Also of interest... in complicated relationships

Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi (Abrams, $26)

“A work of extraordinary insight and courage,” Avni Doshi’s acclaimed debut novel “is also the world’s worst Mother’s Day present,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The narrator, an artist in India, nurses an inner rage throughout the story as she cares for her own mother, a cruel, neglectful parent now sliding into dementia. Such a blend of filial resentment and devotion isn’t new to fiction.

But it’s “something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely—and so baldly.”

This Close to Okay

by Leesa Cross-Smith (Grand Central, $27)

“The story is a little too implausible, the characters too sentimental, the ending too rushed,” said Marcia Kaye in the Toronto Star. But if you can accept that a woman driving at night would pick up a man who’s about to jump off a bridge, you’ll appreciate the safe space that Leesa Cross-Smith’s latest novel creates for two strangers to bare their hearts. Though secrets and suspense figure in, too, this is a story “steeped in kindness,” and “we can never have too much of that.”

Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder (Scribner, $26)

The protagonist of this “wildly readable” sophomore novel has made selfdenial a sport, said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. Languishing at a Los Angeles talent agency, the lonely 24-year-old subsists on Nicorette gum and fat-free everything until the day an overweight and Orthodox Jewish server at a fro-yo shop insists on her devouring a sundae. Rachel and Miriam soon embark on a surreally hedonistic journey, transforming Milk Fed into “one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year.”

Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

By Mark Leyner (Little, Brown, $27)

Mark Leyner has outdone himself, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. In surely the least sellable novel of his “admirably weird” career, the veteran absurdist builds a bizarro world around a karaoke bar in Eastern Europe where his fictionalized self is bonding with his daughter. The real Leyner supplies his usual blitz of pop-culture references and comic non sequiturs. “He is the undisputed master of a style of writing he invented, whose rules no one else can really understand.”