Ring

DEBUT Former lawyer and poet Lerner’s (Protection) debut novel is sure to be an emotional read that readers will be thinking about long after finishing. Lee, who is nonbinary, is overcome by grief after their 23-year-old daughter dies mysteriously. Lerner’s writing style movingly gives readers a view inside Lee’s grief-stricken mind. Remembering a trip they had planned to the remote Seven Pillars Sanctuary in Ontario, Canada, Lee leaves their wife to find comfort there. Others drawn to the sanctuary include people with terminal cancer diagnoses and a woman trying to heal after a sexual assault. Led by a Hungarian man and a Syrian woman who was an oncology nurse, attendees engage in a practice of walking through the snow around the sanctuary’s Seven Pillars. It’s a rite completed only after weeks of training and healing. But the end of the walk is essentially an assisted suicide.