The Ocean House

Set in and around the Jersey shore, Hughes’s arresting new collection (after her novel The Loved Ones) orbits multiple generations of families connected by love, grief, and estrangement. With an enviable ear for dialogue and high command of prose, Hughes finds in these overlapping stories a stark beauty amid scenes of suffering and death. In “Dove,” a standout, a young man returns to his dying mother’s house, sharing his vigil uncomfortably with his stepfather and a nurse who smells as though “she wore a sprig of herbs beneath her smock.” In the title story, set in 1962, two sisters living in one of the “last of the great oceanfront houses left in Long Branch” yearn to connect with their lovely and unknowable mother, whose own mother was killed in the London Blitz. In “California,” a young girl and her father navigate life in the wake of the mother’s departure to a series of rehab facilities for substance abuse. There are many telling moments—a woman smiles at a young man because “that’s what any decent person does, they say hello to goodness, no matter how small, how tangled.” Hughes is a careful reader of her characters, and she captures their small, easy-to-miss moments of humanity through life’s vicissitudes. These stories pack a punch. (Jan.)