Spring Reading

Secrets abound this month in five new novels. In Love & Treasure (Knopf), Ayelet Waldman’s thoughtful rumination on the impossibility of reparations, a locket found among Nazi spoils connects three generations of feisty heroines. Julia Glass, meanwhile, revisits characters from her 2002 breakout novel, Three Junes, in And the Dark Sacred Night (Pantheon), about an unemployed professor in search of the identity of his father. Based on a real cold case, Frog Music (Little, Brown), by Emma Donoghue, follows a Gilded Age burlesque dancer through the streets of San Francisco as she hunts for her best friend’s killer. Linn Ullmann’s searing The Cold Song takes us to the coast of Norway, where a celebrated chef and her novelist husband find themselves grappling with the murder of their daughter’s nanny. And don’t overlook Evie Wyld’s read-in-one-sitting All the Birds, Singing (Pantheon), which suspensefully teases out the past crimes and present dangers imperiling an Australian woman on the run. Pass along after reading—some secrets are too good not to share.