Heartwrenching Books to Read if You Can’t Get ‘Real Americans’ out of Your Head

The Everygirl Book Club’s June pick is here! In this twisty, uproarious debut, a pop culture obsessive uses her reality TV expertise to investigate a suspicious disappearance aboard a yacht… while falling for a hot deckhand and avoiding confronting her best friend’s untimely passing—perfect for fans of The Wedding People and Traitors.

In the fall of her senior year of college, Jordan meets Sam and Yash, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Throughout her life, Sybil has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings,  Sybil sits down to write letters. She expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the plateau of mid-life. Having nearly derailed herself several times, she finally feels, at age 57, that she has a firm handle on things. She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Louisiana, have been best friends since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for college, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband, Gordon, respected in the community but a controlling presence at home, intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and name the baby after him. But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates. Spanning 35 years, what follows are three alternate versions of their lives, shaped by Cora’s last-minute choice of name

As a child, Kathy lived at Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world. Kathy had long ago put this past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the memories. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, but other scenes as well that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood—and about their lives now.

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall. When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left them reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in. But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they’ve been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. They envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion binds Cal Jenkins to Margaret Salt. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.

This short story collection features ten tales that blend humor, surrealism, and social commentary on love, identity, race, and mortality. The characters find themselves facing extraordinary choices in scenarios that range from the everyday to the U.S. government injecting all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic, and the immortal.