“She was beautiful but when she tasted the water from the glass on her lectern she smiled sadly as if it were bitter for, in spite of her civil zeal, she had a taste for the melancholy – for the smell of orange rinds and wood smoke – that was extraordinary.”

Why is it great? When I moved back to New England last year after nearly a lifetime away, John Cheever’s debut novel about a quirky New England family was the first thing I read. This sentence, near the beginning, captured the character of the mother but also the book itself, which is shot through with melancholy and a family’s sense of history — and the feeling of being trapped by the weight of that history. Perhaps the most lovely part is that beautifully evocative combination of orange rinds and wood smoke; I can taste it, and the sweet-bitter sorrow.