Fall Book Recs

Looking for some nooks to curl up by the fire with? Here’s what our staff is reading!

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

By: Delia Ephron

After the long illness and death of her older sister, Nora, and the long illness and death of her first husband, Jerry, Delia Ephron was stunned—if not entirely surprised—to learn in 2017 that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. Her engaging, wise, and funny new memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, chronicles her fierce reckoning with cancer, with grief (“I took the sun setting personally,” she writes of the loneliness of early widowhood), with the life-affirming power of friendship, and, at age 72, with a new love—Peter, a Jungian psychiatrist who wrote Ephron a friendly email after she published an op-ed in the Times about trying to disconnect Jerry’s landline. (Her record of their courtship, conducted initially over email, is as breathlessly romantic as anything she’s put into a screenplay—and this is a woman who co-wrote You’ve Got Mail.)

Love Marriage By: Monica Ali

Monica Ali’s new novel is an absorbing and meaty exploration of love, family and culture. Yasmin Ghorami is a young doctor following in her ambitious immigrant father’s footsteps. She’s newly engaged to Joe Sangster, a fellow doctor who’s the son of an infamously outspoken feminist and public intellectual with boundary issues. There are differences in race, class and religion to navigate between the middle-class, Muslim and Indian-born Ghoramis and the white, upper-middle-class Sangsters, and Ali delineates those distinctions with nuance. Yet, to its credit, the characters of Love Marriage are more interesting than their well-worn challenges.

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