Quiet Chaos, by Sandro Veronesi

An Italian business executive rescues a drowning woman, then returns home to discover that, while he was saving a stranger, his own wife suddenly died. Now he turns his attention to his 9-year-old daughter. As an international merger of his company is underway, he goes AWOL from work, instead committing himself to a simple and, in his mind, completely rational existence: standing in front of his daughter’s school, all day, every day. A fascinating cast of characters visits him at his car–other executives, his disastrous and beautiful sister-in-law, and, eventually, the heiress whom he rescued at the seaside. A long, sweet burn of a book, surprising in every way: the best book I’ve read this year.

The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy, by Priscilla Gilman

The memoir of a woman whose academic track at Yale is interrupted by the birth of her first child, a brilliant and very different little boy who explodes his Wordsworth-loving mother’s deeply romantic notions of childhood. Tender, smart, and full of wonder, not quite like any book I’ve ever read on motherhood.

French Lessons, by Ellen Sussman

One day, three tourists, three French tutors, lust, loss, and the lure of foreign streets. A delightful read. In French Lessons, Ellen Sussman has created an erotic, emotionally charged novel spanning two continents. The intriguing cast of characters, whose lives are intertwined by a common love for the world’s most beautiful language, make delicious reading from the first page to the last.