When you’ve finished your morning paper, pick up one of these books to join in on New York City’s largest unofficial reading group: The Subway Book Club. As the holidays roll around and you’re stuffed into social situations you may or may not dread every year, take a break from your own drama with these new books about family calamities that make your own seem not so bad after all.
‘Seven Days of Us’
By Francesca Hornak
One week. One dysfunctional British family. One really engrossing holiday read. Meet the Birches, spending their first Christmas all together under one (very old) roof for the first time in years. If you enjoy laughing out loud at the plights and predicaments of fictional families you immediately feel like you know, this novel will keep you smiling through Thanksgiving. ($26, Berkley)
‘The Floating World’
By C. Morgan Babst
Set in New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina, this novel tells the story of the Boisdoré family, a mixed-race, multigenerational unit navigating the natural disaster together. The premise: Cora Boisdoré’s parents evacuate the city before the storm, though she refuses to leave, and the mysterious, tragic outcome following the catastrophe disrupts and brings people together in completely unexpected, page-turning ways. ($26.95, Algonquin Books)
‘I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter’
By Erika L. Sánchez
A YA novel that adults can get lost in, the author’s second book introduces readers to Mexican-American sisters Julia and Olga, the “perfect” one. When an accident kills Olga, Julia learns more about who her sister really was. ($17.99, Knopf Books for Young Readers)
‘Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties’
By Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman
Fans of Emma Cline’s novel “The Girls” will enjoy this nonfiction account of a teenager living under Charles Manson’s cult leadership in the ’60s and her eventual aid in his arrest and imprisonment. ($27.99, William Morrow)
‘It’s All Relative’
By A.J. Jacobs
Think your family is rough? What if everyone you knew was actually somehow related to you? That’s what immersive journalist and author A.J. Jacobs (you may know him as former President Barack Obama’s aunt’s fifth-great-aunt’s husband’s brother’s wife’s seventh-great-nephew) sets out to prove in his newest book. The humorous yet poignant look at family structures, biology versus chosen and adopted family and what it means to be related makes for great holiday conversation with whomever you happen to be sharing a table. ($27, Simon & Schuster)
