Lately — Sara Pritchard

The novel Crackpots established Sara Pritchard as a writer of great sensitivity and spirit; "Lately" is a deliciously heart-rending followup to this acclaimed debut. In these skillfully interconnected stories, Pritchard presents women and men whose lives have been influenced by Bob Dylan and Vietnam, childhood accidents and family mysteries. Her characters often possess a certain good-can-be-made-from-bad personal calculus, a resilience of character, and a resolve to suck out the marrow of life, or at least to soldier on. In "The Honor of Your Presence", two sisters throw a divorce party, from cake to costume it's a Martha Stewart vision gone darkly, delightfully haywire. "Late October, Early April" finds a coed in the late 1960s debating whether to keep the child she's carrying, while the baby's father is missing in action. A woman on her first trip abroad thinks she sees her late father on a transatlantic flight in "La Vecchietta in Siena". Throughout this lively collection, Pritchard illuminates our defining moments with a playful but knowing wit.