Love takes many forms — between family, lovers, friends — and the common denominators connect us all. Enjoy these three thought-provoking reads.

The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar (Harper Collins, $25.99)

Some bonds can survive years of change and neglect; some friendships are so fundamental that they follow us for the rest of our lives. Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita and Nishta met in the 1970s while in college in Bombay. These four women met during a time of political unrest in their native India, and they bonded around common ideals and activism. Thirty years later, they have largely lost contact, until they learn that Armaiti, who moved to the United States, has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The past comes flooding back as they all reflect on their idealistic young selves and the people they have become. Laleh still harbors a fierce attachment to her idealism, while she and her husband enjoy a prosperous, charmed life. Kavita, who has hidden her lesbian relationship from those closest to her, and Nishta, whose fundamentalist husband has slowly limited her freedoms, discover challenges in the possibility of reunion. Can they surmount the years between them and their own life choices to come together to see Armaiti in her final days? Umrigar’s compulsively readable novel about friendship and the passage of time presents fully dimensional characters that resonate with life and hope.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Random House, $25.00)

“The letter that would change everything arrived on a Tuesday.” When Harold Fry opens said letter from Queenie Hennessy, he finds himself doing something entirely out of character — he writes a reply, but instead of simply posting it from his English village, he elects to hand-deliver his letter. Harold decides that walking 600 miles to Queenie, who he learns is dying, might just keep her alive. The tension and distance in his marriage is put into sharp relief when Harold sets off without telling Maureen, his wife of 45 years. Harold’s resolve only strengthens, and as he walks, he recounts his life, his childhood, his son David’s childhood, and all of the mistakes and moments of inaction that haunt him. Harold’s improbable journey by foot catches the media’s eye, and soon he is a local celebrity. Why does Harold feel he must walk to Queenie? Can a weak man find strength in an impossible quest, and will it cost him any more than he has already lost? Joyce’s debut tells a story of deep empathy and emotion without teetering into sentimentality. Already being compared to another recent and beloved novel,  Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Harold Fry is sure to be another character that readers take to heart and whose late-life journey of transformation is worth cheering for.

Cures for Hunger A Memoir by Deni Y. Béchard (Milkweed Editions, $24.00)

“Where did such longings reside in us, passed on through blood or stories? It seemed to me then, hearing his words, that a father’s life is a boy’s first story.” All children learn from what is said and unsaid, and they struggle to make sense of the world from the people who raise them. But what if one parent is a mystery, even a dangerously exciting one? Béchard grew up poor in Canada with a father whose wild ways force his mother to escape with his two siblings to Virginia. Later he discovers that his father is all that Deni thought and more — his father, it turns out, was a bank robber. His father’s crimes and fistfight-with-the-world approach to life mark Deni as he struggles in his own coming-of-age and discovering what makes him a man, even as he pursues a world of literature that his father disdains. Seeringly clear and honestly told, Béchard’s hardscrabble life and sense of his father and himself tell of the kind of quests he sought out in the books that he read. In figuring out who he is in the shadow of a man who thrilled and frightened him, Béchard illustrates the pain, loneliness and satisfaction in discovering your own path. This memoir also accompanies the American publication of Béchard’s debut novel, Vandal Love, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s prize in 2007.