Full of small mysteries that deserve lengthy discussions with well-read friends, The Complexities is a superb book club selection.
Dinosaurs is a bracing if subtle reminder that, in the absence of changes to old-fashioned ways, some people are just one good volcanic eruption from going the way of the dinosaur.
Celeste Ng is undoubtedly at the top of her game. The American society in Our Missing Hearts is overcome by fear, serving as a poignant critique of our own increasingly fraught and oppressive political landscape.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value.
Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining generations of a family and their friends living in central New York, but you need not have read her earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History.
Although some readers may disagree, Ian McEwan’s scathing, unsettling novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness.
Jonathan Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As his protagonist notes, “If I don’t create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it’s as if we don’t exist.”
The engrossing new novel from Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah is filled with human compassion and historical insight.
In his fast-paced debut novel, Zac Topping, who has served two tours in Iraq, focuses on the impact that unrelenting pain and helplessness have on a human’s soul’and how the thirst for power can corrupt the best of intentions.
Shutter is a promising debut that satisfyingly explores forensic photography and Dine culture within the New Mexico landscape, surrounded by the voices of some very engaging ghosts.
Despite its doomed Midwestern setting, Tess Gunty’s debut novel makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have.
Properties of Thirst was completed after the author’s stroke in 2016, through a process of creative collaboration between Marianne Wiggins, her daughter, and editor David Ulin. We are lucky to witness and experience the result.
The hero of Jean Thompson’s novel is like the finest poems: complex and wondrous, with hidden mysteries and graces that aren’t immediately apparent.
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