Kin by Tayari Jones
Annie and Vernice, known as Niecy, grow up next door to each other in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, during the segregation years. They call themselves “the cradle friends”, linked from infancy by loss. Both are motherless. Annie is abandoned at birth and raised by her strict grandmother. Vernice’s mother is killed, and she is brought up by a protective aunt.
Their shared upbringing makes them inseparable, each providing the stability the other lacks.
But as they reach adolescence, their paths begin to diverge. Annie is restless and impulsive, driven by a deep need to find the mother who left her. She runs away to Memphis, on a journey that exposes her to danger, hardship, love, and moments of fierce self-discovery.
Vernice, more cautious and reserved, leaves Honeysuckle at 18 to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. There, she is drawn into a network of educated, influential black women and becomes increasingly aware of how class, wealth, confidence and social capital can open doors, determine opportunity, even as she continues to live with the impact of her mother’s death.
Men come into their lives but always remain secondary to the bond between the two women. What holds the story together is their loyalty, a form of sisterhood built on honesty, care, and showing up for each other without judgment.
Vigil by George Saunders
Jill “Doll” Blaine has a job in the afterlife. She’s an angel who appears at the moment of death to guide people through their final passage, materialising mid-fall in her familiar skirt, blouse, and black pumps. Since her own death, she has done this 343 times, and almost all of her charges have found comfort. This time is different.
Jill is assigned to KJ Boone, a powerful oil executive on his deathbed in his Dallas mansion.
Boone has no regrets. He believes he lived well and made the world better. Jill’s job is not simply to comfort him, but to help him see himself honestly before he dies, a process that involves truth as much as compassion.
Over the course of one long night, Boone’s room fills with visitors, both living and dead.
Former colleagues arrive to defend his choices. Animals harmed by environmental destruction appear. A mysterious figure known as the Frenchman, who claims responsibility for inventing the internal combustion engine, presses Jill to force Boone into shame and remorse. But Jill resists, insisting that reckoning can’t be hurried.
As Boone argues, boasts, and deflects responsibility, the novel explores how people justify the harm they cause and how power protects self-belief. Moving between the earthly and the spiritual, Vigil examines corporate greed, environmental damage, accountability, and mercy. Ever empathetic, even when it’s difficult, Jill questions whether absolution is ever simple: “I felt a familiar, powerful truth being beamed into me by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive: Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility.”
The Hill in the Dark Grove by Liam Higginson
Carwyn and Rhian are the last of a long line of sheep farmers working a remote hillside farm in the mountains of Eryri, North Wales. Life is already hard. The winters are brutal, debts are mounting, neighbours are disappearing, and tourism is reshaping the land in ways they can’t control. All they have is routine, isolation, and a shared determination to hold on.
Everything changes when Carwyn uncovers a stone head buried in one of the farm’s fields. The discovery draws him towards a much larger, ancient structure hidden beneath the land.
What begins as curiosity turns into a fixation. Carwyn neglects the farm and dismisses Rhian’s fears, convinced that uncovering the site will somehow solve their problems.
Rhian finds herself increasingly alone as her husband drifts away from her. The man she knows grows distant and secretive, and something about him begins to feel wrong. As winter tightens its grip, the sheep begin to die off, money runs out, and an accident puts their fragile stability at risk. The farm, once familiar, begins to feel threatening, watched over by the looming stones.
Rooted in Welsh folklore, The Hill in the Dark Grove is a tightly controlled folk horror novel about inheritance and the danger of digging too deeply into the past. It explores how tradition can protect, but also trap people, and how the urge to preserve a way of life can unleash forces that refuse to stay buried.
Effingers by Gabriele Tergit
First published in 1951 and long overlooked, Effingers is a sweeping family novel that traces three generations of a German Jewish family from 1878 to the aftermath of World War 2.
The story begins in southern Germany, where the Effingers are modest craftsmen, and follows their rise in Berlin after marriages link them to two wealthy Jewish banking families, the Goldschmidts and the Oppners. Together, they become part of Germany’s industrial, financial and cultural elite.
Tergit charts the family’s fortunes against the major political and social upheavals of modern German history. The Effingers thrive before World War 1, then struggle through the instability of the Weimar years, inflation and political unrest. As anti-Semitism hardens and Nazi rule takes hold, the family’s position collapses. Careers end, relationships fracture, and long-held assumptions about belonging, assimilation and national identity are forced into question.
The novel is crowded with life: weddings; business deals; dinner parties; arguments; gossip; and everyday routines continue alongside war, terror, exile and loss. Rather than presenting history as inevitable tragedy, Tergit focuses on how people live through uncertainty, arguing fiercely about what it means to be Jewish, German or both.
Wide-ranging yet precise, Effingers is a detailed portrait of German Jewish life before its destruction. Recently rediscovered and newly translated, it has come to be recognised as a major 20th-century novel, combining social observation with a refusal to simplify the past or judge its characters with hindsight.
The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara
Set in 1869, The Last of Earth begins at a moment when Tibet is closed to Europeans, frustrating the ambitions of the expanding British Empire. To get around the ban, British authorities recruit Indian surveyors, who can cross borders white men cannot, to secretly map the region. Balram, a schoolteacher turned surveyor-spy, is one of them. He has worked for the British for years, often alongside his closest friend, Gyan, who has vanished on a recent expedition and is believed to be imprisoned in Tibet.
Hoping to find and save him, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a risky mission into southern Tibet. The captain, disguised as a monk, wants to chart an unmapped river himself, no longer content to rely on others. Along the way, their journey intersects with that of Katherine, a 50-year-old Anglo-Indian woman travelling undercover after being denied recognition by the male-only Royal Geographical Society. Determined to reach Lhasa, she hopes to succeed where no European woman has before.
The novel moves between Balram’s and Katherine’s perspectives as they travel through a harsh, unforgiving landscape. They battle extreme weather, illness, bandits, soldiers and wild animals, while also reckoning with grief, ambition, loyalty and doubt. As their paths converge, both are forced to confront the limits of their beliefs and desires.
Blending historical adventure with psychological depth, The Last of Earth examines colonial power and the human urge to leave a mark on places that resist possession or control.
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