Bender, Aimee.The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.Doubleday Books, 2010.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the slice. To her horror, she finds that her cheerful mother tastes of despair. Soon, she’s privy to the secret knowledge that most families keep hidden: her father’s detachment, her mother’s transgression, her brother’s increasing retreat from the world. But there are some family secrets that even her cursed taste buds can’t discern.

Simses, Mary.The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café.Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Manhattanite Ellen Branford travels to her grandmother’s hometown in Beacon, Maine the week after her death. Ellen’s close relationship with her grandmother leads her to agree to fulfill her last request—to deliver a letter to her grandmother’s first love. Though at first not a fan of the small, New England town, Ellen learns about her grandmother’s past and rediscovers herself in the process.

Anderson, Jessica.Tirra Lirra By the River. Melville House, 2015. (Originally published in 1978.)

Nora Porteous, a witty, ambitious woman from Brisbane, returns to her childhood home at age seventy. Her life has taken her from a failed marriage in Sydney to freedom in London; she forged a modest career as a seamstress and lived with two dear friends through the happiest years of her adult life. At home, the neighborhood children she remembers have grown into compassionate adults. They help to nurse her back from pneumonia, and slowly let her in on the dark secrets of the neighborhood in the years that have lapsed.

Backman, Fredrik.My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry.Atria Books, 2015.

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. She is also Elsa’s best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal. When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure begins.