This Is a Love Story (A Read with Jenna Pick) by Jessica Soffer

Some books arrive quietly and then refuse to let you go. Jessica Soffer’s This Is a Love Story—selected as A Read with Jenna Pick—is one of those rare novels that lingers long after you’ve turned the final page.

This is a story about what we carry, what we lose, and the unexpected ways love reshapes us. Soffer writes with stunning emotional precision, crafting characters so vivid you’ll swear you’ve met them on the Marginal Way or passed them browsing in our own aisles. Her prose is both achingly beautiful and unflinchingly honest—the kind of writing that makes you pause, reread a sentence, and think, “Yes. Exactly that.”

At its heart, this novel explores the messy, complicated terrain of human connection. It’s about family secrets and second chances, about the stories we tell ourselves and the truths we’re afraid to face. Soffer doesn’t offer easy answers, and that’s precisely what makes this book so powerful. She trusts her readers to sit with complexity, to understand that love—real love—is never simple.

The fact that Jenna Bush Hager chose this for her book club speaks volumes. It’s the kind of novel that sparks conversation, the kind you’ll want to press into a friend’s hands with the words, “You have to read this.”

Perfect for readers who loved The Great Believers or The Light We Lost, this is literary fiction at its finest—intimate, devastating, and ultimately hopeful.