Best of 2022: Adult Fiction & Nonfiction

"What if you could take a vacation to your past, without the filter of memory? What would you give to go back in time and relive your youth, in person, with the people who shared it? On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But something is missing. Her...

"Raised by a single mother in Miami, Florida, Jenry Castillo, newly arrived at Brown University on a music scholarship, finds himself searching for information about his late father Jasper Patterson, an internationally recognized principal ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. Jenry thinks his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a professor of African American history at Brown and a titan in his field, might have the answers...

"After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they're deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom. When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking...

"From the first line of Just by Looking at Him, you'll know this story is so much more than boy meets boy. First, there's the humor. Elliot is a writer who spends his days navigating the back stabbing, the pressure, and the day to day snark of writing aggressively average television. In laugh out loud detail, we're immediately with him on his journey to try to get his lines onto the screen. But there's a deeper, and more poignant, story beating at...

"The 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression...

"Exquisitely compassionate and witty, Big Girl traces the intergenerational hungers and desires of Black womanhood, as told through the unforgettable voice of Malaya Clondon. In her highly anticipated debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the perils-and undeniable beauty-of insatiable longing. Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she'd rather paint alone...

"For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on...

"New York, 2015: The city is facing a series of bicycle accidents, the Mayor's approval ratings hang in the balance, and Alice, besieged by grief and regrets, wants desperately to take the MCAT and become a doctor, but she can't seem to sign up for the test. First and foremost there's her phone--which, like so many others, she can't seem to put down--but there's also her chaotic roommate Roxy, who works at the Mayor's office and whose thirst for adventure...

"A new heartfelt novel about the power of loneliness and the strength of love that overcomes it by critically acclaimed author Roselle Lim. Newly minted professional matchmaker Sophie Go has returned to Toronto, her hometown, after spending three years in Shanghai. Her job is made difficult when she is revealed as a fraud: she never actually graduated from matchmaking school. In a competitive market like Toronto, no one wants to take a chance on an...

"The much-beloved BookTok sensation from Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a novel of high fantasy and low stakes. Come take a load off at Viv's cafe, the first & only coffee shop in Thune. Grand opening! Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv, the orc barbarian, cashes out of the warrior's life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune,...