Listen, if I tell you this book title nods to Bridget Jones and opens with a wink at Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, you'll get the gist. Yaël Koppman starts keeping a diary because her life needs documenting—or maybe just understanding. It's intimate, it's funny, and it straddles literary homage with modern neuroses.

Three wealthy American brothers board a train crossing India. They haven't spoken in a year. The eldest, Francis, orchestrated this reunion trip to repair broken family bonds. What follows is Wes Anderson doing what he does: quirky dysfunction against gorgeous backdrops, emotionally stunted men learning to feel again.

Spring has arrived (supposedly). Birds are chirping, trees blooming, and my choir is performing. Catch us at Espace des Blancs Manteaux on April 6th. Come hear voices doing their thing. This is my not-subtle plug for something I care about outside of books for once.

Tardieu returns to her obsessions: disappearance, absence, impossible mourning. Alice was five when she lost her mother. "Lost" is accurate because she took years to understand what gone meant. This novel excavates memory and grief with surgical precision. Raw and unflinching.

Ogawa seems to have left her fantastical phase behind, but her fixations remain: memory, collections, eccentricity. Tomoko is twelve and spends a year navigating an offbeat world. Ogawa writes childhood strangeness better than almost anyone. Delicate and peculiar in equal measure.

Strange how everything I'm consuming lately deals with prejudice and overcoming assumptions. Esther is paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair, her world radically shrunk. Faucon films her life without pity or melodrama. Just honest observation of a person navigating a body that won't cooperate.

I love Claudel the novelist, so I rushed to see his directorial debut before reading any reviews. Smart move. This film is devastating. A woman released from prison moves in with her sister. The past hangs heavy. Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a performance that guts you quietly.

Knud is a Danish kid living on a dull island. His nightmare? His mother is German. Post-war Denmark where German equals enemy. The boy suffers daily for his mother's origins. Romer writes childhood cruelty with dark humor and unflinching honesty. Brutal stuff.

Valentine's Day in a Midwest town. Literature professor Sherry Seymour finds an anonymous card: "Be mine forever." Suddenly she's flustered and flattered. Seems harmless until it isn't. Kasischke spins suburban unease into full-blown dread. Domestic horror done right.

Special St. Patrick's feature. I've read three Johnston novels and the last disappointed me—felt repetitive. Still, she's the Irish author I'm honoring today. Johnston writes fractured families and Irish landscapes with understated grace. When she's on, nobody does it better.