22 Best Books We Read in 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

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

Civil is fresh out of nursing school and has dreams of making a big difference in her post-segregation African American community. She works for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, and she’s sent to a rural cabin during her first week on the job. When she arrives, Civil is shocked to find that her patients are children, only 11 and 13 years old.

The girls, Erica and India, are innocent and not even thinking of boys. However, because they are poor and Black, those handling their benefits have requested the children be on birth control. Civil struggles with this unexpected aspect of her new career. Despite the shocking reason for meeting the sisters, Civil is endeared to them and their family. However, one day when she arrives for her visit, something unthinkable has happened, and Civil soon finds herself involved in a legal case.

You’ll also see Civil years later, at the end of her career, with a daughter of her own, as she tries to find peace without forgetting those she encountered along the way.

Book Summary

Sewanee “Swan” Chester was an actress whose star was rising. 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.

Of course, given that a well-known audiobook narrator writes this novel about two audiobook narrators, it seems almost unnecessary to say… but this book is meant to be listened to.

Book Summary

Albert Entwistle is a 64-year postal worker in the UK. He has no plans of retiring but receives a letter informing him that his mandatory retirement is just around the corner on his 65th birthday.

Albert’s only friend is his cat, and although he isn’t chatty with others at work or on his routes, he still dreads being home alone without a job. When he’s reminded of his only romantic relationship, which happened 50 years prior, something begins to stir in Albert. Perhaps it’s not too late to find happiness after all?

With the help of some unexpected new friends, Albert sets off to find George, the man he hasn’t seen since they were teenagers.

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

In this moving memoir, author Wade Rouse, who writes fiction under the pen name Viola Shipman, shares the story of his complicated relationship with his father. Growing up as a queer kid in a conservative Ozarks community, Wade and his father, Ted, had little in common. Wade was never the athlete his father hoped for, but his desire to connect with his father and gain his approval led Wade to learn the vocabulary of baseball and to watch the game with his dad season after season.

As an adult, he and his father rarely saw eye-to-eye, but it was always baseball that brought them back together. When his father’s health declines, Wade returns home to southwest Missouri to spend one final season with his father. Inning by inning, they move closer toward forgiveness, reconciliation, and closure.

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

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

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

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

The Winners picks up two years after our all-time favorite books, Beartown. The locals are still trying to come to terms with the events that tore the community apart. However, change is on the way.

The book catches up with the original characters. We see Peter, Kira, Maya, Benji, Amit, and others continue to be haunted in different ways. But their story is intertwined with several new characters integral to the plot of The Winners.

From a midwife, her fireman husband, and their four children to a con man and two other children with rough starts to life, you’ll feel the emotions and motivations of these characters in classic Backman style. The rivalry between Beartown and Hed is as fierce as ever, which plays out in unexpected ways.

Book Summary

Florence Day is a romance ghostwriter who no longer believes in romance. She has spent her career as the ghostwriter for one of the most well-known romance writers 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. However, after the phone call, 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

In this memoir, Dave Grohl tells the stories of a lifetime. It begins with his childhood in Springfield, Virginia, teaching himself to drum and dreaming of being a musician someday. Then he tells of his early adult years on the West Coast, where he was rocketed from a starving artist to a member of the biggest band in the world, Nirvana.

Having achieved all his wildest dreams by age 25, but also witnessing firsthand the price of fame, Dave then spent his next 25 years carefully crafting his life exactly as he wanted it – with equal measures of music, family, and friends. He shares some really epic stories starring some of the biggest names of our time, and he tells some really touching stories starring his mom, his wife, and his children.

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

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

Forty-two year old Becca has been married into her husband’s uber-wealthy family of lawyers for over half her life At first, her husband was one of the good guys. But as he got older, he began representing the types of clients that made his parents rich—the smarmy guys who have done terrible things to women and had the money to avoid punishment. After overhearing a particularly disturbing comment that went unaddressed by her husband, Becca reaches her breaking point and leaves her marriage.

During the divorce proceedings, the judge is shocked that she isn’t protesting her decades-old prenup and plans to walk away with absolutely nothing. Instead, the judge declares that she should get to keep the fancy sailboat that bears her name.

Becca runs into a dreamy guy at the boatyard who helps her sell the boat, but the buyers are in Miami. To save money on the delivery, she recruits her 21-year-old daughter to sail with her from New England to Miami along the US coast. The only problem is that she has no idea how to sail.

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

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 understood both Molly and the world. 

She’s still excellent at her job as a hotel maid, with her penchant for perfection making 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.

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

If winter has you dreaming of relaxing days summering on Nantucket, you can grab any of Elin Hilderbrand’s books. But for this list, we selected The Hotel Nantucket because the back of the novel includes a detailed travel guide to Nantucket with hotel and restaurant recommendations.

The 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

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 now-infamous Mar-a-Lago.

Book Summary

April has a rough life, fending for herself in a motorless motorhome that her father won while playing poker. She works at a diner but dreams of being a songwriter. After flunking out of school and another fight with her dad, April sets off to find a better life for herself.

Along the way, she meets others with complex stories, which are the perfect inspiration for her songs. But even more important than that, she finds that family doesn’t have to mean the community you were born into. Instead, people you meet can become family.

Book Summary

After losing her husband in WWII and her daughter to illness, Iris walled herself off from the world. She’s spent many decades hiding behind the tall fence around her home. In place of human connection, Iris has surrounded herself with a family of flowers. Propagating her daylilies and roses and tending to a garden that helps her keep memories of those she loved alive.

In the early 2000s, Abby is a young mother whose husband has recently returned from military service in Iraq. When Abby’s family rents a cottage along Lake Michigan, next door to Iris’ property, the older woman can’t help but view the young family as a window to the life she once had.

As Iris and Abby are drawn together by their shared love of flowers, the friendship that blossoms between them is a testament to the healing power of both gardening and human connection.

Book Summary

Told from the perspective of an older woman looking back on her youth, City of Girls is a fictional life story set in the New York theater world during the 1940s. 

Nineteen-year-old Vivian has been kicked out of Vassar College due to poor performance, and her affluent parents send her to live with her aunt, who owns a flamboyant but crumbling midtown theater. 

Other charismatic theater employees, from showgirls to Olive, the no-nonsense secretary that keeps everyone in line, have their own spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors. Vivian loves fashion and is a talented seamstress, which is perfect for making clothes for the Lily dancers on and off the stage.

The main setting of the book is 1940s New York City, spanning the years before the US entered WW2, along with the war years. Vivian reflects on the events of those years, including a personal mistake that almost ruined the course of her life in a moment.

Many years later, at the age of 95, she tells her story, musing that “at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.”

Book Summary

Like so many other young gay men, eighteen-year-old Brian arrived in New York City with a bright future ahead of him. But within the first six years of the 1980s, as the AIDS epidemic took hold, Brian lost his partner, his friends, and his future.

Rock Hudson’s death in 1986 shifted the conversation on AIDS and finally brought news of the epidemic into every American living room. It’s also the year that Brian returns home to small-town Appalachia to die.

Book Summary

Eudora has lived a long, full life, but at the age of 85 she’s decided she’s done with it all. She’s already witnessed the indignities and suffering of old age, and she wants the end – her end – to be on her own terms. She’s called a clinic in Switzerland to set her plan into motion. But then she meets 10-year-old Rose.

Rose is rainbows and sparkles and cheer. And as much as Eudora just wants to be left alone, she can’t help but be drawn into her young neighbor’s world of adventure. Along with her affable and recently widowed neighbor Stanley, they join Rose for afternoon teas, shopping sprees, trips to the beach, and birthday celebrations. As they all await the arrival of Rose’s new baby sister, Eudora is secretly waiting for approval to go ahead with her plan.

As this unlikely trio grows closer, the joy that her new friends bring to her life forces Eudora to reconsider whether she’s really ready to say goodbye.

Book Summary

As London is emerging from WWII, Juliet Ashton, a writer, is looking for the subject of her next book. She begins exchanging letters with a man she’s never met – a native of the island of Guernsey. Through their letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of the man and his eccentric friends. Though they range from pig farmers to phrenologists, they are all literature lovers.

As Juliet learns about their tastes in books, she also comes to understand the impact that the German occupation has had on their lives.

Book Summary

Raymond is a shy Black teen who feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere – not with his complicated family, and not at school. Mildred is a blind 92-year-old Holocaust survivor living alone since her caretaker disappeared. When Raymond meets Mildred in his apartment building, she introduces herself with the question: “Have you seen Luis Velez?”

Raymond begins to help Mildred with her weekly errands to the banks and the grocery store, and also hopes to help her track down Luis. In a short time, they’ve formed an unlikely friendship. Raymond demonstrates that for every terrible act, there’s a mirror image of kindness. And Mildred helps Raymond see that even when life is difficult, there is always hope.

Book Summary

Ten year old Auggie has a facial deformity that previously prevented him from attending a traditional school. In his own words, “I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.”

Wonder begins from Auggie’s point of view as he starts 5th grade, but soon switches to include his classmates. While there are also chapters told from the perspective of his teenage sister, her boyfriend, and others, Auggie remains the focus of the story throughout. The multiple perspectives create a beautiful portrait of Auggie’s community as they struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance.

Book Summary

Macy and her dad spend their weekends at a house in the charming town of Healdsburg, where they are able to escape their daily life in San Francisco. While it starts as a place to process their grief, they gain even more than they expected. The large family across the street, starting with son Elliot, quickly becomes more than just casual neighbors.

Elliot and Macy soon bond over their love of books and their favorite words. Over time, their teenage friendship grows into romance.

The book is told in a split timeline as you watch their relationship develop as teens, but then also see Macy eleven years later working on her pediatrics residency in San Francisco. She’s engaged to someone else when she unexpectedly runs into Elliot at a coffee shop.

Upon seeing him, her long-repressed emotions come rushing back. Something happened in the past to tear them apart, but their chemistry is as strong as ever. For a shot at a future, they’ll be forced to come to terms with both the past and the present.

Book Summary

Qian, 7 years old + aging through elementary school

In 1994 at age 7, author Qian Wang moved with her family from China to America. Before the move, her parents were successful professors. Despite the Chinese word for America, Mei Guo, meaning beautiful country, life is much harder for the family here. Her parents overstay their visas and are not in the US legally, which means they must find work in sweatshops instead of classrooms.

Qian escapes to libraries to avoid the teachers and classmates who shun her limited English. Over time, she’s able to master English through her study of books like The Bernstein Bears and The Babysitters Club and begins to glimpse some of the magic of New York City, like Christmas at Rockefeller Center. However, her world changes again when her mom gets sick.

This memoir gives a unique insight into the hidden life and struggles of children trying to thrive in a place where they must also remain hidden in many ways.

Book Summary

Missy is 79 years old and lives in a stately London home alone. Her husband, Leo, passed away after a challenging illness, and her favorite child, son Allistair, broke her heart by moving to Australia. Daughter Melanie lives much closer in Cambridge, but they have a contentious relationship.

As Missy walks alone through a park, her primary mission is to experience something worthy of including in her next email to Allistair. While she prefers keeping to herself, she forces herself to interact with some interesting characters she encounters on her walk. When she faints, her new acquaintances not only help her in the moment, they invite her to a nearby coffee shop.

But is 79 too old for new friends and a new outlook on life?

Book Summary

Written by the long-time director and producer of Anthony Bourdain’s travel food show, In the Weeds takes you on an adventure around the world. They filmed in dangerous locations, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Iran.

The book covers what it was like to be on this journey, and how they managed to film in areas so hard for Westerners to visit. There’s a focus on what it was like traveling with Bourdain, on and off-camera.

Book Summary

Alice’s grandmother, Adalyn, just passed away, and she left the sixteen-year-old an apartment in Paris – one that’s been locked up for more than seventy years and that no one in the family knew existed.

Now Alice is spending the summer in Paris, and with the help of Paul – a Parisian student – she’s determined to find out why her grandma never mentioned the family that she left behind when she left France during WWII. The more she learns about the past, the more she realizes that her family is also hiding secrets in the present.

This dual-timeline YA novel also transports us back to Paris in the 1940s. It’s a city that sixteen-year-old Adalyn hardly recognizes as the Occupation brings new terrors daily. When she meets a young leader of a resistance group, she sees an opportunity to fight back, but she soon finds herself having to make more and more compromises.

Book Summary

Now 87, Veronica McCreedy has an unlikely new friend. Nine-year-old Daisy is wise beyond her years, partly because she has endured years of medical treatment. Veronica has passed her love of penguins on to Daisy, and together they get the opportunity of a lifetime. 

As part of a make-a-wish style program, Veronica and Daisy travel to Bolder Island in the Falklands to meet Rockhopper penguins and participate in a nature program. The handsome host, Sir Robert Saddlebow, asks Veronica to co-host and share her penguin knowledge on camera.  

The book also dives into the other characters from How the Penguins Saved Veronica, including Patrick’s search for information on his father. If you haven’t read How the Penguins Saved Veronica, be sure to pick that up first!

Book Summary

The book follows two significant periods in the life of Lily Bloom. As a teenager, she notices one of her classmates, Atlas, sleeping in the unoccupied house behind hers. When she begins sneaking him food, they develop a friendship that leads quickly to a deep first love. Lily’s life at home isn’t perfect, but everything feels right with Atlas. When they are separated, they vow to find each other again as adults.

Years later, on the day of Lily’s father’s funeral, she has a chance encounter with a gorgeous neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid. Despite Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships, he has a total soft spot for Lily. From the first time he sees her, he can’t get her out of his mind. Lily is busy trying to set up her own business, but when they run into each other again, she’s intrigued.

Book Summary

Mirielle West lives a glamorous life in LA as the wife of a silent film star. When a doctor sees a small spot on her hand, she’s whisked across the country to what feels like a different world. She hopes to have only a brief visit to the Louisiana Leper Home, but when she arrives, there is barbed wire, a curfew, and little chance of ever returning to her everyday life.

As Mirielle is assigned work inside the home, she must come to terms with both the illness and its perception in the outside world.

Book Summary

While jogging near her home on Nantucket, novelist Vivi is killed in a hit-and-run accident. After her death, Vivi is granted the opportunity to watch what happens to her family for one final summer. In addition to watching, she gets three “nudges” to change the outcome of events on Earth.

Between troubles for her children, the investigation into her death, and a childhood secret wrapped into the final novel she was writing, Vivi must be cautious with her nudges while learning to let her family make decisions without her.

Book Summary

In the late 60s and 70s, being a flight attendant was one of the most exciting and envied jobs for young women. This was especially true for the glamorous Pan Am World Airways. However, competition for the positions was fierce, with new hires facing strict physical and educational requirements. For example, you had to speak at least two languages and be under 5’9” and 140 lbs.

This non-fiction book tells the story of several stewardesses while weaving in the history of the company and the world. Among the tales, you’ll learn what it was like for Hazel Bowie, one of the few black stewardesses. The book also covers Operation Babylift, the dramatic evacuation of over 2000 children during the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Book Summary

This dual-timeline novel tells the little-known history of Coney Island and America’s first infant incubators.

In 1926, Althea Anderson was a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Her heart breaks each time they cannot save another premature baby’s life.

After reading an article detailing the significantly improved survival rates of babies being treated in an incubator sideshow exhibit at Luna Park on Coney Island, Althea inquires of the doctors at Bellevue, who dismiss it as unconventional medicine. Not wanting to see another baby die that could be saved, Althea is forced to make a very difficult choice.

Twenty-five years later, Stella feels like her life is falling apart – her mother recently passed away, she quit the job she loved, and her marriage is struggling. When she discovers a letter, it calls into question everything she thought she knew about herself and her mother.