Adults

This timely, engaging book examines whiteness through controversial Confederate symbols and statues that have become a focal point in the national discussion about systemic racism and white supremacy. Producer of the podcast White Lies, O’Neill focuses on several statues and a building named after Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who looms large in Confederate lore, being the only person to enlist as a private and work his way to general. But Forrest also made his money as a slave trader and was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Petty’s innovative, genre-busting debut opens with a vignette set in Barcelona, in which an unnamed narrator addresses another unnamed character, telling her she’s sorry for standing her up. From there, the novel rockets through metafictional sections—a script for a horror movie, a first-person narrative, a set of revisions for a college essay, and more—which initially seem disparate but are inevitably connected. In the first substantive segment, a young lacrosse player named Nick Brothers explains what happened to him and his team in 1999.

In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. General Franco and his Fascists overthrew the government; hundreds of thousands fled over the mountains to the French border. Roser, a pregnant young widow, finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. To survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants; Sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda, they embark on the SS Winnipeg along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life.

A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts "The Authenticity Project"as he titles a slim green notebookand begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London.