One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this big-hearted family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo. Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall. When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time. Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust. A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.