Mothers and Sons, by Adam Haslett

Mothers and Sons was the first book I read in 2026, and it turned out to be a terrific way to start the year. This is a genuinely excellent novel. It’s intelligent and humane, with parts that are absolutely devastating. My first book of the year, and it earns five stars, no hesitation.

The protagonist, Peter, is a forty-year-old asylum lawyer in New York City, a detail that gives the book an immediate sense of urgency and relevance, given how fucked up things are in the country right now. Peter spends his days immersed in harrowing immigration cases and his nights alone in his apartment, punctuated only by the occasional, largely joyless hookup. He is good at helping others and spectacularly bad at helping himself. When a new asylum case involving a young gay man lands on his desk, it triggers him, big time, dredging up memories of a traumatic event from Peter’s adolescence that he has spent decades avoiding.

That long-buried event is also the seismic incident that characterizes Peter’s relationship with his mother, Ann. Ann is a former Episcopalian priest who now runs a women’s retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. She has finally found peace and purpose, but at the cost of being estranged from her son for more than twenty years. The novel slowly reveals what happened when Peter was fifteen, involving his first love and a violent incident that neither he nor his mother has ever fully confronted. Reconciliation is possible here, but only if both of them are willing to tell themselves a different version of the story they’ve been living with for decades.

What the author does particularly well is explore how work—especially “meaningful” work—can become a form of avoidance. Peter’s devotion to his clients is admirable, but it’s also a shield, a way to stay safely numb. That said, I did occasionally feel that some of the immigration cases were rendered in more detail than necessary. I understand their narrative purpose, but at times they slowed the book’s momentum and felt a bit dry.

The author makes up for this with his handling of emotion. Haslett is exceptional at capturing interpersonal dynamics: the things we don’t say, the misunderstandings we let fester, the stories we convince ourselves are true because they hurt less than the alternatives.

The book unfolds across three separate strands—Peter in the present, Ann’s life in Vermont, and flashbacks to Peter’s adolescence—and it weaves in several other mother/son relationships (namely, his sister and his nephew) that deepen and echo the central theme.

These are deeply flawed characters, but Haslett renders them with such empathy that you want to root for them anyway. Mothers and Sons is a moving, timely, and very powerful novel about memory, avoidance, and the courage it takes to finally face the past. I’d love to see it adapted for the screen.