On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

I didn’t go anywhere on spring break, but I’ve been everywhere. Thanks to books, I’ve traveled from New York to London, Paris to Venice, Berlin to Baltimore. I’ve even been to the moon and back, skipping through time and space via Emily St. John Mandel’s wonder-filled Sea of Tranquility (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), a sort of companion novel to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. I suppose it’s science fiction, what with classic elements like time travel, spaceships and colonies on the moon, but its reality — past, present, future — is both familiar and strange, and its characters are achingly human. There’s an English expat wandering in the Canadian woods, a best-selling novelist on a future book tour, a curiously named stranger playing time detective. There’s devastating climate change, and another pandemic, and the world maybe, probably coming to an end, yet there is as much life as loss. It’s hopeful, too, and I’ve been carrying it around in my head like a half-remembered dream. I realize I haven’t given you much detail as to the shimmering plot, but I want you to experience that sense of discovery when the strands come together.

Back to earth, and we’re in Baltimore, where Anne Tyler has made ordinary lives seem extraordinary in numerous novels. She does it again in French Braid (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), floating among members of the Garretts as they spin out and away from each other over several generations and decades. Not that they were ever very close, even on a family vacation in 1959 where younger son David avoids the lake and his overloud father Robin, while mother Mercy paints landscapes and ignores her teenage daughters. I lost all sympathy for Mercy when she later leaves a cat, who had curled on her bed like a ”nautilus,” at an animal shelter. She also effectively leaves her husband, moving bit by bit into a small artists’ studio. A granddaughter inherits her artistic talent, though, even as other offspring are imprinted with distinctive family traits. Tyler writes prismatically of the passage of time and the enduring mystery of family.

A teenage love triangle ends in tragedy in Stuart O’Nan’s Ocean State (Grove Atlantic, digital galley., which reads like a literary episode of Dateline. The little sister of the killer reveals both the identity of murderer and victim in the first line, while flashbacks tell the suspenseful backstory of young love and jealousy in a working-class Rhode Island town. It reminds me of O’Nan’s beautifully written novel of a few years back, Songs for the Missing, about a family stricken by the disappearance of a beloved daughter. O’Nan is very good at getting inside the heads of teens, their hothouse emotions stoked by hormones and peer pressure.

Other kinds of mysteries propel novels of crime and suspense. Donna Leon returns again to lovely, watery, crowded Venice in Give Unto Others (Grove Atlantic, digital galley), where police officer Guido Brunetti suspects a respected charity is a cover-up for fraud. Tech-savvy Claudia Lin whizzes around New York on a bike in Jane Pek’s clever The Verifiers (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), checking out clients using a popular dating app. Alex Segura’s terrific Secret Identity (Flati ron, digital galley) is set in 1970s New York, where comic book fan Carmen Valdez ghostwrites a female superhero comic for a colleague, who then turns up dead.

Paris is always a good idea, right? Lucy Foley crafts a locked-room puzzle in The Paris Apartment (HarperCollins, digital galley) as Jess arrives to stay with her brother in his posh digs, only to discover he’s disappeared and his odd neighbors are of little help. In An Impossible Imposter (Penguin, digital galley), Deanna Raybourne has Victorian sleuth Veronica Speedwell confronting her past while investigating a long-lost heir at a Dartmoor mansion. Kelley Armstrong may be winding up her Rockton series with The Deepest of Secrets (St. Martin’s Press, digital galley) with detective Casey Duncan facing the closure of the off-the-grid community in the Canadian wilderness. Rockton’s not on any map, but it’s a must-stop for people looking to lose their pasts.

A map is at the heart of Peng Shepherd’s inventive The Cartographers (HarperCollins, digital galley), which deftly mixes mystery with a little bit of magic. There’s a body in the New York Public Library — that of noted cartographer Dr. Daniel Young. His estranged daughter Nell, her father’s protege until a famous falling-out, arrives at the scene of the crime with a mix of emotions. She’s even more confused when she finds a cheap, gas station map among his papers — the very map that caused the fateful argument — and learns that it’s the last of its kind and very much-wanted by a mysterious group known as the Cartographers. But why? That’s the secret someone will kill to keep secret, and it’s simply amazing, as Nell discovers with the help of her ex-boyfriend and her father’s friends from long ago. The Cartographers is amazing, too, and I’m already looking forward to a return visit.