Books like Nick Hornby

After celebrated painter Oscar Feldman dies, two biographers begin interviewing the women who knew him: his wife, his longtime mistress, and his formidable artist sister. Gradually, the official portrait of the genius gives way to sharper, funnier, less flattering truths.

Like Juliet, Naked, this PEN/Faulkner Award winner is fascinated by the distance between an artist’s legend and the ordinary people forced to live alongside it. Christensen is especially good on women whose lives have been treated as footnotes to male creativity. The result is not a grim reckoning but a witty, intimate novel about who gets to manufacture cultural importance—and who finally gets to correct the record.

Arthur Less, a moderately successful novelist nearing fifty, receives an invitation to his former lover’s wedding. To avoid attending, he accepts every literary engagement he can find and assembles an absurd itinerary around the world.

Greer shares Hornby’s rare ability to make embarrassment both excruciating and tender. Arthur’s professional insecurity, romantic evasions, and fear that his best years were never especially good are played for exquisite comedy, yet the novel never despises him. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Less turns apparent mediocrity into something unexpectedly moving: a life may look ridiculous from the outside and still contain a love story worth recognizing.

Graham is married to Audra, a woman so sociable that a trip down the street can become a civic festival. When his controlled, intimidating first wife re-enters their lives, Graham begins measuring one marriage against the other—and discovering how little such comparisons explain.

This is the choice for readers who loved Juliet, Naked less for the music than for its alert, forgiving understanding of long relationships. Heiny’s dialogue has the snap of first-rate screen comedy, while her real subject is the strange accumulation of concessions, grievances, private jokes, and loyalties that constitutes adult love. Few novels are this funny about domestic irritation or this persuasive that affection can survive clear-eyed knowledge.