Elizabeth’s Best: 5 Fiction Books Worth Reading Right Now

I'm down in South Carolina for a stretch of book signings for The Peace Guidebook, and somewhere between bookstores, events, driving, meeting readers, and talking about peace, I've been doing something I don't always make enough time for: reading purely for fun.

Not research. Not a book I need to read for work. Not something I'm reading because I'm interviewing the author. Just fiction.

I've been reading during the quieter hours, on my days off, and whenever I have a little time to myself. And I've been loving it. There's something wonderful about disappearing into someone else's story for a while, especially when your own days are busy.

So this edition of Elizabeth's Best is coming to you from South Carolina. These are five fiction books I've been reading and recommending lately. They're very different from one another, but each one gave me that wonderful feeling of wanting to get back to my book.

Here are my five picks.

1. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

If you love sweeping family stories filled with secrets, consequences, and characters whose lives become intertwined in ways they never could have anticipated, put Buckeye on your list.

Set primarily in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, Patrick Ryan's novel begins around the end of World War II and follows two families across decades. A single encounter between Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt sets something in motion that doesn't simply disappear when the moment ends. Its consequences travel through marriages, families, secrets, and eventually another generation.

What I especially like about this book is that it understands something very human: our lives aren't made only from the big decisions we deliberately make. Sometimes they're shaped by one moment, one mistake, one secret, or one choice that seemed relatively contained at the time. Then life keeps moving, and years later we discover how far the ripple traveled.

Why I Love It: I love novels that let characters be complicated. People make mistakes. They love imperfectly. They hurt one another. They try to repair things. Buckeye gives its characters enough humanity that you can understand them even when you don't necessarily agree with them. It is a big story, but underneath it all, it is about people trying to live with the choices they've made.

2. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This one had me at remote island near Antarctica.

Wild Dark Shore takes place on Shearwater, an isolated island where Dominic Salt and his three children are the final caretakers of a research station and seed vault. The family is preparing to leave as rising seas threaten the island when a mysterious woman named Rowan washes ashore during a violent storm. And yes, there are secrets. Several of them.

The setting is almost another character in the book. It's beautiful, dangerous, isolated, and changing. Against that backdrop, McConaghy gives us a family carrying grief, a stranger with her own reasons for being there, and questions about trust, survival, nature, and what we'll do to protect the people and places we love.

Why I Love It: I love a book that transports me somewhere I've never been, and this one certainly does that. But the landscape isn't what ultimately kept me reading. It's the family. It's grief. It's love. It's what people hide from each other because they believe they're protecting someone. And it's the reminder that sometimes surviving isn't the same thing as living.

3. The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

The question at the center of The Midnight Train is irresistible:

If you could travel back through your own life and revisit the moments that mattered most, where would you stop?

Matt Haig returns to the world of The Midnight Library with the story of Wilbur, an older man given the opportunity to board a magical train and revisit moments from his past. At the center of those memories is Maggie, the love of his life, and the choices Wilbur wishes he could make differently.

This could easily have become a clever time-travel premise and nothing more. Instead, the idea raises much bigger questions. Which moments would we choose to return to? Would we recognize the important ones while we were living them? If we could change the past, should we? And how much of a life is made up of moments we didn't fully understand until much later?

Why I Love It: This book lands directly in territory I think about all the time. We are not entitled to time. We don't always know we're living an important moment while we're in it. Sometimes it's only years later that an ordinary dinner, conversation, trip, goodbye, or afternoon takes on enormous meaning. I love fiction that makes me think about my own life differently, and this one does.

4. Whistler by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett has such a gift for finding enormous meaning inside relationships and moments that might initially appear small.

In Whistler, Daphne Fuller is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband when she realizes an older man is following them. The man is Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, whom she hasn't seen in many years. Eddie was married to Daphne's mother for only a relatively short period when Daphne was a child, but their relationship had a lasting impact on both of them. Their unexpected reunion brings the past into the present and opens a story about memory, choices, loss, connection, and what it means to have truly been known by another person.

I love the premise because it challenges the way we measure the importance of relationships. We tend to think longevity determines significance. But some people are in our lives briefly and change us forever. Others are there for decades without ever fully knowing us.

Why I Love It: Ann Patchett understands the emotional weight of ordinary human connection. Whistler asks us to consider the people who helped shape us, including the ones who may no longer be part of our everyday lives. It is also a beautiful reminder that time doesn't necessarily determine the importance of a relationship. Sometimes being truly seen by another person, even for a relatively short period, changes everything.

5. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

And then there is Sybil Van Antwerp.

The Correspondent is told largely through the letters and emails of Sybil, a retired lawyer in her seventies who writes to family, friends, authors, acquaintances, and others who cross her path. Through that correspondence, a life gradually emerges, including relationships, grief, regret, humor, stubbornness, connection, and something from Sybil's past that she has not fully confronted.

I love the format because letters reveal people differently. There is what Sybil says, what she doesn't say, what she sends, and what she cannot quite bring herself to send. Little by little, you begin to understand the person behind the correspondence.

And perhaps most importantly, this isn't a story suggesting that growth belongs only to the young. Sybil is still learning, changing, repairing, connecting, and becoming. The novel has become a remarkable word-of-mouth success and won the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.

Why I Love It: I love the idea that we are never finished becoming who we are. We can change our minds. We can reconnect. We can apologize. We can forgive ourselves. We can let someone new into our lives. We can understand something at 73 that we couldn't understand at 43. There is something wonderfully hopeful about that.

Five Very Different Books, One Very Good Reading List

I didn't intentionally choose five books with a common theme, but when I put them together, I realized there is one.

Time.

What we do with it. Who we spend it with. The choices we make along the way. The people who shape us. The things we wish we'd done differently. The relationships we repair. The memories we carry. And the moments we don't realize are important until much later.

Maybe that's one reason fiction matters so much. For a few hundred pages, we get to live inside somebody else's choices. We see consequences they can't yet see. We know things they don't know. We watch years pass in the turn of a page.

And occasionally, while reading someone else's story, we recognize something about our own.

Those are the books I remember.

These five are well worth making room for.

With gratitude,

Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino

Elizabeth's Best

Elizabeth's Best is my personal collection of things I genuinely love and think are worth sharing. Books, products, places, food, gifts, discoveries, and whatever else earns a spot on my list. Five at a time. No endless scrolling required.