"The Marriage Portrait," by Maggie O'Farrell. The author of "Hamnet" imagines the fictionalized story of another real person — Lucrezia de' Medici, a Renaissance teenager who married at 15 and was dead within the year. Of putrid fever? Or of murder? "Hamnet," a reimagining of the life and death of Shakespeare's son, won the Women's Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
"The Ski Jumpers," by Peter Geye. In his new novel, the Minnesota Book Award-winning Geye writes about a ski jumper with a terrible diagnosis — and a secret past. Geye's earlier novels include the North Shore series about the Eide family.
"Painting Beyond Walls," by David Rhodes. Set in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, "Painting Beyond Walls" is the story of August, who leaves his job in Chicago to go back home, where he finds everything the same — and also deeply changed. Rhodes is the author of "Driftless," "Jewelweed," and other novels set in the Driftless Area.
