantic by steamship and ends up in the beautiful Canadian wilderness. There, he’s shocked to hear and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal.

Two centuries later, Olive Llewellyn is visiting Earth her from her home on a second moon colony. She’s on a book tour promoting her pandemic novel, which includes a strange passage about a man playing his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal in a forest.

In a third timeline, Gasprey is a detective assigned to investigate an anomaly in the Canadian wilderness.

Book Summary

If you could find out exactly how many years you have left to live, would you want to know?

On the same day, all around the world, every person over the age of 22 receives an identical box. Inside each is a string. At first, no one knows what the strings mean, but it soon becomes apparent that a long string means long life, and a short string foretells a life cut short.

As society responds to the revelation of the boxes, each person must make a choice – do you want to know how long you will live? If so, what will you do with that knowledge? And what if your choice is different from those you care about most?

These are the dilemmas facing the eight protagonists in The Measure, whose fates become interwoven as their individual stories unfold.

Book Summary

This story takes place at a recently restored hotel with quite a history. In 1922, the hotel had a tragic fire, which killed a 19-year-old chambermaid, Grace. It degraded from a gilded gem to an abandoned eyesore in the following years. Thankfully, it has finally been restored by a billionaire from London.

He hires Nantucket native Lizbet as the general manager. She’s in charge of restoring the reputation of the hotel. This job can be complicated since it involves ensuring the staff gets along with each other, the guests, and the ghost of Grace. Grace is determined to keep up her shenanigans until someone acknowledges that her death in 1922 wasn’t an accident.

Book Summary

This novel reimagines the story of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter.

In the early 1800s, young seamstress Isobel sailed to the New World from Scotland. Her husband, Edward, has become addicted to opium, so they are trying to leave their secrets and debts behind. However, shortly after arriving in Salem, Edward leaves Isobel alone when he joins a ship as a medic.

When Isobel meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, they grow close. One is a muse, and one is a dark storyteller, but which is which?

Book Summary

Ever since Charlie’s mom died in an accident when he was young, he’s had to take care of himself…and his alcoholic father. Somehow, he still manages to get good grades and be active in sports.

At 17, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. When Howard dies, he leaves his estate to Charlie. As part of his inheritance, Charles receives a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.

Mr. Bowditch has a shed, and the shed has a portal to a magical and scary parallel universe. But that world is in danger, and if its monstrous leaders destroy their own world, it will also destroy ours.

Book Summary

Hannah may look like a kindergarten teacher who could only wrangle young children, but she’s more dangerous than she seems. Her excellent skills as an Executive Protection Agent (aka bodyguard) just earned her a job protecting a superstar actor, Jack. He has some unlikely enemies – like a middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker and a brother who seems to hate him.

When Jack has to return to the family ranch in Texas during his mom’s cancer treatment, he doesn’t want her to find out about the stalker. This means she can’t know he needs a bodyguard to be safe. What could go wrong when Hannah has to pretend to be his girlfriend in front of his whole family?

Book Summary

Millie has a chance to start fresh when she gets a job working for Nina and Andrew Winchester as a live-in housekeeper and cook. She tries to ignore the annoyances of the job, like Nina constantly making messes just to watch her clean them up. Despite the beautiful wife, dreamy house, and fancy cars, Andrew seems more broken each day. His eyes are full of pain behind his outward appearance of a perfect life.

When Millie can’t resist trying on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses, she has no idea what the small act will set in action. Soon, she realizes her attic bedroom door only locks from the outside. The Winchesters may have even darker secrets than her own.

Book Summary

Libby is in her own world as she arrives in London, broken-hearted and newly unemployed. The first person she meets is an elderly man on a bus named Frank. Frank explains that he met a beautiful girl on bus 88 in 1962, and they made plans to visit the National Gallery together. But then Frank lost the ticket with her phone number. So every day for 60 years, he’s ridden the same bus hoping to run into her again.

Libby can’t just walk away from such a romantic and heartbreaking story. She enlists the help of an unlikely companion and creates posters advertising their search for the mystery girl. As they try to find her, Frank’s dementia is progressing quickly, teaching Libby important lessons about embracing happiness before it’s too late.

Book Summary

Marissa and Matthew Bishop’s perfect marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears from the outside. Work and lack of intimacy have come between them, and Marissa has been unfaithful. But they have an 8-year-old son, and they still love one another, so they’re willing to work on the relationship.

They seek help from a therapist named Avery Chambers. Despite losing her license, she continues to counsel those in need. Her methods are unconventional, but the Bishops are willing to try anything.

Book Summary

Chloe is focused on one final accomplishment to finish her senior year at Willowgrove Christian Academy – winning Valedictorian. Her only competitor is the principal’s perfect prom queen daughter – Shara.

Then, with only a month until graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and disappears. Before vanishing, she’s also kissed Smith, her long-time boyfriend who is the school’s quarterback, and Rory, her bad-boy neighbor. Shara left cryptic notes behind, forcing the unlikely trio of Chloe, Smith, and Rory to work together. Chloe wants Shara to return so she can win the Valedictorian title fairly.

You’ll laugh at the situations the trio gets themself into trying to find Shara, while having your hearts warmed by the growing friendships and relationships along the way. 

Book Summary

Hattie’s had a rough time over the past several years. Her husband was killed in a motorcycle accident at 25. She works for her father-in-law carrying on the family restoration business, but she also dreams of taking on bigger projects. So, she used his life insurance proceeds to flip a small house. Unfortunately, the proceeds from that house went into another, which turned into a disaster. In addition to losing money, she lost her confidence.

When Hattie gets the rare chance to star in a beach house renovation reality show called The Homewreckers, it could be what she needs to turn everything around. What she doesn’t expect is that this home makeover project will also reveal new clues in the decades-old disappearance of Hattie’s favorite high school teacher, leading her to split her time between renovation and investigation.

Book Summary

Twenty-five-year-old Molly has always been different from her peers. She struggles in social situations and only communicates very literally, both in her understanding of others and in her verbal communication back to them. Thanks to her Gran, she’s still managed to have a good life. However, after her beloved Gran dies, she loses the one person who understands both Molly and the world. 

She’s still excellent at her job as a hotel maid, and her penchant for perfection makes this the ideal role. One day, she’s shocked to find the wealthy and infamous guest, Charles Black, dead in his room. When the police question her, her unusual communication is interpreted as deception, and Molly becomes a prime suspect.  She knows that the only way to clear her name is to figure out what really happened before she is arrested.