The Gathering by Anne Enright. The nine surviving siblings of the Hegarty family are in Dublin to bury their brother, who walked into the ocean to end his pain. The narrator, his sister, delivers a memory-laden story full of Enright's shimmering prose.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. A newly married couple in mid-20th-century England, bringing their worries and their pasts to their wedding night, try only to connect. The result is a cello suite of sadness, encompassing an entire swath of English culture and the legacy of roads not taken.

Cheating at Canasta: Stories by William Trevor. This collection of stories is so finely wrought and delivered with such confidence that even their most shocking consequences possess the inevitability of truth unfolding.