In The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the protagonist’s desperate desire for a child—and the son she lost—drives the entire mystery. Here, the son is an absence, a ghost whose memory warps every present action. Meanwhile, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother. It is a breathtaking act of reclamation: Vuong writes, “I am writing from inside the body you built.” The novel is not about escape or resentment, but about translation—trying to make his mother understand the gay, artistic man he has become, using the only language (English) she cannot read.