The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain

After her father's death, Riley MacPherson returns to North Carolina to settle the estate.  Her older brother Danny lives like a recluse in a trailer outside of the city.  Her older sister Lisa died decades earlier, a tragedy that had defined much of the life of the MacPherson family.  Lisa was a gifted musician whose kayak was found on the frozen river near Alexandria, Virginia where they lived.  She was only 17 and, although a body was never found, everyone assumed it was a suicide.  Danny carries a great deal of bitterness toward the way the family dealt with her death.  This along with his experiences in the Iraq War have left him estranged from his family and uninterested in helping Riley.
As Riley attempts to fulfill the directions of her fathers will, things don't seem to add up.  She finds documents and hears stories that don't quite match the family history she has always believed and is ultimately driven to find the truth.  This is a much lighter book than Necessary Lies but a good summer mystery read.

The Women In the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

In 1944, in a Bavarian castle, Marianne von Lingenfels makes a promise.  Her husband, good friend Connie, and other Resisters are all part of a plot to kill Hitler.  Recognizing the risk, the men charge organized, competent Marianne with keeping the wives and families safe if it should all go wrong.  The plot fails, the men are all hanged and the war goes on.  At the end of the war Marianne goes in search of the women left behind.  She finds two of them.   Benita, the beautiful and apolitical wife of Connie is living in the bombed out ruins of the city.  Marianne is also able to reunite her with her young son, living in a nearby orphanage.  Also seeking refuge in the castle is the enigmatic Ania and her three children. The castle and the surrounding community have suffered greatly in the war as did the women who have returned to the castle. Each carries with her secrets of the past - some they can leave behind - others they cannot.  Their stories continue through 1991 providing various perspectives of the people who lived through the war and then struggled to define who they were knowing what they had done to survive.  Readers who loved The Nightingale will love this as well.

Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf

Subtitle: the race to measure the heavens
"Race" here is a relative term.  In 1716 Edmund Halley proposed a way to measure the solar system.  He figured out that the planet Venus would pass in front of the sun in 1761 and again in 1769.  By measuring the time and angle of the "transit of Venus" from multiple points on the planet, they could use mathematics to figure its distance from the sun and from that, the distance of all the other planets.  But this book is less about the math than it is the journeys. In 1761, Europe was at war, colonies were being won and lost, getting anywhere depended on ships and horse drawn carts and science had yet to become  SCIENCE.  It took years of gathering the support and finances necessary to make the needed astronomical observations.  They had to find ships that were kind of going in the right direction.  They fought weather and disease.  All the time knowing that to be accurate they had to do it again in 1769 for the math to work.  Hundreds of attempts were made in both years.  Only one man, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche, was able to view both transits and he died while finishing his notes.  Another Frenchman, Guillaume Le Gentile de la Galaisiere was gone so long chasing Venus that he was declared dead and all his belongings were sold.  Hundreds whose names you might recognize like James Cook (who went to Tahiti and had to buy back all the equipment that the natives took) and Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon line fame) were only marginally successful.  In the end, it was a grand world effort and it worked.  You have to wonder what they would think as the world hops on trains, cars and planes to watch a solar eclipse just to oh and ah and say we were there.  This book is not as engaging as her "Invention of Nature" but it is a pretty amazing thing to wrap your head around.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters are born in the Gold Coast in the late 1700's.  Raised by different African peoples, neither is aware of the other.  One stays behind in Africa and becomes the "African wife" of a young British officer involved in the slave trade.  The other  is sold and sent to America on a slave ship.  And so begins a story told through generations.  Esi's generational story is one of slavery, hard won freedom, the sad consequences of segregation and Jim Crow,  Civil Rights,  and eventual success.  Effia's story is one of the development of Africa from tribal wars to colonialism and the eventual independence of the country of Ghana.  And then generations later - without the benefit of Ancestry.com - the worlds of the Fante and Asante come together again.  This is history from multiple perspectives and multiple decades with enough revelatory detail to span the missing years. There is an authenticity to both stories that may come from the fact that the author was born in Ghana and raised in America.

A Gentleman in Moscow

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.  "House" in this case is the luxurious Metropol Hotel across the street from the Kremlin.  He must also leave the elegant suite he was occupying for a room in the attic of the hotel.  But the Metropol is a world unto itself and the charming Rostov is a well respected member of its society.  Historical changes outside the hotel doors as well as a whole host of interesting characters that come through the doors do much to expand Rostov's "prison".  But Rostov himself is a fascinating observer of the world.  There are so many occasions of wit and wisdom that I just wished I could be sitting at his table for dinner or sharing an evening drink at the elaborate bar or cruising the back stairways with him while we explored all the hotels secrets.  And then there is the great ending. It is a book that you don't expect to be about much but turns out to be worthy of multiple page markers.  One of my favorites this year.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

To say this is a non-traditional novel is to make a gross understatement.  It is true that in 1862, President Lincoln's young son Willie died of Typhoid fever.  It is true that "bardo" is a real term used in Tibet to indicate a place between physical death and a final resting place of the soul.  So this is a story of Willie's death and Lincoln's return to the cemetery to grieve - sort of.  The style of the book is one of continuous narrative - narrative from ghosts of people buried in the cemetery - lots of people although we get to know three of them better than the others.  The speaker for every part is identified and through their comments some of their stories are revealed line by line with the appearance of a movie script.  Interspersed between these ghostly narratives are lists of short selections from various actual historical sources providing what is often a conflicting historical context.  It's a jumble that eventually becomes a debate about the future of Willie's soul.  It is a jumble that raises questions about an accounting of our lives.  It is a jumble about what is important and what is not.  I think it is a book that would be even better in the audio version where each voice is distinctive - although it still might be a jumble.

The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood

 Ona Vitkus, age 104 and cranky, has come to look forward to the young Boy Scout who comes every Saturday to do things around the house.  She finds his obsession with entries in the Guiness Book of World Records intriguing - even more so when he seems determined to find a way to make sure Ona becomes a record holder.  Then one day, the boy's father, Quinn, shows up to do his chores.  Quinn, a hardly successful musician never quite warmed to his son - this odd boy who counts everything; who has a freakishly good memory; who has died.  Ona and Quinn eventually form a bond over the memory of "the boy".  Both look for a way to grieve the boy's death and a way to honor his life.  The choices they make about how to do either drive this sometimes humorous, often thoughtful story.  Something about each character puts them outside the "normal" box but they eventually confront the reality that no matter how odd we feel or how odd we appear, we all struggle to find connections.