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What happens when an idealistic trio takes their innovations too far? In The Startup Wife (2021), Tahmima Anam shows the dark side of technology while satirizing startup culture. Asha is the brilliant coder behind a new social media platform developed with her new husband and his friend.

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, The School for Good Mothers (2022), was recommended as one of the best novels of 2022, by many top reviewers and news outlets. It's a challenging and provocative read, as Chan herself acknowledges in author interviews. Her hope was that the book would leave readers thinking about the systematic pressures and demands imposed upon mothers, rooted in historical ideals, but ever-increasing due to the influences of technology and social media.

A Trojan Horse. That's how author Xochitl Gonzalez describes her debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), a work of contemporary fiction set in Brooklyn and Puerto Rico, primarily in 2017.

If you enjoy sweeping historical novels then you may want to dig into A Long Petal of the Sea (2020), one of the most recent books by the prolific Chilean-American author Isabel Allende. And if you especially appreciate books that shed light on dramatic past events less likely to be on our reading radar than, say, World War II, A Long Petal of the Sea just might be calling your name.

How would a twelve-year old boy survive losing his entire family of origin, mother, father, and older brother, in plane crash? How would he cope with being the only survivor of the crash, which took, in addition to his family, nearly two hundred passengers and crew? How could anyone survive this?

A Burning (2020), Megha Majumdar's debut novel, follows three characters in the wake of a firebomb attack at a railroad station in a Kolkata slum.

In her latest book, The Half Moon (2023), Mary Beth Keane tells the story of a married couple in crisis, thanks to circumstances beyond their control. Economic turmoil, infertility, and the shifting values of a younger generation of consumers—these things and more have fractured the lives, loyalties, and love of Malcolm and Jess Gephardt.

Ruth Ozeki's latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), is a big book in terms of length. It's a big book, too, in terms of the ideas and issues with which it deals, including Zen Buddhism, mental illness and the systems that surround its treatment, the nature of reality, and the pressures of the marketplace and capitalism.

I've now read the book and also listened to the audio book of I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai. I scarcely had a break between my reading of, and listening to, this novel. When it became available, I seized the day, as it had been on hold for some time and, I knew, would probably go back on hold again.

Kaitlyn Greenidge's Libertie (2021) might be called a coming of age novel, given the fact that the book explores the issues and challenges of establishing and sustaining identity against all odds.

If you’re looking for a sprawling novel that spans much of the twentieth-century and enters the twenty-first, features an array of distinctive points of view and complex relationships, ventures to far-flung places, and explores big ideas, then I invite you to consider reading Maggie Shipstead’s most recent release, Great Circle (2021).

You may have already watched the Oscar award-winning movie, Women Talking (2023). If you have yet to read the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, upon which the movie is based. I'm here to encourage you to do so!