Released August 6, 2024, The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley traces the first century in the life of a little girl born during World War I who mysteriously ages just one year for every four.

All fiction takes us outside of time—we lose hours and days from our own lives to enter those of others. Some of my favorite all-time reads are anti-chronological, putting the onus on readers to piece together the story arc of the novels’ protagonists, echoing the messiness of memory and emotion. But I especially love books that directly challenge or subvert our notions of regular time as a central theme or plot device. Here are my five favorite time-bending novels.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Published in 2004, this groundbreaking book has been made into a movie and more recently a TV series, but neither recapture Niffenegger’s ingenious plotting, managing to cross-stitch Clare and Henry together, over decades, while sustaining the unbearable sense of pending tragedy that drives the book forward. Henry is an involuntary time traveller who zags forward and back through time, which takes a tremendous physical toll. Clare knows a 36-year-old Henry from her childhood (in ‘real’ time), long before she encounters a younger version of him before he has travelled back in time to meet the girl he will later come to love as a woman, a predicament that is as outlandish as it is rich. The result is a mind-scrambling mess that makes for a read as challenging as it is heartfelt.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson’s novel begs the “what if” question of her principal characters and plot, then asks it over and over again. Time in this novel loops back then inches forwards, hitting one dead end (quite literally) before reforging a new path over familiar but subtly altered terrain. Initially, Ursula Todd dies the moment she is born, only to get some different chances at survival—a doctor arriving sooner, the timely provenance of scissors that can cut the cord that’s strangling her. As she grows older, Ursula comes to sense death’s imminent arrival and for the reader, the repeated sense of tumbling backwards becomes both soothing and fraught. As Ursula’s life is recast, again and again, happenstance meets agency pushing us to rethink the roads not travelled or the choices made that might have led to a different ending. Or, as often proves to be the case, a fresh start.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

I had been working for 10 months on The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley, about a little girl who ages one year for every four, when Haig’s novel was published, about a slow-ageing, 439-year-old man whose one rule is to never fall in love. I was crushed. Determined not to be unduly influenced, I waited until my own novel was finished, sold, and heading to the printers before delving into this book. To my relief, Haig’s tale proved very different from my own, even as it grappled with some similar themes: the fragile ties that bind, the dangers of being different, the risks we take in forming lasting connection. But Haig’s book steers mostly clear of medical explanations and follows a unified and propulsive plot arc that makes for a fast, fun read. I especially loved the situational comedy woven into the drama, provided largely through Tom’s sardonic perspective on mod-cons, his second-hand distrust of science, and some of his bumbled interactions with celebrated historical figures, including everyone from Shakespeare to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

In a dusty, sun-soaked, lakeside valley that looks uncannily like my own (in British Columbia’s sunny Okanagan), Odile Ozanne is a normal teenager with normal teenaged struggles: what’s unusual are the identical valleys to the East and West. One valley is 20 years in the future, the other 20 years in the past. With special permission from the “Conseil,” petitioners can anonymously visit the other valleys to see loved ones from their past, or view those they will never get to meet, decades hence. Time, in Howard’s telling, exists in duplicate, but with temporal shifts that should not be tampered with. On one level this novel is a coming-of-age story with familiar agonies, hopes, and doubts, but for Odile who accidentally glimpses visitors from the future in her valley, there are darker layers. Howard asks, if we were given the brief chance of connecting with our own past or our future, could closure be easier? Can grief be assuaged?

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Zevin’s novel has been hailed as a timely and imaginative book about work—we so seldom see books about jobs!—as well as a tribute to the power of collaborative creativity, in this case, between two best friends who become video game developers and weave in and out of each other’s lives, over three decades. I’m not a gamer, but I loved what I learned about game-based storytelling and second chances in this novel. Of all the books on my list, this is the only one without a speculative element or plot device related to disordered time. Instead, by juxtaposing video-game “lives,” where you can save your level or die and play again, this book holds up a mirror to real-life time’s inexorable passage: how we’re prone to repeating our mistakes, even as we learn from them. And the human instinct to berate ourselves for our worst moments and decisions, longing for a do-over. “That’s the gamer in you,” says Sadie Green. “trying to figure out how to beat the next level.”

The post Five Books That Challenge Our Notions of Normal Time appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Read on to learn more about Zevin’s process writing this novel, her opinion on video games, and which question stresses her out whenever it’s asked!

*If you are a gamer – or you’re just curious – publisher A.A. Knopf created a game from the novel for readers to play: Emily Blaster! Just like the characters in the book, you can blast Emily Dickinson’s poetry out of the air word by word to earn points and win the game! Check it out here.

Hi Gabrielle and thank you so much for taking time to chat with The Nerd Daily! To start, tell our readers a bit about yourself.

This will sound coy, but I don’t mean it to be! I find that the less readers know about me (or writers in general), the more they can read my book without thinking about me. And I feel like that is the optimal way to read a book. So, the first thing I would tell you about myself is I value privacy — privacy gives you creative freedom. Other than that, I’m a dog owner, a writer of many novels, a resident of Los Angeles, the daughter of a computer programmer, a reluctant participant in social media, and, like Sam in the book, a biracial Korean American.

Your tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, came out July 5, 2022 in the U.S. and I absolutely adore it! For those who may not already know what the novel is about, how do you like to describe it to others?

Thank you so much! Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of a thirty-year friendship and artistic collaboration. It’s the story of Sam Masur and Sadie Green, two brilliant people, who have a romance of the mind, if not the body. It’s about how rewarding and tender and volatile creative collaboration can be, and what it feels like to truly share one’s work with someone. It’s about how difficult it is to connect even though we have ever increasing ways to do so, and the possibility of making meaningful connections in virtual spaces. It’s about why it’s worth it to continue loving people and making things in an imperfect and uncertain universe. And yes, it’s about video games. I think the essential conflict of the story is between the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie create, as video game designers, and the imperfect world they live in.

What sparked the idea for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and how did you land on video games as a framework for exploring friendship, love, life, and human nature the way you do?

Ideas are strange. For me, the hard thing isn’t having them, but figuring out which ones are worth following. A great book idea needs to draw more ideas to it. The subject of video games was like a big bowl that held many things in it. What sparked the idea? I was looking for a game I had played as a kid, and I couldn’t find the game anywhere. It occurred to me that games, because they are tied to hardware, could be lost. And it got me thinking how games were an important part of my creative development and, in addition to tons of novel reading, were part of the way I had learned about storytelling. I’m a member of the Oregon Trail Generation, the microgeneration between Gen X and Millennial – so called because its members were the first generation of people to play video games as children. I thought it would be interesting to tell a story about this generation of people – a generational coming of age story where the characters would come of age alongside the video game industry itself.

I’m also curious, how did the timing of writing this novel play out against the COVID-19 pandemic?

I began seriously researching the novel at the end of 2017. I continued researching and did some writing in 2018 and 2019. Felt despair and gave up for a bit at the end of 2019. The bulk of the writing was done in 2020. I think the pandemic influenced the writing of the book a great deal – for obvious reasons, I felt more alone than I had felt since I wrote my first novel, and the quiet gave my writing an intense focus. I didn’t have to think much about what would happen with the book. I just knew that I wanted to write it, and in a strange way, the solitude gave me courage and silenced the persistent voice of doubt, which whispered, Would people even want to read a book about video game designers? The other way I can see the pandemic in the novel is in its settings. Tomorrow takes place in Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, Tokyo – these are all towns where I’ve lived or worked. Writing was a way to travel without traveling.

One thing that really stood out to me when reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow are these beautiful moments of hope and pure joy juxtaposed against the bitter struggles and pain life brings. How do you go about capturing these feelings and experiences so authentically on the page?

Thank you. That’s a wonderful compliment, and I don’t have a great answer! To answer as a human being (and not a writer), I find it challenging to be a thinking person and an optimist.

I think the trick of being alive is to accept that the world is some parts horrible and some parts wonderful all the time. Sometimes, as a person, I can only see the horrible. To answer your question in an oblique way, I suppose I demand more of myself as a writer than I do as a person.

There is also such a wonderful nostalgia to this novel. As someone who grew up largely in the 1990s, I found so many great pop culture references and reflections of my own coming of age in your story. Did you have a particular audience in mind when you were writing?

I am a hair younger than Sam and Sadie, but their references are my references. Still, I hope that one doesn’t have to be born in a certain decade to relate to these characters. The book spans several decades, and what interested me were all the subtle shifts in thinking and mores that have occurred during that time, my lifetime. At one point in the novel, Sadie talks about generational differences and this is something I think about as well. Whenever anyone makes a blanket generational statement like “all millennials are entitled” or some such, I roll my eyes. Because it’s ridiculous to think that having a shared birth year/decade/era makes any one individual particularly like another. To put it another way, there are all kinds of people in every generation.  I think generational differences are often used as ways to create division and to market products. (e.g., women’s jeans)  And yet, I do think having access to certain technologies, having lived through political eras and incidents, and having consumed the same kinds of pop culture, do connect people. I just don’t believe these things change our essential characters.

I think about audience a lot less than I used to – but when I did, I saw the audience for Tomorrow as less tied to nostalgia and more the kind of person who has ever given themselves over to a creative pursuit or truly tried to make something. Maybe, the kind of person who sometimes prefers imagined worlds to real ones.

Forgive me, but before I move on to a few questions about your writing in a broader sense, I have to ask the obvious question readers of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow want to know: Where do you land on video games?!? Do you love them? Hate them? Couldn’t care less either way? Have you played many of the games you reference in the novel or have any favorites?

I really appreciate that you allow for the possibility that I might “hate video games.” I don’t, by the way!  Still, I don’t think of myself as a gamer in the way people think of gamers. I’ve played games for many decades, and until about five years ago, I never once did it with an ulterior motive —I never thought, Hey, there might be a book in this! I played what amused me, and that was it. I had to expand what I normally played when I was researching the book and fill in the gaps — for example, I’d never played Grand Theft Auto. But yes, I dipped into just about every game that is referenced in the book.

My favorite games are probably the games made by Sierra, which I played when I was a kid. King’s Quest IV, Space Quest III, Colonel’s Bequest. I loved the beauty and intricacy of their worlds and how difficult they were to solve – back when I was playing, you couldn’t just Google the solution.

Your 2014 novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry was an absolute smashing success and I understand the film adaptation is now in post-production. Can you talk a bit about writing this adaptation and how involved you have been with the filming/production itself? Any juicy tidbits you can share with fans eagerly awaiting the film’s release?!

When A.J. Fikry was first published, people didn’t necessarily think it would do as well as it did.  But even once it was quite successful, there weren’t that many film offers. Producers liked the story, but they wanted to cast a lead that wasn’t a POC, and repeatedly, that was a dealbreaker for me. In any case, I never found anyone to whom I wanted to sell the rights. My partner, Hans Canosa, is a director – we have made two other films together. Since no one else wanted A.J., we decided to develop it ourselves. I wrote a screenplay in 2018. We found producers (BCDF, a company I had met with about the rights several years earlier – one of the few sets of producers who didn’t think A.J. should be white!), and in the intervening time, the film industry had become far more open to stories with POC leads. The movie stars Kunal Nayyar from The Big Bang Theory, as A.J., and you aren’t going to be able to recognize him! It will be in theaters late this fall.

Readers will also be excited to hear that Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is being developed into a feature film with you slated to write the script. What are your thoughts about novel-writing as opposed to screenwriting? Pros and cons, so to speak?

Screenplays have rules. They are usually 90-120 pages, and their stories are largely told through external action. A novel can be any number of pages, and obviously, one of the great joys of novels is that they can be so internal, can go deeply into character.  I enjoy screenwriting as a break from novel writing. A screenplay is more manageable, which is to say, a completable task. I can be lost in writing a novel for years.

A profile done by Harvard Magazine a few years back says you have never formally taken courses on creative writing, but rather “the way you studied writing was by reading.” (I love this, by the way!) What are a few books you feel really taught you something profound about writing?

This is a difficult question because I would say I learn just as much from books I don’t enjoy as books that I do. I can learn from a book I don’t think is particularly good. And I am learning all the time, and often what I learn is something small and not profound at all.  But I will give you two examples from books I enjoyed a great deal!

Normal People – the part about the Debs. Obviously, we don’t have a precise equivalent for the Debs in America, but I was fully invested in the outcome of this situation. The lesson for me is that you can get a reader to care about anything, even something they have never heard of, if you dramatize it fully and characterize richly. I thought about this when I was writing the part with the game engine in Tomorrow. Obviously, many readers will not have heard of a game engine before encountering it in my book.

Some years ago, I was given a Litograph poster of The Great Gatsby, a novel I’ve read a half dozen times. I was probably given this poster because a younger version of me had said it was her favorite in an interview. Litograph posters have an image that is created using the complete text of the novel. I hung this poster in my hallway and I’d read a few random sentences of the novel every day when I passed by it. I remember a professor of mine saying that The Great Gatsby is a great novel “on the sentence level,” and if you’d asked me before getting this poster, I would have probably agreed. Reading this poster highlighted for me that there is no such thing as a novel that is great “on the sentence level.” There are many, heartbreakingly beautiful sentences, in The Great Gatsby (the first and the last, e.g.), and some hardworking, quotidian ones in it, too. But a novel is not great because of its individual sentences, and so to call a novel “great on the sentence level” is meaningless. It is the spell created by all the sentences when read in a particular order. I have always cared a great deal about my sentences, and this poster was just a reminder to me to think of my novels both locally and globally, if that makes any sense.

Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions

• First book that made you fall in love with reading: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• 3 books you would take on a desert island: Honestly, I know how this question is meant, but it stresses me out whenever it’s asked! What’s happened? Shipwreck? Plane crash? General apocalypse?  This would be a nightmare. 1) a survival guide (because I am not trained for this life!), 2) an enormous blank notebook, and 3) the most comprehensive collection of poetry I could find.
• Movie that you know by heart: My brain is basically 80% movie dialogue at this point.
• Song that makes you want to get up and dance: I’m not really a dancer. It would be easier to answer the question, “song that makes me want to get up and leave.”
• Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: Lives are so many things; I try not to make prescriptions for what other people should do.
• Introvert or extrovert: Introvert, who presents as an extrovert.
• Coffee, tea, or neither: Both. As often as possible.
• First job: Teen Music Critic
• Person you admire most and why: There are a handful of artists I could name. People who are remarkably open all the time and not judgmental about what being creative means— their whole lives are creative. I try to be like them, but I’m not sure I always succeed.

The post Q&A: Gabrielle Zevin, Author of ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

As bookish people, there is one place we all feel at home: the bookshop. The outside world doesn’t even matter anymore as long as we are surrounded by our favourite books and stories yet to be discovered. Most of us use the bookshop as far more than just a place to meet our needs, which is to get new reading material. We see it as a place to meet our friends, a place of comfort full of like-minded people and yes, even a place to reward or console ourselves after an accomplishment or an especially hard day (on that subject, check out fellow Nerd Daily contributor Tracy’s article on impulse book buying here). 

Now, you’re probably wondering why I just told you all of that when these are facts you know perfectly well yourself. I simply want you to be reminded of how you feel when entering a bookshop; either on a planned trip on a spontaneous visit to your favourite store. I get the exact same feeling whenever I read a story set in a bookshop, don’t you?

Luckily for us, a lot of authors choose to set their stories in a bookshop. These stories exist in every genre and for every age group and are like the comfort of a bookshop you can carry around with you and take home.

Surely, you’ve already read some stories which involve our favourite place to shop and you might even have a favourite fictional bookshop (Flourish and Blotts, anyone?) but just in case you haven’t or you’re in need of new reading material, here are five of my favourite fictional bookshops:

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

For some reason, this romance novel has two titles. The American version, as it is listed here and the original British title, which is The Little Shop of Happy Ever After. This is a story about a young woman breaking free of (some) social conventions, relocating from the bustling city of Birmingham to the countryside of Scotland and falling in love. And she does all of this by impulsively buying a van and turning it into a bookshop on wheels.

If you are looking for a love story in which the protagonist not only falls in love with a man but with life, books, and most importantly herself, then this is the book for you.

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

A. J. Fikry is a bookshop owner who has seen better days. In fact, both he and the bookshop have. He starts isolating himself from everyone he knows and even withdraws from what has been giving him pleasure throughout his life so far: his books. That is until a small package arrives at the shop and changes everything.

 This is a story for you if you like contemporary fiction full of emotion because this book is a whirlwind of feelings of every kind.

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

In this cute YA novel, Dash and Lily meet through dares which Lily has left in a notebook at her favourite bookshop in order to find the right guy for her. They keep talking via the cleverly hidden notebook before starting to wonder whether they would get on just as well in real life as they do on paper.

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan are a dream pairing when it comes to writing romances. Some of you might remember Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – either the book or the film version starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings. Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares is an absolute delight for everyone who loves bookshops, an identity reveal and YA.

You by Caroline Kepnes

In this thriller, a bookseller Googles a customer’s name and starts cyberstalking her, before taking his stalking to an ‘IRL’ level. He slowly sneaks into her life and tries to eliminate every obstacle between them and their happy ever after, even if he crosses some lines.

You is an exploration of manipulation and trust (or lack of it) in our digital age, especially considering the power of social media and the enticing promise of ‘likes’. Many of you will probably already know the Netflix adaption starring Penn Badgley, but even so, the book is definitely worth a read as the story is so intense, the pages practically turn themselves!

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The world is about to end. However, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley have been living on earth since the very beginning (separately of course, except for when they run into each other which is bound to turn into lunch). They are too comfortable enjoying everything they are offered on this planet to look forward to the apocalypse. And then somehow, they lose sight of the Anti-Christ, which is a whole new level of dilemma…

This heartfelt and funny fantasy adventure is a true masterpiece. As for the bookshop setting, Aziraphale lives in a bookshop which serves as a meeting point for the angel and the demon on multiple occasions.

Here we have yet another book that has been adapted for the screen. What can I say; there is a reason that people want more of these stories after reading them. The Amazon Prime adaption of Good Omens has many beloved British actors in it, including David Tennant starring as Crowley and Michael Sheen as Aziraphale. If you love the show already, perfect, you will love the book just as much. If you haven’t consumed either, you’re in luck as both a perfect book and a perfect series await!

These are only five examples from a big pond of bookshop fiction and I hope that these examples can be an incentive for you to dive right in and to find as much comfort in fictional bookshops as I am assuming you do in your favourite real-life shop.

Now we would like to hear from you! What are your favourite fictional bookshops? Let us know in the comments below!

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Read on to discover our pick’s for August and tell us in the comments below if you’ll be checking one of them out!

Need more? Check out our August Book Releases List on Goodreads or follow our socials to be up-to-date when we post upcoming releases!

Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo | Goodreads
She is Diana, Princess of the Amazons and her fight is just beginning… Diana longs to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters and when the opportunity finally comes, she throws away her chance at glory and breaks Amazon law to save a mere mortal. Even worse, Alia Keralis is no ordinary girl and with this single brave act, Diana may have doomed the world. Alia is a Warbringer—a direct descendant of the infamous Helen of Troy, fated to bring about an age of bloodshed and misery. Together, Diana and Alia will face an army of enemies—mortal and divine—determined to either destroy or possess the Warbringer. 

League of American Traitors by Matthew Landis | Goodreads
In this Hamilton meets National Treasure novel, seventeen year-old Jasper is thrust into a world of secrets tied to America’s history. From finding out he is the sole surviving descendant of Benedict Arnold, the most notorious traitor in American history, to learning his father’s death was no accident, Jasper finds himself at the center of a war that has been going on for centuries, where descendants of the heroes and traitors of the American Revolution still duel to the death for the sake of their honor.

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley | Goodreads
In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg, but when the India Office recruits Merrick for a deadly expedition to fetch quinine—essential for the treatment of malaria—from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. Desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off and soon becomes surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairytale and find out what befell the last expeditions.

The Driver by Hart Hanson | Goodreads
Michael Skellig is now a limo driver after being an Army Special Forces sergeant and his limo company is staffed by a ragtag band of wounded veterans. When he begins to hear the guttural accent of the Chechen torturer he shot through the eye in Yemen a decade ago, he knows to listen carefully. In an attempt to protect his client, he ends up in custody at a hospital as the only person of interest for murder and becomes entangled with a dangerous situation as he is literally the only person sitting between his client and a bullet to the head.

Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin | Goodreads
Aviva Grossman, an ambitious Congressional intern in Florida who makes the life-changing mistake of having an affair with her boss and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the Congressman doesn’t take the fall, but Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins. Changing her name and moving to a remote town in Maine with her daughter, she tries to start over as a wedding planner, but at the urging of others, she decides to run for public office herself. But in our age, Google guarantees that the past is never, ever, truly past, that everything you’ve done will live on for everyone to know about for all eternity.

Age of Assassins by R.J Barker | Goodreads
Girton Club-foot, apprentice to the land’s best assassin, still has much to learn about the art of taking lives. But their latest mission tasks him and his master with a far more difficult challenge: to save a life. Someone, or many someones, is trying to kill the heir to the throne, and it is up to Girton and his master to uncover the traitor and prevent the prince’s murder. In a kingdom on the brink of civil war and a castle thick with lies Girton finds friends he never expected, responsibilities he never wanted, and a conspiracy that could destroy an entire land.

Red Swan by P.T Deutermann | Goodreads
Set in contemporary Washington D.C., Red Swan begins with the death of a behind-the-scenes operator at the CIA, who was integral to the Agency’s secret war against China’s national intelligence service and severely damaged China’s Washington spy ring with a “black swan” ruse. But this mysterious death suggests that the CIA itself has been compromised and that China has someone inside the Agency. It appears the ruse may have been turned against the CIA and instead, a Red Swan is flying. Who is she, what is her target, and where will she land?

All Rights Reserved by Gregory Scott Katsoulis | Goodreads
Speth Jime is anxious to deliver her Last Day speech, but the moment she turns fifteen, she must pay for every word she speaks, for every nod ($0.99/sec), for every scream ($0.99/sec) and even every gesture of affection. But when her friend commits suicide rather than work off his family’s crippling debt, she can’t express her shock and dismay without breaking her Last Day contract. Backed into a corner, she finds a loophole: she closes her mouth and vows never to speak again. Speth’s unexpected defiance of tradition sparks a media frenzy, inspiring others to follow in her footsteps, and threatens to destroy her, her family and the entire city around them.

Poe: Stories and Poems (A Graphic Novel) by Gareth Hinds | Goodreads
In “The Cask of Amontillado,” a man exacts revenge on a disloyal friend at carnival, luring him into catacombs below the city. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” a prince shielding himself from plague hosts a doomed party inside his abbey stronghold. A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, faced with a swinging blade and swarming rats, can t see his tormentors in “The Pit and the Pendulum”. The seven concise graphic narratives, keyed to thematic icons, amplify and honour the timeless legacy of a master of gothic horror.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne | Goodreads
Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from and over his many years will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud | Goodreads
Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship.

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh | Goodreads
Imagine a place populated by criminals-people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who’ve been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don’t know if they’ve perpetrated a crime, or just witnessed one. What’s clear to them is that if they leave, they will end up dead. For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace—but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town’s residents revolt.

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