Our Favorite Books for a Last-Minute Mother’s Day Gift

Vantage Point, by Sara Sligar

An unthinkably rich brother and sister — heirs to a steel fortune — are haunted by a family curse and by compromising videotapes (possibly faked) that upend the brother’s Senate campaign.

Also consider: “A Reason to See You Again,” by Jami Attenberg; “Playworld,” by Adam Ross; “The God of the Woods,” by Liz Moore

For the mom who loves history

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson

There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson, who is able to transport readers to a different time and place without minimizing the differences of the past from the present. This book — the second in his planned trilogy about the American Revolution — is so compulsively readable that it’s hard to put down.

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige

In this slow burn of a book, set on the Appalachian Trail, an experienced hiker named Valerie goes missing and two other women — a veteran game warden and a lonely but dynamic 76-year-old stuck in a retirement community — must crack the case.

Also consider: “Casualties of Truth,” by Lauren Francis-Sharma; “The Impossible Thing,” by Belinda Bauer; “Your Steps on the Stairs,” by Antonio Muñoz Molina; “Beautiful Ugly,” by Alice Feeney

The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe, by Ariane Bankes

Our critic Alexandra Jacobs, who loved the book, described it this way: “Born in 1916, orphaned at 12 and educated unconventionally, they grew up to be vivid but fragile poppies among tall waving wheat stalks of midcentury intellectualism: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Wilson, André Malraux, Benjamin Britten.”

Also consider: “The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood,” by Matthew Specktor; “Yoko: The Biography,” by David Sheff; “Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí,” by Michèle Gerber Klein

For the mom who loves historical fiction

Isola, by Allegra Goodman

Based on an actual historical incident, Goodman’s novel traces the fate of a 16th-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, who loved the wrong man and was consequently marooned with him on an unforgiving island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Also consider: “Mutual Interest,” by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith; “Fagin the Thief,” by Allison Epstein; “The Jackal’s Mistress,” by Chris Bohjalian; “The Case of the Missing Maid,” by Rob Osler

The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd

This beautiful, meditative book about spending time in Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains is an inspiring guide to stepping away from comforts and routine. “I can recognize the ptarmigan’s plumage and the petals of St. John’s wort from her descriptions, without the aid of a single image,” our reviewer wrote.

Also consider: “Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte Wood; “The Colony,” by Annika Norlin; “Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures With a Clueless Craftsman,” by Patrick Hutchison

For the mom who likes to laugh

The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes

Narrated by their middle-aged daughter Miranda, this book chronicles a few months in the lives of a 70-something British couple who bicker and garden and suffer each other’s considerable deafness, minor dementia and timeworn personalities in a vine-encrusted, bat-infested stone house in rural France.

The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale

The stranger-than-fiction case unpacks a series of sensational murders that rocked 1950s London. Summerscale “brings a novelist’s eye and a sociologist’s understanding to a trove of thrilling material,” our reviewer wrote.

Also consider: “Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen,” by Hallie Rubenhold; “Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco,” by Gary Krist; “The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne,” by Kate Winkler Dawson

For the foodie mom

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang

The Nobel laureate’s new novel, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, revisits a violent chapter in South Korean history: Between 1947 and 1954 on Jeju, an idyllic island off the coast of South Korea, at least 30,000 people were killed in mostly government-perpetrated atrocities. The novel centers on a character who uncovers the depths of a friend’s obsession with the massacre.

Also consider: “A Calamity of Noble Houses,” by Amira Ghenim; “The Tokyo Suite,” by Giovana Madalosso; “City of Fiction,” by Yu Hua

For the mom who loves art

Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton

During the Covid pandemic, Dalton — a British writer and political adviser — stumbled across an abandoned newborn brown hare, or leveret, in the English countryside and decided to raise it herself despite knowing nothing about hares. Her sweet memoir, accompanied by naturalistic illustrations, describes how that choice changed her outlook on life during the pandemic and beyond.

Also consider: “Memorial Days,” by Geraldine Brooks; “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir,” by Martha S. Jones; “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams

For the mom who likes scary, creepy things

Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito

Feito’s deliciously macabre novel, about a murderous 19th-century governess, announces its narrator’s grisly intentions from the start: “In three months everyone in this house will be dead,” she announces a few pages in.

Also consider: “Sour Cherry,” by Natalia Theodoridou; “Beta Vulgaris,” by Margie Sarsfield; “Something in the Walls,” by Daisy Pearce

For the mom who’s a baseball fan

Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems, by Maria Zoccola

Zoccola’s poetry collection transfers the familiar story of Helen of Troy out of Greek myth and into the world of Sparta, Tenn., a real town between Nashville and Knoxville, giving contemporary resonance to her troubled marriage and her affair with an exciting outsider.

Also consider: “Doggerel,” by Reginald Dwayne Betts; “Close Escapes,” by Stephen Kuusisto; “Plat,” by Lindsey Webb

For the mom whose bookshelf is packed with romance