Two novels so breathtakingly good I could even read during daylight

Confession: I find it almost impossible to read during daylight hours. In June, at a garage sale, I bought a lovely little pink chair with a matching ottoman. Price: $12.  "This is my reading chair," I proclaimed. "From now on, I will sit in it and read during the day." Didn't work. Didn't, that is, until two novels appeared on my desk: "The Girls of August," by Anne Rivers Siddons and "Life Drawing," by Robin Black. Couldn't put them down. Daylight or not.

Leave it to Siddons of Charleston always to hatch a great plot. Four friends have been gathering for decades in August to spend a week somewhere along the coast. Ocean front and isolated. But this year, one of the four -- Melinda -- is dead. In her stead is Melinda's widower's new (very young, very fit, seemingly very needy) wife Baby. This year's locale -- a remote barrier island off the coast of South Carolina -- adds to the psychological combustion as each of these women makes a "startling discovery." During their stay,by the way, the four drink enough alcohol to embalm a whale. But it's a light, quick read and highly engaging.

I was tipped to Robin Black's "Life Drawing" when it showed up on the long list for this year's Flaherty-Dunnan first novel prize. Black lives in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Writing program. So I was curious. Still, I had no idea I was in for one of the best reads in ages. This is my favorite kind of novel -- a literary page-turner, which, sadly, doesn't come along often enough. Black burrows under the mind's skin, articulating the things we're only vaguely aware of thinking. She's a painter. Her husband Owen is a blocked writer. They've moved to an old farmhouse in the country to try to put behind them Augusta's affair. Allison moves in next door. Augusta and Allison become quick friends. Owen becomes unblocked. The novel builds, builds, until it's practically on fire.

A Great Reading List: The Long-List for a Prestigious First Novel Prize

The Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, started in 2006, recently released its long-list of first novels up for the award. The announcement grabbed my attention because it includes a 2014 favorite of mine -- the tender, achingly poignant first novel, "Byrd," by Raleigh lawyer Kim Church.
Among the 26 novels named, others with North Carolina connections include "Young God," by Wilkes County native Katherine Faw Morris; "The Word Exchange," by Durham native Alena Graedon; "The End of Always," by Chapel Hill's Randi Daveport; "The Invention of Exile," by Vanessa Manko, who graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and now  lives in Brooklyn; and "Life Drawing," by Robin Black, a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. Black lives in Philadelphia, and she is also the author of the prize-winning short story collection, "If I loved you, I would tell you this."
Another on the list I've put on my own reading list: "We Are Not Ourselves," by Matthew Thomas, 39, a former high school English teacher in New York City, who got more than a $1 million advance in this country and a six-figure UK deal at the London Book Fair after a bidding war over his 700-page manuscript, which took him 10 years to write.
Thomas is an Irish-American, who studied fiction with Alice McDermott at Johns Hopkins, after graduating from the University of Chicago. Set in the second half of the 20th century, the novel, says Publisher's Weekly, is a "sprawling portrait of the Irish-American Leary family -- Ed, Eileen and their son Connell -- as they move from Jackson Heights, Queens, to Bronxville, New York, in pursuit of the American dream." The book will be out in August.
The short-list for the prize will be announced in September, and thewinner in December. Stay tuned.