The best novels for immersing yourself inside the lives and heads of multiple people

This novel is an immersive read with heaps of empathy for all its characters but especially for the two sisters whose perspectives are at the center of the story: the twin who disappears to live a secret life, passing as white, and the twin left behind.

We don’t get the perspective of Stella, the vanished twin, until 14 years after her disappearance, 150 pages into the book. By then, I was fully absorbed in the grief and unanswered questions of the people she’d abandoned, eager to finally know where she’d been all this time and to understand her complex motivations and the emotional and mental toll of relinquishing—and hiding—her racial identity, her community, her sister, and her past. I picked this book up and didn’t put it down until it was done.

Most of the family members in this novel—father, mother, and four teenage kids—are painfully at odds. Most of them don’t much like most of the others, but they also don’t have much understanding of one another’s inner worlds. As readers, we do—one character at a time, in multiplying layers of wounds, desires, and needs that grow into a complex picture of humanness.

I love it when a character who is underestimated or despised from the outside—which Marion, the frumpy, near-invisible wife and mother, certainly is—later becomes the point of view character, and we finally get to see who they really are, hear the secrets of their past, and grasp what has shaped them and why. By the end, Marion takes hold of her own agency and becomes the powerful heart of this novel, a redemption I loved for her. 

I grew up with the true story of the missionaries to an isolated Indigenous tribe in Ecuador who, in 1956, were killed by the people they’d come to help. I loved Five Wives because it’s an incisive but compassionate interrogation of a story from my own religious background, but you don’t need to be familiar with the source material to find it riveting. 

As a religiously fervent teen, I was inspired by the courage of the wives of these martyred men, who later returned to bring the gospel to their husbands’ murderers. As an ex-Christian adult, I was awed by the ways Joan Thomas manages to neither patronize her religious characters nor leave the faith-and-martyrdom myths unchallenged. She deftly imagines the inner lives of these women, the very different doubts, struggles, and desires of each in the lead-up to and aftermath of the tragedy, and she doesn’t let anyone off the hook.

Intergenerational conflict! Irreconcilable clashes of values! Decades of history, miscommunication, misunderstanding, secrets, resentments, shifting allegiances, expectations and their failure to be met!

These are my literary catnip, and they’re all here in this book, brought to life through four complex women: a grandmother, a daughter, a granddaughter, and a daughter-in-law, converging in a beach house one fraught summer. I especially love the way these women's lives illustrate the changes to what is possible and permissible for women between generations. 

I love a decades-spanning love story, and this book delivers, complete with separation and longing, the inner psychology and personal journeys of the two main characters, and a satisfying, hopeful coming together—FINALLY!—at the end.

I also learned a ton about race and the differences between the American Black experience and the African Black experience, but in the best way it is possible to learn: fully immersed in a story that’s entertaining and propulsive. I was emotionally invested in Ifemelu and Obinze from the start, and that’s all I really ask of the fiction I love best.