EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY, letting go of grieving

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY
IMBOLO MBUE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, a captivating novel about love lost—and the weight of regret

What if I’d never gotten into that car? What if I’d pulled out of the driveway five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later?

Three years ago, Wolo’s wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.

Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo’s family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father’s second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared.

What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.

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My Review: Wolo found true love with Yoma. It's the loveliest moment in someone's life: love is joyous before Life has its way with you, and Wolo? He was absolutely at the peak of joy because Yoma was pregnant!

Life had its way with him.

Victoria causes the accident that ends Wolo's happiness. It is impossible for Wolo to recover from this hideous, disfiguring agony of grief, and however loudly he tells his mother, his stepmother, his matchmaking aunties this he is still urged to date, to love again, to move on.

As if some random woman will be Yoma again, will be The One, will fill his life with laughter and excitement...impossible. And then. Will you look at that. Victoria writes to express her remorse for the awful thing she caused to happen to him. To ask Wolo to meet her and process their shared grief.

The Greek chorus of Wolo's life is unequivocal: Do not do this. Don't even think about doing this. You're morbidly obsessed with your loss already don't reinforce it is the universal subtext of their advice. Wolo's stunted, limited existence, the one he resists altering because letting go of his rage and agony feels like killing Yoma and their unborn twins again, has to change or Wolo will die. From the inside out.

So he says yes.

It was here I began to see why Author Mbue chose flashback, a style of storytelling I often find disinvolving, for Wolo's process of healing. It is reinjuring him, it is shoving his head in the waterboarding bucket again and again...it is allowing him just enough air to survive...it is letting him pull his feet under him on the wet floor and lurch and stumble away from the bucket...it is the light that shows the hand extended to him, showing a human is reaching with kind and helpful intent into his dark, drowning life.

It shows Wolo Victoria. Her pain from causing him pain. Her knowledge that she harmed Wolo, she (without malice) stole his life from him and wants so badly to do anything to help him because only that will help her.

And he reaches back.

Everything else I could say is spoilerific. I didn't give it a full-five rating because of spoilery stuff, but look how close I came. (Side note: I am so very happy to have as of October 2026 the ability to give quarter-star ratings on the country's biggest book-discovery engine.) It is Author Mbue's gift to be able to visit the darkest places in a person's life while they are floodlit in Capitalism's distracting material abundance and spiritual moonless midnight. This is another of her immigrants' tales of fitting in being less important than settling down.

It is a beautiful story with some odd edges to keep it from melting into the pleasant sameness of the bulk of entertaiment. That hard-to-differentiate mass gets so stultifyingly dull.

THE STRANGERS, autofiction? metafiction? thought-provoking grief-study no matter how you look at it

THE STRANGERS
NAOMI ALDERMAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere.

A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief—a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.

Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.

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My Review: Grief does very weird things to a person. I'll hold up my hand and admit I've hallucinated (officially) the sound of my thirty-five ears gone belovèd's voice more than once over the years. That one, however, is nothing compared to the mimmoths.

Shared, collective grief powers the mimmoths, of course; no way are fun-sized mammoth-y entities that just...appear...as Naomi Alderman's mother dies, her father's decline speeds up, the planet's climate and civilization's bad-crazy frag-grenade era heat up, just totally unrelated. There is plenty of evidence that Naomi Alderman is not the only one seeing them!

Mass psychosis? Permaybehaps...the mimmoths being widely seen hasn't meant they're easily, or even at all, interacted with, no feedings by humans, no captures (just killings) by humans, nothing tangible except ubiquity. Oh, and lots of (potentially) related effects stemming from being in the vicinity of the mimmoths, healing or spontaneous abortion or death, but SOMEthing momentous occurs to some people (Naomi Alderman included), so of course the conspiracy-theory areas of society have new fodder for old conspiracies and material to make new ones.

Book-Naomi Alderman and Author Naomi Alderman are entwined narratively and intertwined emotionally, as the genesis of the story in mother-loss is real world; the mimmoths and their effects, well...the effects are real, and while I haven't seen a mimmoth I'd love to. What led to Author Naomi Alderman creating this lovely, odd, off-kilter sci-fi memoir is the awfulness of needing a way to work through the random events in a world where the god you thought was yours turns out not to exist and nothing you've thought was real is, in fact, enduringly persistently real, the stuff that god should prevent/ameliorate isn't getting better, and love does not conquer all...but Love persists, endures."Everyone knows the saying: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

But it's not true. Some things don't kill you but just leave you permanently weaker," as Naomi Alderman muses.

A better way to present the fragmented sensation of living on after the death of a love object but not the love is hard for me to conjure. A mimmoth is real, if not tangible; it affects the world but has no effect on it, like a past, like a dead love; and comes from a silent nowhere without explanation like the Orthodox Jewish god that Naomi Alderman has lost.

It is in blurring the lines separating Author Naomi Alderman's terrible emotional, psychic blows, and the consensus-reality immiseration of end-stage capitalism, that this story's impact is most powerful. Creating, summoning the mimmoths, endowing them with potency of emotional and practical sorts...affect and effect...Author Naomi Alderman makes this a story to be reckoned with. As Author Naomi Alderman processes the profundity of her loss (mostly the loss of possibility, a different, better future) after her mother's death, Naomi Alderman reckons with the world's losses and the loss of the world through her semidivine, partly malign living-but-not mimmoths.

Like every other grief considered I've ever read, this is not a story for its own sake or an entertainment to be enjoyed for a while then largely forgotten. It's not tidy enough for that. Manicured Versailles gardens are not the analogues here, but the designed and controlled wildernesses of Capability Brown. Visibly as different as it's possible to be, yet each is a planned, designed, shaped, undergirded and attention-directing space to be within. Moving through The Strangers will give you the feels a great piece of writing is so good at delivering. Don't expect Versailles, enjoy the wilder, less trammeled world of Capability Brown, and I expect you'll feel amply rewarded.

SLEEPLESS NIGHT, grief never really ends...so what do you do with it?

SLEEPLESS NIGHT
MARGRIET DeMOOR (tr. David Doherty)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman gets up in the middle of a wintry night and starts baking a cake while her lover sleeps upstairs. When it's time for her to take the cake out of the oven, we have read a story of romance and death. The narrator of this novel was widowed years ago and is trying to find new passion. But the memory of her deceased husband and a shameful incident still holds her in its grasp. Why did he do it?

Margriet de Moor, the grande dame of Dutch literature, tells a gripping love story about endings and demise, rage and jealousy, knowledge and ambiguity—and the possibility of new beginnings.

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My Review: When I get a deMoor translation, I hop right on reading it because I know I'll go deep into a fascinating place. First Grey, Then White, Then Blue seduced me into her fan club thirty-plus years ago; then, over the years, a few other tries at getting Anglophones interested in her storytelling have been made. None has riled up the delighted baying and howling I feel she deserves for her beautiful, considered, lapidary work.

Oh...I think I see why others aren't flocking to get her latest. More fools they be.

This story will speak loudest to those among us who have lost a love. Left behind to make sense of the life we now live, our love now unreturned, figuring out how the hell to keep plowing through endless, cheerless, drift-filled days and then...horror of self-sadism...those reflective contemplative unanswerable-questioning nights.

Bake a cake!

In this case a tulbandcake (here translated as a "bundt cake" which, yes, but in a curious way, no):

A tulbandcake showing its candied-fruit interior and cool fluting

Staying busy, trying to keep your thoughts out of the toxic death-spiral of loneliness, resentment, anger, hollowness; that's all so relatable, and more poignant because on this night she's come to her kitchen to escape a man she's trying to find a passion for who is sleeping (she thinks) in her bed. He's been left behind as well...though her abandonment is to the love of her life's suicide some time ago and his to his wife's unwillingness to be married to him. That's it, that's the sum total of his existence in this story; having been him before I'll say it's my considered opinion he's lying awake wondering what the hell he's doing where he is when she's not even willing to be there with him for afters.

That said, the love of her life gave up on her, their brand-new life together, and on Life. That leaves a scar. What this nocturnal awakening is about is that scar. Is she so puckered and warped by it there's no longer a way to lie flat again? Is this hopelessness real or imagined? Can she tell the difference? How can she tell the difference?

Is the cake ready?

Because if it is, it needs to come out and cool down so it can be eaten.

IYKYK.

LESSER RUINS, shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses

LESSER RUINS
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3 very grouchy stars of five

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses Winner announced 12 March 2025

The Publisher Says: From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

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My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.

Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.

I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.

I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.

Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.

My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.

BRIGHT OBJECTS, shiny start to a promising new career

BRIGHT OBJECTS
RUBY TODD
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences, in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy, and romance, perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands.

Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye.

As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message. Finding herself caught between two conflicting perspectives of this celestial phenomenon, she struggles to define for herself where the reality lies. As the comet grows in the sky, her town slowly descends further and further into a fervor over its impending apex, and Sylvia’s quest to uncover her husband’s killer will push her and those around her to the furthest reaches of their very lives.

A novel about the search for meaning in a bewildering world, the loyalty of love, and the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession, Bright Objects is a luminous, masterfully crafted literary thriller.

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My Review: A debut novel from a very accomplished author, one whose best gift is the deft touch of characterization. I felt very connected to Sylvia from the get-go, her fuddled and bewildered survivor's guilt, her unostentatious revenge-seeking against the one responsible for her loss, and her deep but unwilling fascination with a charismatic local cult leader.

The lovely patterns Author Todd weaves among these strands, spinning her threads from the ever-renewed internal structures of loss, guilt, sadness, and outrage, don't sag or drop. They're sometimes not as harmoniously tinted as a veteran writer might choose...the mother-in-law in particular is rather paler than I'd expected, Theo the astronomer a bit too intense...but these are quibbles. Not a line out of place, not a word (even when a not-American word crops up) wasted or obscured.

The lack of a full fifth star on my rating isn't because of some sense of disappointment. I got what I wanted. The plot...revenge-driven widow struggles to cope with her loss and her survivor guilt will catch me in its web every time...is consistent, is finished with an appropriate, yet unexpected, ending. What bothered me, and this is really a very *me* thing to be tangled up in, was the comet. A comet, one on a path to get this close to Earth, is not going to go undetected for very long. We're motivated, since Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked Jupiter so very hard in 1994, to go looking for these kinds of objects.

Okay, so that's a half-star lost. A tiny smidgeon of the tarnish on my shiny loving cup of pleasure also traces to Theo and his own warping loss. It's a trope I find painfully Writerly, is the Conjunction of Damaged Souls. Theo's issues were understandably similar to Sylvia's; his response to her darkness was believable. His discovery of her, in Australia, where he happens to be for the confirmation of a career-defining discovery, is what rings false to me. As always I want this kind of other-directed man to exist; I suspect he isn't to be found in a man about to ascend to the heights of his ambitions. I also see the facile characterization of Joseph Evans, and honestly, since he's such a bell-end of a grifter, I just don't care.

Quibbles and crotchets aside, everything Author Todd does in this story fits. The mystery plot, the way it's rooted in the ugliness of revenge, the focus of the two leads on their personal quests, all works as a whole. The manner in which the ending's made manifest felt satisfying to me. I'm struggling with myself not to spoiler it (though I really want to!) because experiencing the event blind is a pleasure enhancer.

Tyro author does a fine job, will most likely do better next time, and very much deserves your treasure and time.