Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Mother’s Shoes | 2011 | Shirley Russak Wachtel | Buy |
| 2 | The Music Makers | 2014 | Shirley Russak Wachtel | Buy |
| 3 | A Castle in Brooklyn | 2023 | Shirley Russak Wachtel | Buy |
| 4 | The Baker of Lost Memories | 2025 | Shirley Russak Wachtel | Buy |
Shirley Russak Wachtel’s standalone novels move between decades and generations, but they return again and again to the question of what families carry forward and what they leave behind. My Mother’s Shoes, her debut novel, draws on the emotional terrain she explored in her nonfiction, translating the immigrant experience into a multigenerational story grounded in place and longing.
A Castle in Brooklyn, published in 2023, became her most widely read novel, following two Holocaust survivors who build a life together in postwar Brooklyn. The novel captures the texture of mid-century Jewish American life while remaining intimate in its focus on two men who survive through friendship as much as willpower. The Baker of Lost Memories, her 2025 novel, continues in a similar vein, weaving food, loss, and family history into a story that feels both timely and rooted in the past.