In Elizabeth Day’s psychological thriller, “Magpie,” an obsessive, boundary-pushing lodger upends the lives of a picture-perfect couple trying to have a baby.
At its best, Beth O'Leary's tender and fragmented narrative feels like a metaphor for experience — how we only ever know part of the story of our lives and control even less.
Antonia Fraser’s “The Case of the Married Woman” tells the story of Caroline Norton, who scandalized 19th-century London society — and upended its laws.