Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
T.C. Boyle has never been afraid to torment his characters or draw from real life, and he does both in Blue Skies, putting his cast through just about every climate-related calamity to make the contours of the crisis so prominent that no one could miss them.
He begins this bicoastal adventure—the action toggles between Florida and California—with, of all things, jewelry. But it’s “living jewelry,” a Burmese python purchased by influencer Cat to wear around her neck. Boyle, the unparalleled stylist, describes Cat’s thought process in gorgeous prose: She thinks snakes are beautiful, “as if somebody had dipped a brush in acrylics and traced the lines that radiated in a widening V from their mouths to draw reticulate patterns across their backs and down their sides.”
Plenty of descriptions as unforgettable as that one follow as Boyle introduces multiple characters and complications, from the self-inflicted to the unforeseen. Cat’s ambition is to gain online followers and show off her Florida beachfront home. She lives there with her Tesla-driving fiancé, Todd, whose job involves drinking and partying to promote a rum brand. To Cat’s chagrin, it also involves a lot of time away from home.
Across the country in California are other members of Cat’s family. Her brother, Cooper, is an entomologist, disparaged as “Bug Boy” by classmates when he was growing up but who now conducts field research to study ticks and other arachnids. Their mother, Ottilie, is so deeply impacted by Cooper’s warnings about harming the planet that she begins cooking with crickets, making everything from cricket cobbler to cricket-infused cookies and brownies.
The disappearance of Cat’s snake is only the mildest of calamities to befall this group. Ever the maximalist, Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change. If anything, there’s too much incident. Fewer would have made his point more effective.
But wealth is better than poverty, and Boyle doles out ample riches. The pace never lets up, and he blends many other timely themes into his narrative, from aversion to parenthood to the ruthlessness of the media. Blue Skies may not be top-flight Boyle, but it’s Boyle at his most urgent. “What good was beachfront property if there was no beach?” Ottilie asks. As Boyle warns us, take the planet for granted, and don’t be surprised if, like a snake, its luxuries slither away.
Ever the maximalist, T.C. Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change in his novel Blue Skies.
With the passing of Ward Just in 2019, the literary world lost a fine writer who was comfortable grappling with the moral dilemmas surrounding the exercise of power and the lives of those who wield it. Journalist and novelist Elliot Ackerman’s fifth novel, Halcyon, suggests that he may be one of the inheritors of Just’s preoccupations. Blending alternative history with science fiction, Ackerman artfully explores several provocative issues that have become flash points in contemporary America.
The year is 2004, and the novel’s narrator, Martin Neumann, is a college history professor whose specialty is the American Civil War. He’s fitfully engaged in work on a book about the role of compromise in American life amid a society whose “grim national mood” he describes as “rage-ennui.” He’s spending his sabbatical ensconced in a comfortable guest cottage on the premises of the titular house in rural Virginia, owned by retired attorney and Washington power player Robert Ableson and his wife, Mary.
In Ackerman’s imagined America, Al Gore edged out George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, following Bill Clinton’s resignation over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Although the country still sustained a terrorist attack on 9/11, there was no invasion of Iraq, and Osama bin Laden was killed in December 2001. But most startlingly, the public learned that the Gore administration quietly has been spearheading scientific research into the field of cryoregeneration—bringing humans back from the dead—and one of the participants in the experiment is none other than Martin’s host, Robert.
As he reemerges into the world five years after his death, following a year of social quarantine, Robert quickly becomes embroiled in current controversies, attempting to thwart a drive to remove a Confederate monument from the Gettysburg battlefield and defending a sexual harassment claim filed by one of his former subordinates. His revitalization also sparks a thorny legal dispute about the status of the inheritances received by the heirs of a person who was once dead but now is very much alive. Martin observes these events from the periphery, describing them with a detached but sympathetic curiosity.
Early in the novel, Martin asks what “were the minor events of today that would forever change the trajectory of the future?” Ackerman prefers challenging questions like these over convenient answers. With this choice, he leaves ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he’s undertaken. Anyone who accepts that invitation will come away from this ingenious story with fresh ideas of what past, present and future truly mean.
Elliot Ackerman prefers challenging questions over convenient answers, leaving ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he’s undertaken.
Our top picks for June include the latest from S.A. Cosby, Dominic Smith and Uzma Jalaluddin, plus the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades.
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Geena Rocero was a trans pageant queen in the Philippines who became a successful model in the United States. As you’d expect, her life story is a completely engrossing whirlwind.
Humorist Harrison Scott Key’s memoir of the fallout following his wife’s affair offers plentiful food for thought about faith, humor, courage and love.
Lisa See’s spellbinding historical novel, inspired by the true story of a female physician, vividly depicts 15th-century China with artfully woven details, rich characters and descriptive language.
With Return to Valetto, Dominic Smith doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he doesn’t need to: He is a master of his trade who has executed a flawless novel that satisfies on all counts.
Paraic O’Donnell inserts touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension in his breathtaking gothic historical mystery, The Naming of the Birds.
In Gloria L. Huang’s fantastical, heartfelt coming-of-age tale Kaya of the Ocean, the protagonist’s gradual willingness to trust herself will resonate with readers on their own journey to self-confidence, magic-infused or otherwise.
Our top picks for June include the latest from S.A. Cosby, Dominic Smith and Uzma Jalaluddin, plus the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades.
Mary Beth Keane grew up around bars. “Most of my uncles owned bars or worked in them,” she says. Which is why, when the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, Keane found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. But besides socializing with her husband and two sons, the best she could do was drive around Pearl River, New York—the town where she grew up and now lives—hoping to spot a friend to chat with from afar.
To compensate, Keane immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the novel’s center. The wonderfully unpretentious, gifted writer explains this by phone from Bozeman, Montana, where she’s researching her next novel. (Its Western setting will herald a marked change from her beloved 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, and The Half Moon, both of which are set in Gillam, a fictionalized version of Pearl River.)
In the novel, Malcolm Gephardt has worked at the Half Moon for years, and now he finally owns the place, with dreams to update and transform it. Unfortunately, creditors are at his heels, his marriage is on the rocks, and in the midst of a blizzard, a patron goes missing—setting the stage for plenty of riveting internal and external drama.
“This is a COVID book,” Keane says, “even though it doesn’t seem that way.” The pandemic is never mentioned, and there are no masks in sight. But Keane poured her loneliness and isolation right into Malcolm’s character, and the winter storm that paralyzes the town for a week or so accentuates the fact that a number of her characters feel trapped in their lives.
When asked about the impetus for The Half Moon, Keane explains that, at age 45, she’s starting to see couples get divorced and then, 18 months or so later, share Facebook posts showing “a whole new set of people and a new life,” she says. “I was thinking about to what degree we can change our lives once we reach a certain point. . . . I’m a very working-class child, and I grew up in a very Catholic community, and I don’t know whether it’s just me and the way I was raised, [but] I literally do not know how to do that.”
Not that she wants to, she adds quickly. “I’m very happy with my life. But part of being a writer is observing and watching other people, and I guess I just like thinking about things that I can’t imagine.” A friend of Keane’s recently commented that her books “are an argument for staying together, over and over,” which surprised the author. “Although it’s so obvious when I think about it now,” she says.
In The Half Moon, however, the odds of an intact marriage seem low. Malcolm’s wife, Jess, a lawyer, has been dreaming of having a child, but after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, she has moved into the arms of someone else. Keane writes that Jess is weighed down by “Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.” Jess and Malcolm have had bitter disagreements over the financing of the bar, which she recognizes is his “baby,” his lifelong dream.
“Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
In crafting Jess and Malcolm’s rocky marriage, Keane had no idea what would happen between the couple, and she reported to her editors that she had “tried every [outcome] you could possibly suggest,” including some wildly dramatic ones. Such is the “jigsaw” style of Keane’s creative process. “It seems like a piecemeal, haphazard way to write, but that’s the way I do it,” she says.
In a 2019 essay for the New York Times, she describes growing up without books and how her earliest literary influence as a kid in the late 1980s was the Reader’s Digest column “Drama in Real Life.” In a way, Keane says, her upbringing was freeing, especially when it came to choosing books at the library. “Boy, did I learn a lot from those Danielle Steel books,” she says, laughing. She wrote her first stories on the back of paper plates, then read them aloud to her mom. Her first clue that she might have a talent came after writing a fourth-grade essay about a baked potato. Later, at age 13, she wrote a short story for a school literary magazine about a girl whose sister had committed suicide; it was so convincing that her mother began getting condolences from friends who said they didn’t realize that she had an older child.
“I knew [early on] that it didn’t have to be true; it just had to be good,” Keane says. “So I always leaned toward fiction. I felt in my gut that I was better at writing than I was at other things.” As she grew older, her childhood reading habits allowed her to remain free from the burden experienced by many writers who try to measure up to certain literary reputations. “I really don’t care what everyone thinks is good or not. I just read for myself. And I think that is a gift that not every writer has.”
“As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
While Keane was at Barnard College, novelist Mary Gordon told her, “You have a subject.” At the time, however, Keane had no clue what it was. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was with people who’d been all over the world, and they had read everything. They were writing about things like anorexia, bulimia, sex—things that just seemed beyond me. But what was interesting to me then, and I think still is, is work and what people do for a living.”
Keane is the daughter of two Irish immigrants; her mother had various jobs, and her father was a “sandhog,” a New York City tunnel worker. For Ask Again, Yes, Keane interviewed members of the New York Police Department to collect accurate details for her police officer characters, but with The Half Moon, she simply turned to family, gleaning insider bar knowledge about things like jukebox earnings, free swag from breweries, beverage distribution and state liquor licensing authorities. Her cousins tended to be more helpful than her uncles. “Irish people, they clam right up if they think you’re asking too many questions, especially since I’m a writer,” Keane says. With a laugh, she adds, “Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
The novel’s fictional bar takes its name from the ship that English explorer Henry Hudson sailed on his 1609 voyage to discover a Northwest Passage; a variety of places and products in the Hudson Valley share the Half Moon name. The moniker is apt, since readers will wonder whether Malcolm and Jess’ marriage is waxing or waning. “I also like that the name isn’t overtly Irish,” Keane admits. “It sort of bothers me when everyone describes [my work] as ‘Irish people’ and ‘an Irish novel.’”
The hallmark of a classic Keane character isn’t their background or heritage, but rather their inability to articulate what’s bothering them. “I’m more familiar with and more sympathetic to people who would sooner either tamp it way down and pretend it’s not there—or throw a beer bottle against a wall,” she says. Malcolm, for instance, can charm customers with his gift of gab for hours, but at home, he’s not so much of a talker. In fact, one of his truest, most memorable forms of self-expression comes when he throws a cup of coffee at someone’s car. “These are my people, I guess,” Keane says. “As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
Keane has spent a lifetime observing people in fiction and real life, and in both cases, she likes to keep things simple. “We’re just a disaster from beginning to end,” she says with a laugh. “Nobody gets any smarter. It’s just that kids look up to us. But I want to say all the time, ‘I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to drag you along with me, and we’re going to do our best. You know, try to be kind to the people you love. And that’s about it.’”
Photo of Mary Beth Keane by Martin Hickey
When the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, author Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes) found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. To compensate, she immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the story’s center.
A Love Catastrophe is a delightfully heartfelt rom-com with much ado about cats (and some ado about dogs).
Newly hired NHL data analyst Miles Thorn has his hands full. His mother is in the hospital, and her cat, Prince Francis, is acting up. Enter the indomitable Kitty Hart, aka the Kitty Whisperer, the optimistic owner of a cat care and training service with a robust social media following. Although Kitty is irked by dog lover Miles’ scornful attitude toward cats, she still finds him quite fetching. And although Miles is a bit bewildered by Kitty’s boundless devotion to and adoration of the felines she works with, he still wishes he hadn’t been so rude when he first met her. As Miles and Kitty attempt to overcome a bad first impression and curb Prince Francis’ destructive behavior, will Kitty’s charms work on Miles as well as the cat?
Author Helena Hunting amusingly sets up the initial division between the sunny Kitty and the overwhelmed and grumpy Miles. He’s not quite in the territory of misanthropes like Fredrik Backman’s Ove; rather, Miles is understandably (and often charmingly) cranky due to his circumstances. Kitty’s sunny and loving disposition, even when she is strict with naughty cats, makes her immediately likable, while Miles’ attempts to be less aggravated by his mother and Prince Francis are endearing.
While there are plentiful cute moments between Miles and Kitty, especially in their disagreements about their preferred species, both are also working through complex family relationships and painful past experiences. Hunting perfectly balances levity and heartwarming sincerity to create a purr-fectly sweet, uplifting and playful romance.
A Love Catastrophe is a purr-fectly sweet romance between a sunny catsitter and a grumpy data analyst.
Author Uzma Jalaluddin returns with another classic love story retelling set in Toronto’s Muslim community. While her last romance took inspiration from ’90s rom-com classic You’ve Got Mail, Much Ado About Nada offers a contemporary twist on Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Nada Syed feels blocked, both professionally and personally. She had high hopes for her app Ask Apa, which would have offered users culturally sensitive advice. But after being betrayed by a business partner, she finds herself working an engineering job that stifles her creativity and desire to do good. With her 30th birthday on the horizon, she’s questioning all the decisions that have led to her being single, living with her parents and failing to become the successful tech CEO she’s always dreamed of being.
Haleema, Nada’s best friend, thinks attending Deen&Dunya, a Muslim conference full of fandom and fun, will help Nada get out of her rut. Haleema’s fiancé, Zayn, and his brother, Baz, are joining them, but unbeknownst to Haleema, Nada and Baz have a long and tumultuous history. Despite being thrown together for the duration of the conference, both Nada and Baz want to keep their complicated feelings for each other a secret.
Jalaluddin has a real talent for crafting protagonists, and Nada is just as complex and enjoyable as the heroines of Ayesha at Last and Hana Khan Carries On. Nada faces all the unfair societal and familial pressures that can weigh on women as they enter their 30s, and her feeling of a giant clock ticking away her remaining time to accomplish goals will hit home for a lot of readers. Jalaluddin adds depth and specificity to this experience by showing how these pressures manifest in Nada’s Muslim community and family.
Nada and Baz’s cheeky romance is the perfect balance to Much Ado About Nada’s social commentary. Their interactions sizzle with sexual tension as they dance around each other, and their adorable mutual attraction is charmingly obvious to everyone but them. Baz and Nada’s eventual union is a sure thing from the moment they reunite, but it’s still a delight to see them get there in their own time.
One of the best things about Jalaluddin’s work is the sheer amount of joy she brings to her characters, her writing and her happily ever afters. She clearly delights in reinventing known classics, using beloved heroines as a foundation to create modern women who don’t want or need to sacrifice their ambitions for other parts of their lives. With Much Ado About Nada, Jalaluddin has written yet another winner—and this time it’s one with a particularly heartwarming, tender and feminist resolution.
Uzma Jalaluddin’s Much Ado About Nada is a heartwarming, tender and utterly winning adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Aisha Harris, co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” and a writer for Slate and The New York Times, is the pop culture maven millennials have been waiting for. That’s why her debut book, Wannabe: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, will be flying off the shelves faster than Taylor Swift presale tickets. Part pop culture analysis, part social commentary, and completely and intrinsically personal, Wannabe tackles topics both internal and external. At the forefront are societal issues such as positive representation versus harmful stereotypes in media. Harris’ identity as a Black woman also shapes the narrative as she deftly explores the intersection of pop culture and politics, noting how our political climate changes the way we tell stories.
This book will appeal to readers wishing to go beyond the consumption of media for entertainment’s sake by helping them engage in a socially conscious dialogue. But despite its intellectual value, Wannabe isn’t written for academics. Harris’ audience is anyone who wishes to broaden their understanding of pop culture’s significance to society, and the accessibility of her writing helps to achieve that goal. The humor incorporated throughout the book is truly a delight, and each chapter is chock full of so many witty asides that Harris, were she a television writer, could be the new Amy Sherman-Palladino.
But the book truly shines when it offers us a peek inside Harris’ psyche, providing examples of specific artists, actors and authors who have impacted her life. From unlikely childhood heroines such as tomboy Kristy from The Baby-Sitters Club and loyal punk Ashley Spinelli from the cartoon “Recess,” to the incredible impact of the MTV and VH1 R&B era (looking at you, Toni Braxton), Harris explores how her younger self gravitated toward subversive female icons who redefined the meanings of femininity and strength. As the years passed, other content challenged Harris’ views of womanhood and sexuality, from the sensual Nola Darling in She’s Gotta Have It to the four iconic women who defined a sex-positive generation in “Sex and the City.” Harris also analyzes present-day pop culture, from flawed female leads in TV shows like “Fleabag,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Insecure” to pop stars like Rihanna and Megan Thee Stallion who are unapologetically sensual, commanding and fun. When Harris applies her refined, journalistic scrutiny to subjective nostalgia, the behind-the-scenes magic of Wannabe becomes truly clear.
So in conclusion—taps mic—Imma let y’all finish, but this book is the best pop culture guide of all time!
When Aisha Harris applies her journalistic scrutiny to the subversive pop culture icons who shaped her millennial upbringing and worldview, the magic of Wannabe comes alive.
Over the course of his career, Dominic Smith has demonstrated that his favorite playground as a writer is the past. With his sixth novel, Return to Valetto, Smith doesn’t break from his successful formula but instead perfects what he did so well with his award-winning 2016 book, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, delivering a charming and captivating multigenerational family drama that beautifully blends the past with the present.
Smith whisks readers away to Valetto, Italy: a fictional, crumbling town that floats like an island in the clouds among the rolling hills of the Umbrian countryside. Although the setting sounds like something out of a fairy tale, Valetto has been in steady decline, with earthquakes and other natural disasters having driven away most of its inhabitants.
Hugh Fisher spent most of his childhood summers in Valetto, but when he returns decades later (now a historian and a grieving widower) to visit his aunts and celebrate his grandmother’s 100th birthday, the town has but 10 permanent residents—plus one unexpected new addition. The stone cottage that Hugh’s late mother bequeathed him has been claimed by an inscrutable woman named Elisa Tomassi, who insists that Hugh’s grandfather promised her family the cottage as a show of gratitude for sheltering him while he fought in World War II. As Hugh attempts to validate Elisa’s claims, his forays into the past uncover a terrible secret involving both his and Elisa’s mothers. It’s a bombshell that, once detonated, reverberates across generations and will have consequences that are felt far beyond the walls of Valetto.
With Return to Valetto, Smith doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he doesn’t need to: He is a master of his trade who has executed a flawless novel that satisfies on all counts. The writing is both accessible and evocative, the pace leisurely yet suspenseful, the characters and plot are intriguing, and the themes of grief, generational trauma and resilience are well considered. Smith has the authorial confidence to resist the urge to overcomplicate his novel, delivering a straightforward narrative with a nostalgic tone and classic style that cleverly match the subject material and setting. The result is a richly rewarding book that is imbued with a sense of timelessness. It’s an outright pleasure to read, an excellent choice for both armchair travelers looking to vicariously experience Italy’s dolce vita, and for lovers of impeccably crafted literary fiction.
With Return to Valetto, Dominic Smith doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he doesn’t need to: He is a master of his trade who has executed a flawless novel that satisfies on all counts.
Starting with its title, My Murder, Katie Williams sets up her second novel after Tell the Machine Goodnight with a handful of classic crime fiction questions: Whose murder? And who knows what? But readers will discover a subversive twist within.
Lou, the young mother and wife who narrates the novel, is back from the dead. As part of a government project, she and other victims of a serial killer have been resurrected with cloning technology and placed back into their homes, marriages and jobs. Yet things don’t quite fit for Lou: She can’t remember the days surrounding her murder, can’t connect with her child in the same way and feels distant from her husband. Lou’s confusion and curiosity guide the reader’s experience; she’s figuring things out just as we are, and the revelations of certain details, intentionally paced by Williams, are fresh and surprising. As Lou investigates unexplained moments from her previous life, it’s apparent that she won’t find peace until she makes some sense of them.
My Murder engages with a violent subject without gore, and probes how technology infuses our days and engages our attention, often without our awareness. The plot is certainly rich and appealing, but Williams’ layered considerations are even more compelling and yet never heavy-handed. What happened to Lou? Is she who she was? What makes humans who they are, and how does technology impact these definitions? With a singular voice and a winning narrative that will stay with you for days, My Murder speaks to the construction of the self and the filters we apply. It’s about what it means to survive, to be reborn and, ultimately, to live.
With a singular voice and a winning narrative that will stay with you for days, My Murder speaks to the construction of the self.
Ice might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of coveted “luxury” goods. In fact, many Americans take ice for granted as a now-ubiquitous product that is dispensed out of their refrigerators and can be purchased in bags from nearly every grocery store, convenience store and gas station.
But as Amy Brady (co-editor of The World as We Knew It) explains in her new book, Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, ice has indeed been a very “hot commodity” throughout history. Flash forward to today on our rapidly warming planet, and ice is in even higher demand. This paradox was not lost on Brady. As she writes, “The irony lay in the fact that I was driven to seek out and consume ice because of a phenomenon that’s eliminating ice on the planet.”
Brady found ice to be an untapped subject and did enormous amounts of research to fill in the gaps in its history. Divided into four parts that each focuses on an aspect of ice—obsession, food and drink, ice sports, and the future—Ice outlines how frozen water “profoundly has shaped the nation’s history and culture.” Commentary from food writers, scientists, physicians and historians are interspersed with historic resources such as newspaper articles, diaries and journals, creating unique connections between the past and present.
Historical facts and statistics help contextualize the important role ice has played in events like Prohibition, when breweries pivoted to other business ventures that would make use of their existing ice cellars. (Yuengling opened a dairy, Anheuser-Busch made infant formula and Pabst sold cheese.) Another especially interesting chapter covers ice’s use as a medical treatment for injuries, chronic ailments and even cancer. Throughout the book, Brady uses timelines to help illustrate the trajectory of ice’s journey from an amenity to an everyday item, emphasizing how quickly it became mainstream. Taken all together, Ice makes an important case for securing the future of those freezing cold cubes in a warming world.
Amy Brady uses commentary from food writers, scientists and physicians to illuminate how something as commonplace as ice came to shape America’s history and culture.
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In 1881, Jacci Reed is only five years old when a man attempts to kidnap her from the steamboat her mother, Irena, works on. Badly wounded during the confrontation, Irena takes Jacci aboard the Kingston Floating Palace, a showboat tied up beside them. There, Jacci’s actor grandfather tends to her mother and Jacci gets a first taste of the life she will come to lead.
Fifteen years later, Jacci is an actress aboard the Kingston Floating Palace, and largely contented with her adopted family of actors, singers, and dancers. Especially Gabe, who has always supported her, and the gruff grandfather she has come to know and love. Jacci’s mother has been gone for years, but the memory of the altercation that ultimately took her life—and the cryptic things Jacci has overheard about her past—is always there, lurking in the back of her mind.
When someone on the showboat tries to kill Jacci, it’s clear her questions demand answers. But secrets have a way of staying in the shadows, and the answers she craves will not come easily. Gabe only hopes they come in time for him and Jacci to have a future together.
Jacci Reed loves her life on the Ohio River in 1896 as part of the Kingston showboat family, but shadows of her past and the death of her mother linger in her memory. With the help of the showboat owners' son, can she find answers before those shadows overtake her and threaten her life?
For fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, a stunning debut following Clytemnestra, the most notorious villainess of the ancient world and the events that forged her into the legendary queen.
As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best…
You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offence against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly, you plot.
But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice.
Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So, you bide your time and force the gods’ hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did.
If power isn’t given to you, you have to take it for yourself.
A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece for fans of Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.
A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece for fans of Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.
Rich with historical detail, The House of Lincoln is an insightful account of Lincoln’s transformative vision for democracy as observed through the eyes of a young immigrant who arrives in Lincoln’s home of Springfield, Illinois from Madeira, Portugal.
Showing intelligence beyond society’s expectations, fourteen-year-old Ana Ferreira is offered a job in the Lincoln household assisting Mary Lincoln with their boys and with the hosting duties borne by the wife of a rising political star. Ana bears witness to the evolution of Lincoln’s views on equality and the Union and observes in full complexity the psyche and pain of his bold, polarizing wife, Mary. Yet, alongside her dearest friend in the Black community, Ana confronts the racial prejudice her friend encounters daily as she watches the inner workings of the Underground Railroad, and directly experiences how slavery contradicts the promise of freedom in her adopted country.
Culminating in an account of the little-known Springfield race riot of 1908, The House of Lincoln takes readers on a journey through the historic changes that reshaped America and continue to reverberate today.
Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy bestseller Loving Frank, returns with The House of Lincoln, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. President to Great Emancipator.
The best books of 2023 (so far) as determined by BookPage.com readers include the latest from Abraham Verghese, Kate Morton, Jenny Odell and Ann Napolitano, as well as a remarkable debut from Margot Douaihy.
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The best books of 2023 (so far) as determined by BookPage.com readers include the latest from Abraham Verghese, Kate Morton, Jenny Odell and Ann Napolitano, as well as a remarkable debut from Margot Douaihy.
In Linda Holmes’ delightful Flying Solo, Laurie Sassalyn goes to her hometown of Calcasset, Maine, in the wake of her canceled wedding to sort out the affairs of her late great-aunt, Dot. There, she discovers romantic letters and a curious wooden duck among Dot’s possessions. After the duck vanishes, Laurie becomes embroiled in an adventure that reunites her with her first love, Nick. Along the way, she makes surprising discoveries about Dot and herself. The nature of independence and family connections are two of the novel’s many rich discussion topics.
Angela Appiah, the spirited Ghanaian American protagonist of Shirlene Obuobi’s On Rotation, has everything going for her. Enrolled in a prestigious medical school, she’s on the road to success—until she flunks an important exam and gets jilted by her boyfriend. Angela’s life takes another unexpected turn when she meets smart, sensitive Ricky Gutierrez, who really seems to get her. But is he worth pursuing? During a time of transformation, Angela is faced with tough questions. Obuobi’s winning tale of modern romance makes for transportive summer reading.
In Abbi Waxman’s Adult Assembly Required, Laura Costello relocates to Los Angeles in an effort to leave her past behind. All manner of adventures ensue as she connects with book-loving Nina and vivacious Polly, moves into a boarding house and contends with a still-hopeful ex-boyfriend. Easing into adulthood has its challenges, but Laura comes to understand that she can handle anything with help from her friends. Readers will lose themselves in this brisk, charming chronicle of millennials in LA.
Pestered about her lukewarm love life by relatives and friends, Yinka, a successful Nigerian woman living in London, sets out to find the right man in Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn. In need of an escort for her cousin’s wedding, Yinka cooks up a strategic plan for landing a date. But she learns that there’s more to the quest for Mr. Right than she imagined as she’s forced to come to terms with herself. With poignant themes of identity and independence, Blackburn’s buoyant look at contemporary courtship is a sure conversation-starter for book clubs.
These breezy reads are also thought-provoking and intellectually satisfying.
In her essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf complains that English literature has failed to find words for the experience of a headache. “English,” she writes, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” I thought of her essay often when I was pregnant for the first time and after labor, when I found myself reflecting that the problem she described still persists, and no more so, perhaps, than when it comes to childbirth.
My own experience of pregnancy was not easy. The most important fact, for me, about the years I spent pregnant is that they produced two wished-for and miraculous babies. But I will also be reckoning, for a long time, with the aftershocks of their physical realities. I was pregnant four times in four years and gave birth to two babies. There were also miscarriages and hemorrhages; migraines and months of crippling nausea; four surgeries and hundreds of blood draws; a neural puncture and a proliferation of tumors.
During those years, I looked to novels to help me understand and to give me company, as I had through so many other phases of life—falling in love and out, getting married and getting divorced. Time and time again, however, as I turned through the pages of the novels I loved, I was struck by the shortage of attempts to represent the experience of giving birth. There are, of course, exceptions. In my search for literary company, I found a tradition of novels describing labor from the perspective of a male character, from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. In these depictions, the experiences range from comic to frightening, but we always see the woman undergoing it. We laugh at her and fear for her rather than inhabit her experience.
“How can other people know what they are asking of us, what we endure in the course of childbirth, if there are no words to describe it?”
There is a labor scene in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that is often described as horrifying, but it, too, is narrated from the perspective of someone other than Janine, the woman giving birth. Janine’s experience is held at a remove while our narrator and the other handmaids gather around her, hold hands, whisper among themselves and drink grape juice. It is a horrifying scene, but not because we are given to feel what Janine is feeling; it’s horrifying, instead, precisely because Janine’s experience is set off to the side. What she endures is not the main event—not while she’s giving birth and her individual experience is transformed into a collective ceremony, and not after, when her baby is handed off to the wife of a commander.
In novels that do describe the experience from the perspective of the person giving birth, the experience is often startlingly short. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe gives birth over the course of a page. Her water breaks, she has a contraction, the head comes out, the afterbirth follows. In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante dispatches the experience even more quickly. Lenu’s first childbirth is summarized in a sentence: “I had atrocious labor pains but they didn’t last long.” The second childbirth gets two: “Everything went smoothly. The pain was excruciating, but in a few hours I had another girl.” In Yuko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, a book about what it means to give birth to a child, labor is skipped over entirely. On one page the protagonist is nine months pregnant; on the next, five days later, she’s in the hospital and her baby has been born. All three of these novels are breathtakingly granular about other aspects of their protagonists’ physical and psychological lives. They are novels by writers I’ve turned to time and time again to clarify other modes of existence. And yet, when it comes to labor—or the pregnancy that precedes it—they seem to turn away.
Why would this be the case? Part of the challenge in describing pregnancy and childbirth must be that it involves so much pain and sickness, and as Woolf describes it in “On Being Ill,” those states are notoriously hard to describe. “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor,” she writes in a sentence that must resonate for anyone who has ever been to a doctor, “and language at once runs dry.” Elaine Scarry expands on this point in The Body in Pain, her seminal monograph on the subject, which establishes first the inexpressibility of pain and second the political complications that arise as a result. Pain, she says, is defined by the fact that it cannot be expressed. “When physical pain is transformed into an objectified state,” she writes, “it (or at least some of its aversiveness) is eliminated.”
But why, in that case, don’t more writers try? If pain is eliminated by the act of expressing it, why wouldn’t more people who have given birth write about labor? Perhaps another part of the problem is how conditioned we are to focus on the aftermath of pregnancy—the miraculous child born as a result—as opposed to what we risk and endure, as though to give voice to the pain involved in giving birth is to unnaturally or ungenerously deflect from the miracle of the new life that follows. This conditioning both produces a shortage of language for the experience and is reinforced by the same shortage. How can other people know what they are asking of us, what we endure in the course of childbirth, if there are no words to describe it? And if they don’t know, how can they work to change our culture’s refusal to acknowledge the price of pregnancy?
“I wanted to write a pregnancy book of my own, a labor book of my own, that fully embodied the pain and the sickness involved and held it side by side with the sweetness of a new baby.”
For some of us, pregnancy is a happy state. For many of us, however, pregnancy and labor involve not only sickness and pain, but sickness and pain that last for a very long time. They involve season upon season of an experience that longs to be expressed and can’t, and therefore confines the person experiencing it to a long state of transforming loneliness. Trapped in that state, as I felt myself to be when I was pregnant, I wished for examples of the kind of language that would transform pain into something else, but as I moved through the books on my shelves, the only example I could find that approached the length and intensity of what I was experiencing was the example of the creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which, as Victor Frankenstein describes it, takes season upon season to unfold, requires superhuman efforts from the body of the creator, and leaves him so sick that it takes months for his fiancée to nurse him back to health.
This “labor,” as he repeatedly calls it, is grueling and long, not only for Victor but also for the reader, who must wade through seven remarkably repetitive pages about bodily unraveling—the process involves “charnel bones,” “eyeballs . . . starting from their sockets,” “the unhallowed damps of the grave,” “a slow fever” and nerves aggravated to a “most painful degree”—in order to get to the moment when new life arrives. The language, in its brutal repetitions of grotesquerie, seems to be attempting to approximate the feeling of what it represents.
At the same time, however, Victor insists that he is incapable of expressing the physical sensations involved in his labor. “No one can conceive of the variety of feeling which bore me onwards,” he says in one paragraph; in the next paragraph he asks, “who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil?” The painful and isolating fear that he will not be able to accurately communicate his agony is there, but so is the desire that the reader should feel it as a “conception,” as their own process of painfully creating life. The hope, then, is that language could so fully embody a pain that it could transmit it to the reader.
Reading these pages, I felt I had finally found it: the labor scene I was looking for. And yet, of course, the person laboring is a man, and what he makes isn’t a baby. Did Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein after two labors of her own, one of which produced a child who died after two weeks, feel that the only way she could include a labor scene in literature was to make it a man’s? Did she feel that her readers would be unwilling to conceive of such pain if they imagined it took place in a woman’s body? Did she feel that the only way to allow her character the luxury of dwelling on pain long enough to describe it was to remove the idea of a miraculous baby?
These were the questions I asked myself when I began to write Reproduction. I wanted to write a pregnancy book of my own, a labor book of my own, that fully embodied the pain and the sickness involved and held it side by side with the sweetness of a new baby. I wanted to find a language not only for the headaches and the shivers but also for the contractions and the nausea, a language that attempted, at least, to transmit my experience of pregnancy.
Photo of Louisa Hall by William Callahan.
After being pregnant and giving birth, novelist and poet Louisa Hall found herself reflecting on the dearth of fiction describing the experience—but why? Why is it so hard to write about? With help from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hall found the inspiration to craft her own work of fiction to embody the experience of labor and pregnancy.
The seven reimagined fairy tales in Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog (8 hours) are so convincing that we don’t merely suspend our sense of disbelief; rather, we drop it like a hot potato. We accept without question, for example, the enchanted prince and the extraordinarily resourceful cat because Link makes the implausible seem utterly natural.
The audiobook’s seven narrators (Rebecca Lowman, Dan Stevens, Dominic Hoffman, Kristen Sieh, Ish Klein, Tanya Cubric and Patton Oswalt) understand how important this plausibility is to making Link’s fairy tales work. In these performances, the fact that a bear might be telling a story matters far less than the story being told, and therein lies the wonder of a fairy tale. All of the actors do an excellent job, but Lowman, Stevens and Oswalt stand out for their ability to convince the listener that the magic is real—and the real, magical.
In the audiobook of Kelly Link’s story collection, the fact that a bear might be telling a story matters far less than the story being told, and therein lies the wonder of a fairy tale.
Athena Liu and June Hayward are fellow Yale University graduates and authors, but while Athena’s debut novel soars to the top of bestseller lists, June’s quietly fades into obscurity. June feels like everything is stacked against her until, by accident, she is present at Athena’s death—and in the chaotic aftermath, she steals Athena’s final manuscript to edit and publish as her own. In Yellowface (8.5 hours), R.F. Kuang tells a darkly funny story about culture and media that will resonate with readers and writers alike.
Helen Laser’s narration brings June’s cutting inner voice to life, immersing listeners in her bitter emotions about a writer’s role in contemporary publishing. Laser’s performance of June’s frantic, defensive first-person perspective renders the sarcasm so biting, the reasoning so desperate, that listeners will find it difficult to turn away from the scandal of the story.
Outrageous and highly relevant, Yellowface is a provocative listen that turns a critical eye on modern publishing. As listeners barrel through this audiobook, they’ll find themselves asking the core question of the novel: Who has the right to tell a story, and why.
Helen Laser’s performance of R.F. Kuang's frantic, defensive first-person narrator will make it difficult for readers to turn away from this scandalous story.
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
