Those We Love Most (2012)

If Lee Woodruff's debut novel, Those We Love Most, at first seems the stuff of standard midlist women's fiction — two fraying marriages, a predictable affair, the death of a young child — well, it is. Yet against the odds, given the cardboardy story she's laid out, Woodruff elevates her stock characters (especially bereaved mother Maura and her philandering father, Roger) by sketching them as less than sympathetic, even at times downright unlikable. As a result, a book that threatened to turn into yet another soapy family drama becomes something fresher, sharper, and more indelible. B