Aimee Bender Books in Order

Desire and grief take strange forms in these stories of lovers, families, and lonely strangers. Aimee Bender gives familiar emotional struggles unsettling physical shapes, exploring how longing can transform relationships and distort ordinary lives.

Mona Gray retreats into mathematics after her father's mysterious illness and abandons anything else she enjoys. Teaching second-graders and meeting an inquisitive science teacher begin to challenge the defenses she has built around her life.

A boy with keys for fingers, potato children, and a family of pumpkin heads inhabit these surreal stories. Beneath their extraordinary circumstances, the characters struggle with love, vulnerability, and the difficult work of connecting with others.

A swan and a bluebird form an unlikely family, only for their cloud child to drift away. The swan's search leads through a village connected by mysterious elevators, where miners and loggers face their own constraints.

A skeptical doctor and a patient rabbi debate belief while illness makes their relationship newly intimate. Through medical care and ordinary acts of kindness, they confront the uneasy connections between reason, faith, doubt, and affection.

Twenty years after her mother's psychiatric crisis, Francie revisits childhood memories of images that seemed to become physical objects. Her effort to understand those experiences draws her inward and unsettles her relationship with reality.

On her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein discovers that she can taste her mother's sadness in a lemon cake. Her unusual sensitivity to the emotions contained in food exposes feelings concealed within her family and complicates her understanding of those closest to her.