Jillian Quint

Just when the publishing world is ready to assert that nothing good ever comes out of the slush pile, a talent like Stephen Kelman comes along. The 34-year-old Englishman—who before turning to writing worked in jobs ranging from house-cleaner to warehouse operative—began his novel, Pigeon English, in response to a spate of news stories about British youth violence. But he also called upon his own childhood experience, which was not unlike that of Hari Opuku, the narrator of this electric debut.

An 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant who loves sneakers, YouTube and driving his older sister crazy, Hari is decidedly a child. Yet he’s also wise beyond his years—growing up as part of a London housing project’s insular community of illegal aliens, addicts and knife-wielding thugs will do that to a kid. Indeed, violence is a common occurrence, and one Hari describes with as much honesty, humor and emotion as he does a grade-school crush or the pigeon that regularly visits his balcony. Still, when one of his classmates is killed in the street, Hari does feel deeply moved and decides, along with his best friend Dean, to solve the crime using techniques gleaned from episodes of “CSI.” But while his attempts to go undercover and obtain DNA samples may seem comical, as the duo comes closer to the truth (and the murderer), their adventures grow ever more dangerous.

Hari’s joie de vivre is infectious, and his voice simultaneously charming and haunting—similar to the narrators of Emma Donoghue’s Room or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. And much like those books, Pigeon English is a story for adults whose success rests almost entirely on the unreliability of a child’s interpretation. Were Kelman to have entrusted this tale to an older teller, we’d no doubt lose the excitement, immediacy and hopefulness that infuses it.

Read an interview with Stephen Kelman about Pigeon English.

Readers of The Sisters Brothers will hardly be surprised to learn that it has been optioned for a film. After all, the fast-paced, gun-slinging Western is cinematic in scope, while its terse and comically stilted dialogue is reminiscent of recent film homages like No Country for Old Men and True Grit.

But Patrick deWitt’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut Ablutions is also a thrilling, smart and surprisingly touching read—the kind of book that translates to the big screen precisely because it’s so visual and visceral.

The brothers of the book’s title are Eli and Charlie Sisters, professional hit men who travel the frontier carrying out the underhanded orders of their enigmatic boss, an off-screen baron known only by the name “The Commodore.” At the novel’s start, The Commodore sends them to assassinate Hermann Warm, a man whose crimes neither trouble nor interest the pair. They know only their assignment, and set out from Oregon City in search of their target.

As the brothers make their way through Indian Territory, prospectors’ campsites, noisy whorehouses and finally into the heart of California Gold Rush country, the two emerge as very different men. Charlie, the oldest, is a bloodthirsty alcoholic, content to live by the laws of the Wild West and without remorse for his deeds. Meanwhile, Eli, the novel’s thoughtful and funny narrator, proves a more sensitive soul—exhausted and conflicted by his way of life, befuddled yet entranced by women, self-conscious about his rotund physique and touchingly delighted by his most recent acquisition: a toothbrush.

Though the book is more episodic (think murderous trappers, gold-gathering schemes and encounters with bears) than plot-heavy, it is always compelling and surprising. When the brothers finally come upon their mark, he is hardly what they expected. Luckily they’re in the habit of rolling with the punches—a technique that will cause readers to follow suit.

Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross’ stunningly dark debut, is, on its surface, a compelling thriller, and at its core, a grisly psychological and postmodern probe, a story that takes as its forebears both Scott Turow and Italo Calvino.

Through three men’s interlocking though asymmetrical narratives, Mr. Peanut tells the story of all marital strife—with an emphasis on the ugly side, replete with violence, pain, inertia, manipulation, sexual longing and destruction. The first husband, video-game designer David Pepin, is both terrified of and obsessed with his morbidly obese wife’s death—imagining her in any number of creatively fatal scenarios. That is, until she actually turns up dead, from a reaction to a severe peanut allergy, and David becomes the prime suspect. The second is the detective assigned to Pepin’s case, Ward Hastroll—no stranger to fantasies of uxoricide himself—whose world turns upside down when his once complacent and loving wife becomes voluntarily, irrationally and then defiantly bedridden. And the final, Hastroll’s partner, is the infamous Sam Sheppard (from the real-life 1950s case which inspired The Fugitive), convicted of killing his wife and then exonerated 10 years later.

All three stories are gripping––from Alice Pepin’s perverse weight gain and loss, to an imagined retelling of the days leading up to Marilyn Sheppard’s murder––but all ultimately inconclusive. After all, Ross seems to say, when it comes to culpability in a marriage, how can there be objective truth?

To say this is a thematically rich book is hardly to do Mr. Peanut justice. For with every theme Ross presents—the Hitchcockian fallen hero (the Pepins met in a seminar on the great filmmaker), the classic “wrong man” trope, the Möbius strips and Escher imagery that emerge again and again, lest we forget the unending nature of marriage, love and murder––there is a way in which this too-clever-to-be-neat story resists such thematics, indeed calls into question the expectation/fulfillment nature of storytelling itself. And yet Ross cleaves closely to all the pleasures of the genre: mystery, suspense, romance, surprise. And in this sense, Mr. Peanut is highly unique—a disturbingly funny and remarkably poignant novel from one of the year’s most promising new voices. 

Related content:
Interview with Adam Ross for Mr. Peanut.

Irene America, the protagonist of Louise Erdrich’s 13th novel, is a woman whose identity has never been entirely her own. For while she is both a mother and a serious academic, she is best known as the subject of her husband Gil’s esteemed art—large, assertive and overtly sexual portraits that exemplify his love, but also his constant need to subjugate and own her.

This power dynamic has always troubled Irene, but at the novel’s start, she discovers that Gil has reached a new level in his quest for possession; he is reading her diary in an attempt to both quell and verify fears that the marriage is deteriorating. Unable to confront Gil directly, but unwilling to let him know everything, Irene reacts by creating another hidden diary in which she records the actual truth. She continues to write in the original diary, however, leaving it where she knows her husband will find it and crafting her words in order to manipulate him.

In many ways, this charade is much like the game referred to in the novel’s title, shadow tag, in which players try to step on each other’s shadows without casting any of their own. American Indians believe shadows hold a person’s soul, Irene (who is herself of Native blood) explains, and thus the game becomes a literal fight for self-preservation. Irene, Gil and their three children struggle to defend themselves and their family, but increasingly realize that such defense requires a certain splitting of the self. “[It] had released a double into the world,” Irene thinks of one of Gil’s paintings, but she could easily be talking about her diaries, about her biracial ethnicity or about the disconnect between who she is and who she pretends to be.

Erdrich is a muscular and fearless writer, and she explores her characters with both compassion and criticism and through lyrical and visceral prose. At one point, Irene notes that it is the process of narration that authenticates history—a sentiment Erdrich no doubt wants readers to consider. After all, it is her superb telling of this story that makes it real, her stellar writing that brings powerful truth to invented worlds.

Jillian Quint is an associate editor at the Random House Publishing Group.