Body Language

Sloane used to act and now works as a therapist. She is heading into menopause and wants to meet it on her own terms, without the products sold to women in her position, and she is open to trying psychedelics. Her sister Laurel is angrier and more restless than she lets on. She works for an environmental nonprofit, is raising teenagers, and has just found what may be proof that her husband is cheating. The youngest, Nanette, has finally answered a religious calling she put off for years and now lives as a novice in a convent, where a spontaneous public prayer has turned her into the subject of a media frenzy.

Then a call summons Sloane to their mother's house. Barbara has dementia, just as her mother and her sister did, and the three women find themselves under one roof again with little agreement on anything else. Large age gaps, a parental divorce and very different temperaments have always kept them apart. Barbara has also always kept her inner life closed off, and her illness raises the question of whether that door might finally open.

Caring for her could bring the family together, or a startling revelation could wreck what time Barbara has left and split the sisters for good. Meg Howrey tells this story in sharp, funny prose. She looks at memory, what mothers pass down emotionally, and a woman's right to run her own body and life, and she shows how strong the bond between sisters can be even when they have little in common.

The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.