Fathers and Daughters — Benjamin Markovits

A book in which everyone gets happier in the course of the changing seasons of a single year.

In prose that shimmers with emotional insight and precise observation, Benjamin Markovits unlocks the souls of three teachers and a student at a wealthy private school in Riverdale, New York. For all of them, fathers and fatherhood exert a gravitational pull. Biology teacher Amy Bostick has always adored her all-American dad, but now she pulls away as she falls in love with a rich alum. Another biology teacher, Howard Peasbody, finds fatherhood thrust upon him when he discovers that a fling seventeen years before has produced a daughter, Francesca, the best friend of one of his students. English teacher Stuart Englander yearns powerfully for the children his marriage won't deliver him, leading him into awkward intimacy with his student Rachel Kranz, who, independent of her teachers' dramas, is moving closer to her own father as he dies.

Shockingly beautiful and melancholy by turns, this novel is a triumph--full of satisfactions of the kind that only great literary fiction can provide.