Books

On a beach in British Columbia, a writer named Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up from the 2011 tsunami. Inside is the diary of Nao, a Japanese teenager desperate to be understood, and each page pulls Ruth — and the reader — deeper into the mystery of Nao’s life. Weaving across continents and decades, Ruth Ozeki’s novel is a meditation on time, connection, and our shared humanity.

Why it’s here: One of the book’s two narrators is a teenage girl, but the other is Ruth, a midlife woman writer whose own reckoning with meaning and mortality anchors the story.

In an alternate 1952, a meteorite strike devastates the U.S. East Coast and forces humanity to race for the stars before Earth becomes unlivable. Dr. Elma York — a former WWII WASP pilot and gifted mathematician working as a human ‘computer’ for the fledgling space program — battles entrenched sexism and her own anxiety to win a place among the first women astronauts. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.

Why it’s here: Elma is in her thirties in this first book, but the series grew from Kowal’s short story ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars,’ in which Elma is a 63-year-old astronaut called back for one last mission — an older woman’s story of nerve and competence that anchors the whole arc.