The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks / Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks was the name of an African-American woman who died of a virulent form of cervical cancer in Baltimore in the early 1950s. What makes her case historically remarkable is that a colony of her cancerous cells were among the first human cells to thrive and multiply outside the body in a petri dish, making them a much sought-after commodity for lab experimentation and scientific discovery. For decades the cell line known as HeLa (for the first letters of her first and last name) made a huge positive impact on the development and advancement of cellular biology. On the flip side, partly due to its remarkable longevity and tenacity, HeLa contaminated other cell lines, ultimately compromising the integrity of experiments and responsible for the loss of millions of dollars in research money.

Further controversy surrounds the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without the informed consent of her next of kin, and much of the book chronicles the author’s attempts to win the surviving family’s trust and help them understand exactly what happened to their mother’s cells and in exactly what regard Henrietta Lacks has become immortal, as the title of the book suggests.

This is great scientific writing, but also provides an honest look at a family bulldozed by the modern medical establishment, never quite getting the simple answers to their questions that would help them allay their fears, confusion, and resentment about what had happened to their mother.

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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