Jillian Quint

At the start of Monica Ali’s third novel, In the Kitchen, executive chef Gabriel Lightfoot fears he has bitten off more than he can chew. His multi-ethnic staff is unruly, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, his father is ill, his secret plans to open his own dining establishment threaten to unravel, and one of his porters has just turned up dead in the basement of his London restaurant. For a while, Gabe keeps things under control, erring on the side of both caution and obligation. But, after he agrees to help his former employee Lena, a young Belarusian woman with a dark past, his life takes a series of twists that lead him away from his sense of duty and, in turn, from the things he thinks he wants.

Ali’s highly acclaimed debut, Brick Lane, centered on Bengali immigrants in London, and it’s easy to see how her interest in multiculturalism and nationality extends to the new novel. However, where the first book was focused and contained, In the Kitchen is surprisingly far-reaching and delightfully nuanced—messy even, in the best way possible. After all, much of Gabe’s neurosis and guilt stems from his Englishness, his ho-hum middle-class worries about tea and football and cancer in the face of Lena’s concerns about human trafficking, poverty and horrific violence. As a way to assuage this guilt, he takes her on as his cause worth fighting for. But this charity is misguided. The more he tries to help Lena, the more he hurts himself; and the more he seeks to understand the inner workings of his kitchen, the more muddled his life becomes.

Ali doesn’t provide easy answers for either her characters or readers. Gabe is endearingly flawed from page one, making choices that are somehow both admirable and cringe-worthy. But it is precisely this duality that wins readers over as Ali employs her immensely vibrant and critical voice to address yet another side of the complicated intersection between where one comes from and who one is.

Jillian Quint is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Inadvertent culpability. Suburban insanity. Personal and familial redemption. Such are the subjects of A.M. Homes’ ambitious, sprawling and nearly Dickensian new novel that follows one middle-aged, middle-class man from bad to worse to renewed, and everywhere in between.

May We Be Forgiven opens with a series of unfortunate events. George Silver, a widely loathed television executive, flies off the handle after a deadly car accident. Harry Silver, a Nixon scholar with less money and success than his brother, finds himself not only embroiled in the drama, but also entwined emotionally and sexually with George’s gorgeous wife, Jane—that is, until George comes home and bludgeons her to death with a table lamp.

And that’s when things really get crazy. Homes—never one to shy from unpleasant situations—takes these brothers’ bad deeds as her starting point, and Harry’s circuitous quest for forgiveness as the book’s core. Abandoned by his shrewish wife and saddled with the care of George’s two precocious children, Harry moves into his brother’s Westchester home and begins to build a brand new life. This process, it turns out, is as hilarious as it is wrenching. Think kleptomaniac great aunts, Internet sexcapades with lonely housewives and a covert mission to recover Richard Nixon’s lost short-story collection.

In many ways, Nixon and the failed American dream form the cheeky subtext of this novel: The house, the wife, the kids are an outmoded myth, and even when good men try, they come up short. This said, Homes is also up to something sneakier and more redemptive with her madcap antics. By seeking to do good in the lives of others, she seems to say, and by cobbling together a different version of the nuclear family, we can heal ourselves.

Such issues might seem weighty, but Homes is never didactic—a balance she achieves with the sheer strangeness and deadpan nature of her tale. Indeed, one never can predict what’s going to happen next. In a less capable writer’s hands, this spiraling and volatility might feel disorienting. But with Homes at the helm, you can’t help but be delighted by the ride.

RELATED CONTENT: Our Q&A with Homes about May We Be Forgiven.

The family vacation has been the subject of many a comedic essay and Chevy Chase film, but in Mark Haddon’s new book, it gets both the literary and psychological treatment.

The Red House, Haddon’s first adult novel since 2006’s A Spot of Bother, is undoubtedly the writer’s most ambitious undertaking to date. And yet, it also pays homage to his most acclaimed book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: In both stories, Haddon taps into the brains of children while at the same time making the quotidian feel larger than life.

His latest offering follows one family—husband Dominic, wife Angela, children Alex, Daisy and Benjy—on a trip to Wales to visit Angela’s brother Richard and new wife and stepdaughter. From the onset, nobody is particularly excited about this sojourn (Angela and Richard haven’t been close since the death of their mother) and the laborious way in which the clan goes through the motions of “quality time” is one of the book’s many uncomfortable delights.

Still, more interesting is Haddon’s creative approach to interiority. In lieu of typical authorial omniscience, he jumps from character to character’s brain—often multiple times within a single page—in a way that is both frenetic and delightful. In other words, don’t get put off if you’re initially confused; you’ll eventually get used to the device and come to appreciate Haddon’s ability to illuminate an incident from multiple points of view.

Indeed, one of the book’s many great truths is that each person is too wrapped up in his own tiny dramas to appreciate anyone else’s: Angela in the loss of a stillborn child, Alex in his nascent need to assert his masculinity, Daisy in her conflicted (if fervent) relationship with God, and so on. This can lead—as in the case of several failed kisses—to miscommunications only comprehensible from the outside in. And yet, as the trip’s small incidents play out, the characters do change and do learn to understand one another—particularly the teenagers, for whom Haddon clearly has great compassion.

It’s also worth mentioning that Haddon is a supremely talented and perceptive writer with a great love of language and poetics. If The Curious Incident relied on simple diction and vocabulary, this book is the opposite—lyrically flowing from thought to thought, brain to brain, potential connection to potential connection.

In Lydia Millet’s 2008 novel, How the Dead Dream, she introduced readers to T., a troubled real estate developer who takes an obsessive interest in endangered animals—to haunting and remarkably engaging effect. Needless to say, when Millet announced that two more books would follow in the same series, fans and critics were thrilled to see where the darkly cerebral trilogy would lead. The second novel, Ghost Lights, does not disappoint.

Here, we pick up after T.’s Heart of Darkness-like disappearance into the jungles of Belize. Now, T.’s secretary Susan is struggling to manage the leaderless company and Hal, Susan’s husband and the novel’s reluctant hero, is dragged into the drama. For starters, he’s worried that his wife has become dangerously consumed with finding her boss. Additionally, he learns his wheelchair-bound daughter is a phone sex operator. Finally, he’s pretty sure he’s being cuckolded. Thus, in an act of total desperation-cum-bravado, he decides to travel to South America to track down the missing employer, launching his own Conrad-esque journey into the tropical wilds.

Millet is at her best when describing trespasses and betrayal; Hal’s indignation and subsequent bad behavior in the book’s first half are simultaneously honest, funny and sad. This said, as Hal comes closer to finding T., he draws further into his own head, and the lyricism and wit of earlier chapters fails to punctuate his thoughts. This is no doubt intentional—Millet seems to be commenting on the nature of disappointment and the inability to fully right wrongs. Luckily, such interiority runs parallel to the plot-driven, exciting quest to find T., which means that we’re never short on action for very long.

When we do come upon the missing man, his story both satisfies and invites more questions. The same could be said of Ghost Lights on the whole.