Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. THE VULNERABLES offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. This book reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress.

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and his wife, Isabel, are slowly drifting apart --- and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Ten-year-old Nathan is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, five-year-old Violet, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And Robbie is stranded in Iceland. April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality.

Boyd Halverson --- star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JCPenney manager --- robs a bank and takes the teller, Angie Bing, as a hostage and for a ride. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday, Boyd and Angie reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. THE HIVE AND THE HONEY is a bold and indelible collection that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? In GOING INFINITE, Michael Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy and the justice system.

In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning --- from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world --- sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree --- and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper --- and cousin by marriage --- of a once-famous novelist, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for 30 years. Mrs. Touchet suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. The “Tichborne Trial” --- wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title --- captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud?

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and they are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully’s son, is still grappling with his father’s tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him. Meanwhile, the towns’ newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice’s ex-lover. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another.

In each of these 12 stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her 40s, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age, but everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.