In the 1930s, a man who called himself Cornelius O. Pierson began to correspond with a 45-year-old widow struggling to raise three young children in suburban Chicago. She had written to a matrimonial bureau — the Depression-era version of online dating — seeking someone with whom she might find “true friendship, fidelity and matrimony.”

After a seven-year hiatus, National Book Award winner Alice McDermott returns with her seventh novel, “Someone,” a quiet tour de force of a story. McDermott writes in lyrical yet methodical prose about an ordinary woman living an ordinary life, a seemingly nonstory with heartache, joy, suffering and beauty all simmering beneath the scattered recollections that make up the novel.

“What if?” is a tried-and-true starting point for a novelist. In the case of “Top Down,” PBS newsman and veteran fiction writer Jim Lehrer asks an intriguing question but doesn’t quite come up with an equally intriguing answer.

When we enjoyed an elegant meal last year at 88, we didn’t think this restaurant at the Spruce Point Inn could get any better. But this year, they really stepped it up.