Counting Backwards
By Binnie Kirshenbaum (Soho Press)

This novel, author Binnie Kirshenbaum’s eighth, focuses closely on a loving, happily married couple—he is a scientist; she is an artist—as the husband’s health plunges because of early-onset Lewy body dementia. With dark humor and much insight into love and grief, Kirshenbaum details the couple’s unraveling lives as they shift from sharing dreams to an unexpected place of despair. Written in short, tense scenes, the novel is informed by the author’s own experiences after her husband received a similar diagnosis.

 

Accidental Friends
By Susan Josephs (Bink Books)

A debut novel, this is the well-crafted story of an uncommon friendship between two women—Rose, a 93-year-old former ballet dancer who fled the Nazis decades earlier, and Nina, a 36-year-old yoga teacher, both living in sunny Venice, Calif., and are brought together by a deadly car accident. Journalist and playwright Susan Josephs describes their dynamics with depth and compassion and captures the magic and history of beachside Venice.

 

Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust
By Lucy Adlington (Harper)

Offering an original perspective on tragic events of the Holocaust, British novelist and textile historian and collector Lucy Adlington weaves together the experiences of four young women whose paths never crossed. Each of their lives was upended by the Holocaust; each had a connection to a different red knit sweater that they treasured, whether it was handmade, a store-bought gift or secretly plundered. Adlington’s impressive research gathers the stories behind these everyday items—now moth-eaten, faded, torn at the elbows or lost—to present the women’s remarkable stories.

 

Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion
By Kelsey Osgood (Viking)

Kelsey Osgood, who converted to Judaism, interviews other young women who, like her, left their secular lives to find meaning and fulfillment in religion. She devotes a chapter each to the spiritual journey and inner lives of six women who found their homes in different religions—Quakerism, Islam, Catholicism and others—as well as a chapter on her own path to Orthodox Judaism. Osgood’s story and insights run through the entire book, along with wide-ranging cultural references from religious figures, authors such as Tolstoy and modern-day feminists. These are riveting accounts of connection and faith.

 

Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
By David Denby (Henry Holt)

Essayist and film critic David Denby’s four Jewish subjects—Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan and Norman Mailer—are not only creative geniuses and public intellectuals, but all are also larger-than-life personalities who ultimately changed American society and culture. While the four hardly knew each other, they were all alive at the same historical moment in the years after World War II. Denby, a staff writer for The New Yorker, describes how their Jewishness shaped their creative output and success, as did the fact that they were very much at home in America. The profiles are both celebratory and honest.

 

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Sandee Brawarsky is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.