These two books with the word sentence in their titles couldn’t be more different, but I found both so compelling and full of heart. I learned about Irish writer Billy O'Callaghan’s Life Sentences from Godine editor, Joshua Bodwell, who sent us a copy. You might remember that Rebecca and I both loved Beneficence by Meredith Hall, another Godine title, so we pay close attention when a Godine package arrives. One evening I picked up Life Sentences to just get a flavor of the writing and found myself reading to the very end. Told from multiple perspectives over three generations, the quiet, beautiful prose of this novel is juxtaposed with the intense hardships his characters must endure to survive. It’s masterful. Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, which I listened to on audiobook (beautifully read by the author, I might add), is a real show stopper. It’s funny and thought-provoking and completely exceeded my expectations in every way. I loved it.—Shari

Like many of you, I adore a good index (personal trivia: I wrote indexes in a former career), so I was more than excited to read Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the. I was not disappointed. Index, which takes us on a romp through the history of the index in its many forms, from Medieval texts to the “visual index” of Jen Bervin’s The Gorgeous Nothings. I’d devoured the first few chapters of Index when Kristin Keane’s An Encyclopedia of Bending Time arrived on my doorstep and I instantly fell in love with this beautiful, sad meditation on grief over the loss of Keane's mother, organized in alphabetical entries, “Absolute Time” through “Zeta.” The two books, though nothing like each other, vibrated on my bedside table in obvious sympathy. How do we organize our thoughts and griefs? By alphabet? By number? By memory? And then, of course, Ocean Vuong’s new collection of poetry, Time is a Mother, joined the conversation. Though the subject is, again, grief, it is a joy to be back in the deft, beautiful hands of the poet as he traverses the heartbreaking landscape that so many of us reluctantly call home: the land of lost mothers. Signposts again, but in broken lines this time: “these / corpses I lay / side by side on / the page to tell you / our present tense / was not too late”—Rebecca