The youngster may be visiting, but specific details in Grant’s softly colored art suggest that Grandfather’s cozy house—indeed, the entire verdant landscape—is truly home. As an unseen narrator exhorts readers to appreciate small joys both concrete and abstract (“the sunshine warm on your skin,” “the seeking, the aha! of finding”), the pair enjoy breakfast, then drive to a quiet cove. The ocean is calm, the sandy beach almost empty. The child revels in the hot sun and “silky sand,” the “sea-salty air,” and a dip in the water, with its “breath-stealing chill.” Elder and child savor “the sweetness of summer-ripe peaches” and just-picked blackberries. Swooping sea gulls, a tide pool filled with sea stars, a glimpse of whale fin, and the “finger-paint sky” at sunset all deepen the day’s delights. Most worth savoring, of course, is “the love that holds your heart tight,” expressed in snuggles and cuddles ebulliently given and received, despite the “whiskery scratch” of the older man’s scruffy, bearded face. The four-beat lines are both natural and propulsive, with internal rhymes, alliteration, and accessible diction. Caregiver and child present white.

Macy Miller is a dutiful wife and mother: She raises her two kids, keeps a clean home, and looks after her husband, Chris, when he stumbles home drunk every night. On one such evening, Macy elects to break with routine. Inebriated, Chris falls down outside, and Macy watches silently as his body is buried by the snow. Chris survives, albeit in a hypothermic coma. While her husband lies in the hospital, Macy reflects on her choice to let him die: “She had crossed an invisible line inside herself, and the realization of what she was capable of was as significant as the act itself.” As Schrader’s well-paced story unfolds and Macy’s past indiscretions come to light, it becomes clear that her actions on that night were not truly out of character. There is a “beast” inside of her, one that craves an intense life, but she has instead chosen stability. As a teen, this beast manifested in acts of self-harm and an assault on a boy who is now the detective investigating Chris’ accident. Later, Chris awakens and is spiritually reborn. His resultant commitment to sobriety and God culminates in new careers for him and Macy as Christian influencers. As Macy is thrown back into the mundanity of her life, her secret urges for a different existence threaten to again rise to the surface. Schrader deftly examines the peril of hiding one’s true self and the struggle to maintain the masks we wear in society. His prose is evocative without being overwrought; describing Macy’s beast, he writes, “It lived…In the depths beneath the oak trees. In that half-second of eye contact with the mud-slicked man whose teeth had gleamed in the shadows. Something has been passed to her. Something that had never left since.” This well-crafted novel combines the excitement of a thriller with the insight of character-driven literary fiction.

Drugan’s father was a well-respected man around their suburban Boston-area town. The local dentist, he was known for his bedside manner, his local philanthropy, and his involvement in the town’s Catholic parish, which his family had attended for generations. The author knew a much different man from his public persona, however; his father seemed to single out Drugan among his siblings for scorn. When the author was 13, he heard his father admit to his mother that he despised his middle son. That year at Thanksgiving, the elder Drugan menaced the boy while he was doing the dishes: “His hot breath washed in my ear and down my neck, and I was so repulsed that my knees went weak,” the author recounts. As the boy grew older, his father’s rage began to manifest as violent beatings. Eventually, Drugan realized that the source of his father’s hatred was the author’s latent homosexuality—a profound taboo in his family’s conservative Irish Catholic community. With this memoir, Drugan unpacks how his father’s abuse shaped the man the author eventually became and details the long struggle he overcame to forgive the abuser—and to love himself. (In addition to being a moving story of surviving abuse, the book is a wonderful document of Massachusetts in the 1970s; at one point, future senator Scott Brown comes to Drugan’s aid against locker room bullies.) Drugan conveys his story in nimble prose, masterfully constructing his characters’ psychologies. “I don’t know what exposure he had to gay men earlier in his life because he never talked about anything remotely related to sex,” he writes of his father. “Still, he knew I was ‘different’ before I did. My emerging sexuality eroded the modicum of humanity I had left.” Any readers who had complicated relationships with their parents will likely see shades of their own family interactions in these pages.

In the post–Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a “freethought” movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green’s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, “one skirmish in a larger battle pitting the dominant evangelical Protestant establishment against emerging forms of religious heterodoxy.” Leading the establishment’s war was Anthony Comstock, a special agent for the U.S. Post Office Department who prosecuted thousands of Americans for alleged obscenity after mailing what he considered subversive material. Comstock, writes Green, was “a religious fanatic, a delusional, self-appointed agent of God, and a misogynist to boot,” but much of his campaign and a law named for him remains in place today. Green capably traces the origins of the freethought movement and its principal exponents to the New England transcendentalists and the “tradition of eighteenth-century deism,” though by the late-19th century, they were far less genteel. At points, freethought merged with violent anarchism, at other points with feminist rejection of the “Christian ‘ideal’ of marriage and family,” and at every turn it was met with severe opposition from the religious orthodoxy. This conservative front strongly supported Comstock while resisting efforts to weaken the powers of the major denominations. The freethought movement essentially disappeared in the early 20th century, and for various reasons: The Red Scare of the 1920s cowed many leftists into silence, while movement leaders such as Robert Ingersoll found no heirs after their death. But more, Green writes, “many of the causes that freethinkers embraced and believed were inhibited by organized religion—scientific inquiry, evolution, greater artistic and intellectual freedom, and social reform— were gaining ground on their own.”

In their debut collaboration, Sodais and Sullivan trace their parallel paths throughout the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan at the start of the 21st century. Sodais was a young Persian-speaking Afghan at the time of the rise of the Taliban, which was brutal for him. “The Taliban used their position of absolute power to punish and humiliate people who did not align with their version of Islam,” he writes. “It was another lesson in the use of violence I would learn all too young.” In 2012, he was commissioned to work as an interpreter for an American platoon and met U.S. Army officer Sullivan. The two soon formed a working relationship and then a friendship, and the narrative shifts between their viewpoints. Sodais remarks on the oddities of the U.S. military he observed as he accompanied Sullivan on his various missions, and Sullivan reflects on the unforgiving country he was invading at the behest of his government. “Life is cheap in Afghanistan, and violence part of its long, bloody history,” he writes. “What we took as jest or perfectly acceptable in the western world could be seen as unforgivable transgression in the East.” The contrasting perspectives render the book compelling and readable. The story becomes even more darkly gripping once the narrative reaches the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the resurgence of the Taliban, which left Sodais scrambling to stay alive and escape the country, which proved incredibly dangerous and difficult. “I wanted to leave, and they wanted me gone, so why was it so difficult to actually do it?” Sodais wonders at one point. “Why was there such a strict jail sentence for refugees caught trying to leave?” Both Sodais and Sullivan are genial presences on the page, providing strikingly human responses to the war.