We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is a novel based on real-life events, as Hunter tells a story taken from the life of her grandfather and his family, starting in 1939 as they celebrate Passover in Radom, Poland. 

Hunter notes that of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than three hundred survived. The matriarch and patriarch of the Kurc family are Sol and Nechuma, and their five children (and their spouses) are Genek (Herta), Halina (Adam), Jakob (Bella), Hunter's grandfather Addy, and Mila (Selim), along with Mila and Selim's young daughter Felicia.

Addy was apart from his family during the war as it impossible for him to return from France where we was living to Poland, which fell early in the war and was split between German and Soviet control. Sol and Nechuma were forced out of their house and Genek and Herta sent to a labor camp in Siberia. In Poland, ghettos were created, and later liquidated, and there were many times various family members could have been killed, but survived due to both bravery and good fortune.

The story spans from Europe to Asia, briefly Africa, then Brazil, and ultimately America and the conclusion of the book is a powerful one, with the fate of various family members unknown during much of the war.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is an engrossing novel that features the characters of Tova Sullivan, Cameron Cassmore, and Marcellus the giant pacific octopus. It's an ingeniously put together book with first-person narration from Marcellus interspersed throughout and a really fun read.

Cameron is a young adult without much going on in his life who goes from California to the small town of Sowell Bay, Washington in search of his biological father.

Tova is the cleaning person at Sowell Bay Aquarium, by herself after the passing of her longtime husband a few years prior, and only son Erik decades before, and is contemplating a move to Bellingham, where she can "not be a burden on people." 

There's also the local grocery store owner, Ethan, who befriends Cameron, and likes Tova. The connections between the characters both develop and reveal themselves and it's an exceptionally nice story that Van Pelt provides in her debut novel.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work of nonfiction that's described as one where Coates "set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."

The book starts talking about language, and the sports stories that captivated Coates in his youth, and then gets into stories, and how stories of places not actually always what they are. 

There's three distinct parts, first on a trip by Coates to Dakar, Senegal, then on his time in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally Palestine. In South Carolina he's confronted by often racist mythology, and in Palestine, sees the repression of Palestinians by Israel.