Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, all three were spotted on 2024 ‘best of’ lists.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Summary: In 1999, Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, and heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily is flat-broke, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. Decades later, Lily’s son, Nick, can’t shake the sense that his mother is hiding something, so he sets out to find his biological father.

I’m thinking: Maybe.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

Summary: When Kit’s best friend gets dumped, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. Their getaway reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and her sister, Julie. Kit returns home, unsettled, reminiscing about the band she used to be in and the life she could have had. Kit spirals and as her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder if Julie is really gone.

I’m thinking: No.

Heartsease by Kate Kruimink

Summary: Lot and Nelly are sisters who were once extremely close, but a great deal has changed since their mother’s death, years before. Clever, beautiful, gentle Lot has been unfailingly dutiful – basically a disaster of an older sister for much younger Nelly, still haunted by their mother in her early thirties. When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed.

I’m thinking: Yes.