Elita

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

We wrote about this book when it came out in January, and even though it’s set in the dead middle of a Pacific Northwest winter, the mystery behind this novel makes it hard to put down. Lunstrum’s first novel, Elita (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books) follows Bernadette Baston — a university lecturer and scholar of child language acquisition and development — as she is drawn deeper and deeper into a local unsolved crime that has her trying to balance her career with motherhood. Like a good old Nordic noir, this book places a premium on setting — mainly the isolated, bucolic islands of the Puget Sound — making it as much of a character as the humans who inhabit it.

Storybook Ending

Moira Macdonald

A recent release from Seattle journalist Moira Macdonald (a longtime arts critic for The Seattle Times), Storybook Ending (Penguin Random House) tells the delightful tale of two women who are unknowingly passing love notes back and forth through novels at a local bookstore, each thinking they are writing to the handsome, flannel-wearing man behind the counter. Set in post-pandemic Seattle, this novel taps into the reality, and importance, of human relationships: to places, to each other and to the objects we cherish most.

So Far Gone

Jess Walter

One of the Northwest’s most prolific novelists, the New York Times bestseller Jess Walter is at it again with his latest book, So Far Gone (HarperCollins Publishers), which tells the tale of a reclusive journalist forced from his wooded cabin hideaway to save his kidnapped grandchildren. Emerging from a life with no internet, no smartphone and a car that barely runs, the protagonist is forced to navigate contemporary life — and chase down the bad guys — while reassessing everything he thought he’d left behind

Transplants

Daniel Tam-Claiborne

Former Hugo House program director Daniel Tam-Claiborne released his debut novel, Transplants (Regalo Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster), earlier this year. It tells the poetically written story of two women, Lin and Liz, each looking to find their place in the world. Liz is a Chinese American teacher at a university in rural Qixian, while Lin is a student who has trouble connecting with her peers, and prefers to spend time with her myriad pets. After Lin is expelled, the two women swap places: Liz tries to find out why her parents left China before she was born, and Lin relocates to Ohio to attend community college. Over the course of a year, the women engage in a search for identity and belonging through the lens of migration, family and global relations.