Middle Spoon

The narrator of Middle Spoon has what looks like an ideal life: a devoted husband, two bright children, a comfortable and settled bourgeois routine, and a younger, attractive boyfriend who joins him at farmers markets and cocktail parties. Then the boyfriend ends things without warning, and the narrator, heartbroken for the first time, falls apart.

The breakup forces him to deal with a world that still doesn't quite know what to make of polyamory. Friends judge him, rejection stings, and he starts asking whether a life shared between his family and his lover was ever truly possible, or whether it could be.

Alejandro Varela, a National Book Award finalist, writes with a big heart and a sharp, anxious eye for the present day. The novel pokes at the unspoken rules people still follow, from taboos around intimacy to the letdowns of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food. It is both wrenching and very funny, and it offers an unexpected take on love, loss, and starting over.

This is a book for anyone who has yearned for someone, nursed a broken heart, or wrestled with love at its messiest.