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.
Some people never learn, or so history would suggest. One doesn’t have to look hard to find repeated patterns that can cause lingering trauma, from interpersonal cruelties to larger events such as wars and other human-made disasters. This is just the sort of material that Ian McEwan—that eloquent virtuoso at mining life’s barbarities—likes to exploit for narrative effect, and he does so yet again in Lessons, a scathing novel about the ways brutality, intentional or otherwise, can shape a life.
The life at the center of this exceptional work is that of Roland Baines. At the start of the novel, it’s the late 1950s, when Roland is n 11. His parents, a tough-love father who was an infantryman in Scotland and a mother who betrayed her first husband, have sent him 2,000 miles away from their home in North Africa to attend boarding school in England.
Among Roland’s formative experiences are the overtures, musical as well as physical, of a piano teacher in her 20s. “This was insomniac memory, not a dream,” Roland says of his adult recollections of those days, among them the time she pinched his bare thigh after he made a mistake while performing a piece from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, leaving a “secret oval mark.”
Young Roland’s relationship with his teacher progresses in unsettling ways, but an equally disfiguring scar appears later. His wife, Alissa, whom he met in 1977 after enrolling in her German language class, abandons him and their 7-month-old son because, as she puts it (with shades of Doris Lessing), motherhood “would’ve sunk me” and kept her from becoming “the greatest novelist of her generation.”
McEwan’s novel moves back and forth in time to record the salient events of Roland’s life: adapting to single parenthood, eking out a living as a lounge pianist, learning of his and Alissa’s families’ pasts and more. As McEwan recounts seven decades of Roland’s life, the author places his character’s personal events in a global context and focuses on such international milestones as the Cuban missile crisis, the disaster at Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lessons is designed to unsettle, which is nothing new for McEwan. Although some readers may disagree, the novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness. The book has moments of warmth that are surprising in a work from McEwan, but there’s plenty of his classic cruelty, too, perpetrated by men and women alike. Lessons may not be optimistic, but as Roland notes, “Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.” Which is another way of saying that, with enough hindsight and sentience, there’s a chance that mistakes can be corrected and lessons learned.
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.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a creative exploration of family, community and resilience set in San Francisco’s historically Black Fillmore neighborhood in the 1950s.
Told from multiple perspectives, the novel centers on Vivian, who came to San Francisco from New Orleans after the death of her husband, the father of her children. She works a good job as a medical assistant, but past traumas and current precariousness prevent her from feeling true comfort. She puts most of her energy toward shepherding the singing careers of her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe, who perform as a group called the Salvations. Vivian dreams of more for her daughters and tirelessly pushes them to practice on their building’s rooftop in preparation for their shows at the Champagne Supper Club.
Vivian’s daughters have their own dreams, however. Their mother believes the eldest, Ruth, has the most star potential, but Ruth’s hopes are a bit more modest. Middle daughter Esther is searching for her own voice while grappling with past traumas. Chloe, the overlooked youngest, is grasping for recognition in both her professional life and personal relationships. Amid all this, their Fillmore neighborhood is being threatened by an urban renewal program that would dismantle the physical and symbolic community.
Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, On the Rooftop is a refreshing work of historical fiction that provides a window into Black life outside of the direct prism of racist oppression. While the specters of racism are present in the story, Sexton chooses to center themes of motherhood, memory, music and hope. She has carefully imagined a compelling social world built on the very real cultural dynamics of the legendary Fillmore neighborhood, known as the “Harlem of the West” for the vibrant Black community within its borders.
On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.
On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.
The flame that burns brightly on the colorful cover of Jonathan Escoffery’s debut is an appropriate image, because If I Survive You is a blazing success. With a profoundly authentic vision of family dynamics and racism in America, this collection of connected stories explores the young adulthood of a character named Trelawny, whose parents fled political violence in Jamaica only to face hard luck in Miami.
These eight stories (all except one were previously published) are completely immersive, humorous yet heartbreaking. The first, “In Flux,” sets the stage well, describing Trelawny’s 1980s childhood and his tortured, complex search for clarity about his identity. The questions are invasive: “What are you?” people ask him, and he turns to his mother, wondering, “Are we Black?” His confusion at school is loaded with cynical truths, such as his take on his fifth grade lessons about the history of slavery in the United States: “It’s: Mostly good people made a big mistake. It’s: That was a long, long time ago. It’s: Honest Abe and Harriet Tubman and M.L.K fixed all that nasty business. It’s: Now we don’t see race.“
Sixth grade brings disaster: “A hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fiberboard with sopping sea salt corrosion.” After the hurricane, Trelawny’s family rips apart, with his older brother and father moving out together. This parting is further explored in “Under the Ackee Tree,” a story told from the perspective of Trelawny’s father that was previously published in The Paris Review and included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. Trelawny’s brother, Delano, who longs to be a musician, shines in his own story set on the eve of Hurricane Irene, titled “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch.”
Hoping to be a writer, Trelawny goes to college in the frigid Midwest, only to find himself back in Miami amid the Great Recession, living out of his SUV and scrambling for work. As Trelawny notes, he “had faithfully followed the upward mobility playbook, only to wind up an extraordinary failure.” This quest is at the center of a trio of riveting, memorable and surprising stories: “Odd Jobs,” “Independent Living” and the exquisite titular tale.
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 Trelawny 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.”
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."
For 25 years, beginning with her National Book Award-winning story collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining several generations of a family and their friends living in central New York. In Natural History, the publisher tells us, Barrett “completes and connects the lives of the family of scientists, teachers and innovators she has been weaving throughout her books.”
First, let’s hope that this isn’t truly our final opportunity to spend time with Barrett’s characters. Long may they prosper! Many of them are female naturalists leading deeply compelling lives in provincial places, corresponding fruitfully with each other and with renowned scientists. They’re not simply unmarried teachers or traveling lecturers concerned with the science lab and the beauty of nature. They’re also devoted family members, lonely visionaries and rivals for the attention and approval of others. Their relationships, professional and emotional, are the understory to the science that seems to so fascinate Barrett.
Second, you need not have read earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History. (I have read less than half of Barrett’s books and still found myself astounded.) While the larger narrative of Barrett’s collected works has not emerged chronologically but instead episodically, this collection of six stories does contain a basic chronology, following schoolteacher and citizen-scientist Henrietta Atkins (born in 1852) into the early 20th century. A helpful family tree at the end of the book illustrates the range and complexity of family relations as well as the ties “beyond blood or marriage” that link characters.
Third, Barrett is sometimes described as a historical fiction writer. There’s truth in that. Many of these stories are set in the 19th century and offer rich sensory glimpses of small-town American life of that era. At the same time, Barrett has a more modern view of the winnowing processes of history. In one of the collection’s best stories, “The Regimental History,” Henrietta is a bright child serving in the home of a prominent local family, and she reads horrific and confusing first-person accounts of Civil War battles from two brothers in the family. Later, an older Henrietta, now a teacher, helps one brother attempt to clarify and defend his unit’s sullied reputation by contributing to the regimental history. And later still, an even older Henrietta visits a historian who possesses all the soldiers’ testimonials and will now refine and generalize and make everything clear.
Or maybe not. In Natural History, Barrett demonstrates that while history organizes and distills events, fiction brings messy humanity gloriously to life.
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.
How do you discern whether a vivid dream is a holy vision or just someone’s own desire? Haven, the latest novel from celebrated Irish Canadian writer Emma Donoghue (The Pull of the Stars, The Wonder), hinges on a monk’s ascetic dream of an island set apart for God’s glory.
Artt, a famed traveler and scholarly priest, selects timeworn and experienced monk Cormac and an awkward young monk named Trian to sail west and establish a new community for Christ. Their trinity seeks a place far from civilization and temptation, since Artt plans to withdraw from the world entirely.
Finding two remote islands after a week’s journey fills Artt with zeal and confirms God’s call upon him. But as Artt intones early in the novel, “Monkish life is one long war against the devil.” As he leads his two reluctant followers in an increasingly erratic and unyielding manner, questions abound: Will this haven be a true refuge? Did Artt hear God rightly? Or has he lost his way?
Inspired by the true history of an early Christian monastery founded on Ireland’s Skellig Islands, Haven explores the mix of superstition, lore, faith and basic need that accompanies humanity on a mission. As in her hit bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s powers of description expand small, confined spaces until they contain worlds of universal depth.
Haven sensitively considers hubris, humility and selfishness, who God is and how he might interact with his creation. Artt, Cormac and Trian grapple with this relationship as they face hourly trials in a new world that’s as solid and real as it is mysterious. Much of the action takes place in the hearts of these men, so the story’s pace is a slow, intriguing burn, building enjoyably until a somewhat jarring climax and disappointing denouement. Shock-value shift aside, Donoghue’s talent for storytelling captivates.
Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Haven captures the gulf that can grow—especially during times of hardship—between what we say we believe and how we live.
Inspired by the true history of an early Christian monastery founded on Ireland's Skellig Islands, Emma Donoghue's Haven explores the mix of superstition, lore, faith and basic need that accompanies humanity on a mission.
Denny Tran is dead. No one seems to know how or why, even though he died in a popular and crowded restaurant where he and his pals had gone to celebrate the end of the high school year. Improbable though it may sound, everyone seems to have been in the restroom or have been averting their eyes at that moment. But Denny’s sister, Ky, the protagonist of Tracey Lien’s suspenseful debut novel, All That’s Left Unsaid, is determined to get answers.
Ky is a journalist living in Melbourne, Australia, and to find out what happened to her sweet-natured, brilliant, beloved younger brother, she’ll have to return to her hardscrabble hometown and interrogate people from her own community. The Vietnamese émigrés of Cabramatta—a suburb of Sydney—spend their lives sacrificing and compromising, trying to stay out of trouble and sometimes falling short. This includes Ky and Denny’s checked-out father and loud, infuriating yet surprisingly lovable mother.
Coming back to her parents’ home, Ky must resist lapsing into the role of obedient daughter—the child who never causes trouble or makes anyone uncomfortable, who nearly wrecks herself trying to meet familial expectations. If Ky wants to expose the truth of her brother’s gruesome death, she’s going to have to make some people uncomfortable.
Fortunately, Ky has a superpower, even as she struggles to acknowledge it. Part of her conscience—the voice that can cut through the nonsense and get at some cold, hard truths—comes from her former friend Minnie. For years, docile, striving Ky and hard, cynical Minnie were inseparable, until adolescence struck and wedged them apart. Ky still holds onto a part of Minnie, and this connection bolsters Ky as she demands answers at the local police department. It gives her the nerve to interview her former high school teacher, the restaurant’s wedding singer, Denny’s best friend and other people who were present on that terrible, fatal night.
All That’s Left Unsaid might remind some readers of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, another novel about a journalist daughter returning to her fractious hometown to investigate a murder and having to engage with both a difficult family and former neighbors who are reluctant to talk. Like Camille Preaker, Ky discovers something shocking in the end. Yet Lien’s novel, by turns gripping and heartbreaking, makes room for forgiveness and understanding. Ky knows all about her people, and to know all is to forgive all.
All That's Left Unsaid might remind some readers of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, with a journalist daughter returning to her fractious hometown to investigate a murder.
There’s no guarantee that a writer who excels at short fiction will naturally succeed at novels, or vice versa, which is why it’s so exciting when a storyteller effortlessly crosses over. With her story collection, Bliss Montage, all the promise and power of Ling Ma’s 2018 novel, Severance, is gorgeously applied to the art of the short story. It’s a lyrical, potent anthology that blends fantasy and reality to dazzling effect.
The eight tales in Bliss Montage are rooted in familiar, deeply human moments. For example: A pair of friends have an unhealthy relationship with drugs and each other, a woman is haunted by her romantic history, and a wife deals with losing track of her husband at an airport. But within these familiar beats, Ma inserts fantastical conceits, tilting our view of reality, until something strange and new creeps in. In “G,” the two friends take a drug that renders them temporarily invisible. In “Los Angeles,” the woman shares a house with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends. And in “Returning,” the wife arrives in an unfamiliar country and learns about a burial ritual that might change her marriage forever.
In each story, Ma seamlessly blends the real and the unreal with astonishing confidence and care. Laden with apt, surprising metaphors, her supernatural elements provide incisive, bittersweet commentary on human longing, loss and love. Her tightly structured sentences are little blades of wisdom and wit that slip into you when you least expect it, opening you up with bursts of raw, emotive power.
Bliss Montage is another triumph for Ma. Fans of elegant, well-crafted short fiction should not miss it.
In her first story collection, Ling Ma creates tightly structured sentences: little blades of wisdom and wit that slip into you when you least expect it, opening you up with bursts of raw, emotive power.
Fall 2022 is a blockbuster season for fiction, with new releases from such heavy-hitters as Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver and Celeste Ng. Discover the 21 novels we’re most excited to read.
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah Riverhead | August 23
Prior to being awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tanzanian British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was little known in the U.S. and his masterpieces nearly impossible to find. For readers who’ve waited ever so patiently, Afterlives will deliver an expert examination of postcolonial survival, a deft decentering of European history and a tender portrayal of the trauma of warfare. Spanning decades over the turn of the 19th century, it’s an epic novel that follows the lives of three young people after Germany’s colonization of east Africa.
Haven by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown | August 23
Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue dives into early Christianity for a novel that sounds perfect for readers who loved Lauren Groff’s Matrix. Set in 7th-century Ireland and imbued with descriptions of illuminated manuscripts and ancient parables, it’s the story of a priest and two monks who head out by boat in search of a place to build a monastery, and they end up on the island known today as Skellig Michael.
The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton Bloomsbury | August 30
On the (relatively short) list of novels that immediately demand a sequel, Jessie Burton’s 2014 breakout debut, The Miniaturist (which was adapted into a PBS miniseries in 2017, starring Anya Taylor-Joy), ranks high. We have questions that have never been answered, so we’re queued up for The House of Fortune, a standalone companion novel that picks up the story 18 years later. In 1705 Amsterdam, young Thea lives with her patchwork family (all returning characters): her aunt, the widow Nella; Thea’s father, Otto; and the family’s longtime cook and maid, Cordelia. Money is hard to come by, so brokering a marriage for Thea could solve some financial woes—but Thea only has eyes for a handsome set painter at the local theater. And then the miniaturist makes a return.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell Knopf | September 6
Maggie O’Farrell’s brilliant, bestselling novel Hamnet, about the death of William Shakespeare’s son from the bubonic plague, was high on our list of the Best Books of 2020. For some of us sheltering in lockdown during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, her novel hit a little too close to home; for others, it was exactly what we needed. Her next novel, The Marriage Portrait, arrives with a similar sense of doom as Hamnet: It’s set in 16th-century Europe amid the Italian Renaissance, and we know on the outset that young duchess Lucrezia de’Medici will die, likely murdered at the hand of her husband. Give us ducal intrigue and dial it up to 11, please.
On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Ecco | September 6
The joyful third novel from the award-winning author of A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners is a historical tale set in 1950s San Francisco, within a Black cultural and musical hub known as the Fillmore District. A novel of resilience and ambition that was loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, it revolves around a mother and her three singing daughters who are on the cusp of stardom. No doubt you’ll fall in love with the neighborhood at the novel’s heart, where jazz clubs line the streets, and where dreamers share the stage with legends.
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma FSG | September 13
Little did Ling Ma know when she wrote her debut novel, Severance, that it would be so prescient about life in 2020. With this story of a young woman living through an apocalyptic pandemic, Ming put her finger on the very heartbeat of what it’s like to clock in for work amid a global disaster. Severance was one of the first great millennial novels, so Ma’s upcoming story collection (which includes eight tales) is well deserving of your attention. And what a title: “Bliss montage” evokes one of those gauzy series of scenes as a movie’s tragic protagonist remembers a former love. We can already hear the bittersweet Debussy.
People Person by Candice Carty-Williams Scout | September 13
The titular lead character of Candice Carty-Williams’ 2019 debut novel, Queenie, was funny, sharp and a total individual as she navigated the ups and downs of life as a single Black woman in London. In Queenie’s story, we witnessed the kind of characterization that makes a hero feel real, and that’s what we’re looking forward to most in Carty-Williams’ second novel. The scope of People Person is broader than Queenie, with five half-siblings who share the same absent father coming together in adulthood after a dramatic event. We’re expecting a family drama with bite.
Lessons by Ian McEwan Knopf | September 13
Admit it: Fans of Ian McEwan are gluttons for emotional punishment, because no one devastates quite like he does. His next novel is an epic one, spanning the life of Roland Baines across decades. Historical events such as the disaster at Chernobyl and the falling of the Berlin Wall align with moments from Roland’s life, including traumatic early relationships, his wife’s disappearance and more. The publisher has claimed that it’s “inspired” by McEwan’s own life, and while McEwan has made clear it’s not completely autobiographical, he has said that he’s “raided” elements of his own history.
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li FSG | September 20
We’re treated to the quiet, devastating brilliance of Yiyun Li once more, this time in a new novel that winds from the French countryside to Pennsylvania, where a woman, after the death of her childhood friend, finally feels free to tell her story. Li is the author of six works of fiction and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and she’s received a whole heap of awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer Little, Brown | September 20
The ending of Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less, did not demand a sequel—it ended so perfectly—but lucky us, we’re getting one anyway. Beloved Arthur Less, once again fleeing his problems, accepts invitations to a bunch of literary events and heads out on the road. This time, he’s traveling throughout the United States. As he proved with Less, Greer excels at pinpointing the funniest parts of the writerly life, and we expect him to return to this winning comic realm.
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie Riverhead | September 27
At first glance, the premise of Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel isn’t all that fresh: Two girls were friends; now as adults, they’re forced to look back on their friendship and reckon with their differences. That being said, it’s rare to come across positive depictions of great lifelong friendships in fiction, and Shamsie has promised that Best of Friends focuses on what holds us together, not what drives us apart. Plus, her previous novel, Home Fire, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the Booker Prize, so we know we’re in good hands.
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson Doubleday | September 27
British author Kate Atkinson has written some of our favorite works of historical fiction, deploying her stellar sense of pacing and phenomenal manipulation of plot. Her latest novel takes us to post-World War I London, where the Soho nightlife is hopping. Wherever there’s glam, there’s a dark underbelly, and no one knows this better than Nellie Coker. She’s made a place for herself at the top, and she’ll use her position to help her six kids move up in the world—no matter how many targets are on her back.
The Winners by Fredrik Backman Atria | September 27
The author of A Man Called Ove brings his popular series, set within a small hockey town, to its much-anticipated finale. Beartown has been the backdrop to some of the darkest dramas of the human heart, but there are still more secrets, rivalries and resentments to contend with in this final installment.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng Penguin Press | October 4
With her bestselling 2017 novel, Little Fires Everywhere (which was adapted by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington for an Emmy-nominated Hulu series), Celeste Ng took a relatively familiar setup (escalating divisions within a privileged suburban bubble) to a whole new level, bringing an incredible depth of understanding to the situation. In Our Missing Hearts, she continues to track the growing divide between Americans through the intimate relationships of well-crafted characters, but as these rifts have escalated to a nationwide horror show of brazen xenophobia, racism and violence, her storytelling style has likewise amplified to contend with these dangers. Her third novel veers into dystopian territory, but as always, Ng brings deep compassion to her characters.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Harper | October 18
It’s apparently unnecessary to read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to enjoy the latest from bestselling, award-winning author Barbara Kingsolver. Dickens pulled from his own experiences with poverty to write his 1849 novel, which Kingsolver reportedly drew from to create her rural southern Appalachia-set world. In the hill country of southwestern Virginia (where Kingsolver lives), a boy is born to a teenage mother, and together they live in a single-wide trailer. His life will inevitably bring him through some of the greatest failures of the American experiment: foster care, derelict school systems and the feeling of being invisible to the wider world. Folks looking for a book that compassionately, realistically reflects rural Appalachian stories (or to be more honest, anyone who hated Hillbilly Elegy), this is the book to read next.
The Last Chairlift by John Irving Simon & Schuster | October 18
There are few novels that need to be 900+ pages, but when you’re John Irving (The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules) and you haven’t written a novel in seven years, you get to have all 912 pages. It’s a story of ghosts and skiing, beginning with a slalom skier who gets pregnant in Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, and then following her son during his own voyage to Aspen, where he seeks to make sense of the story of his conception.
Liberation Day by George Saunders Random House | October 18
Whether he’s guiding us through the Russian literary greats (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), getting spooky with Booker Prize-winning historical fiction (Lincoln in the Bardo) or writing short fiction for Chipotle’s to-go bags, George Saunders does marvelous, utterly original work. We have a special soft spot for his short stories, where his breadth of imagination and balance of ambition and restraint really shine. Liberation Day, his first collection in eight years (after Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award), includes four new stories along with five tales previously published in The New Yorker.
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro Knopf | October 18
Dani Shapiro’s powers as a memoirist are well-known due to the power of such books as Inheritance and Devotion. However, you’d be forgiven for being unaware that she’s also a skilled novelist, as it’s been 15 years since her previous work of fiction. After the success of her memoirs, and with help from her podcast “Family Secrets,” Shapiro has become the queen of family secrets—or if not the queen, she’s at least sitting at the royal table. She undoubtedly will bring new insight to a popular setup: A car crash reverberates throughout several families, transforming a community for years to come.
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy Knopf | October 25 and December 6
One of the most talked-about releases of the year is this one-two punch from The Road author Cormac McCarthy. This duology is reportedly the final work for the 87-year-old author, who has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and plenty other accolades, and who has seen several of his novels transformed into masterful films (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men). The premise of the two novels is an intriguing puzzle: The Passenger is a sprawling saga, while Stella Maris unfolds in dialogue, and together they create a story of a grieving brother and sister.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson Ecco | November 8
As we wait for the film adaptation of Nothing to See Here, we can turn to the next novel from bestselling author Kevin Wilson. Now Is Not the Time to Panic has a setup that just can’t be beat: Two young people find a romantic and creative connection during what was supposed to be a very lonely, miserable summer in Coalfield, Tennessee. Together they design a poster emblazoned with the phrase “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” and the posters soon take on a power of their own. In a note included with advanced editions of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Wilson explains that “I’ve had recurring thoughts since I was a kid, which was diagnosed as Tourette syndrome as an adult,” and the novel’s phrase has been a mantra and source of comfort to the author for 25 years. It’s mentioned in the The Family Fang, but now it has finally found its place at the center of a novel about art, creativity, memory and nostalgia.
“One of the great things about writing a book about 1940s Hollywood is that you can watch a bunch of old movies and call it research,” Anthony Marra says about Mercury Pictures Presents, a sprawling, bighearted tragicomedy set in Hollywood during World War II, with additional storylines in Italy and Germany. It took six years to write. “So yeah, I did a lot of research,” he says, laughing. “I’m in my sweatpants watching Humphrey Bogart, saying, ‘Don’t worry, this is work.'”
Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and the story collection The Tsar of Love and Techno, speaks from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, with a voice that’s full of humor, passion and compassion, just like his prose. After previously setting books in Chechnya and the Soviet Union, he says he wanted to set this novel a little closer to home.
Initially, he was toying with two seemingly separate ideas, the first being a story set in Los Angeles, the author’s former home. “Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles,” Marra says. “That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”
The other idea focused on southern Italy, the home of Marra’s great-grandmother and her family. But during a trip to the island of Lipari, the author noticed a plaque commemorating anti-Fascists, artists and intellectuals who had been exiled there during Benito Mussolini’s regime.
“It seemed so strange,” Marra recalls, “that this island paradise to which I could trace my own roots had once been Mussolini’s Alcatraz. It occurred to me that a number of European refugees would refer to LA as ‘sunny Siberia,’ and I thought the same term could have easily been applied to a place like Lipari.” Marra realized that he could weave his two story ideas together into one, “about two Siberias on either ends of the world, and this one family divided between them.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”
Mercury Pictures Presents is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after Fascists condemn Maria’s activist father to confino (internal exile) in a Calabrian village. Devastatingly, it was 12-year-old Maria’s actions that accidentally led to her father’s betrayal—a theme that Marra explores in similar ways in The Tsar of Love and Techno. “Totalitarian ideology invariably undermines the family as an institution by turning each member into a potential betrayer,” the author explains. “The people you’re closest to have the power to take away your freedom, or even your life, simply by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
Fifteen years later, in 1941, Maria lives in Los Angeles with her mother and works as a producer at Mercury Pictures International. Maria’s boss is Artie Feldman, described in the novel as a fast-talking, “middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees.” This is where Marra’s movie watching comes in handy, particularly in the way he mirrors the screwball-comedy dialogue of the era’s films. It’s apparent that His Girl Friday was a big influence, and Maria will remind readers of Rosalind Russell’s character, just “a lot more Italian,” Marra says. It’s easy to see why Maria was the first character that came to him when he started crafting the novel. “I really just fell in love with her.”
Despite the abundance of World War II novels and movies, Marra was surprised to find this chapter of Hollywood history to be “a little hidden.” As he plunged into researching the 1940s world of madcap moviemaking, he meticulously explored more serious subjects with equal fervor, including wartime challenges, xenophobia and immigration. For example, immigrants were subject to curfews, so Hollywood studios frequently adjusted shooting schedules to ensure workers could get home on time. Immigrants like Maria had to register as “enemy aliens,” confine their movements to a 5-mile radius and surrender certain items like flashlights, radios and cameras—anything that might be used to communicate with the enemy.
Such restrictions are particularly problematic for another central character of the novel, Italian immigrant and photographer Vincent Cortese. As he complains to Maria, “You travel halfway around the world just to end up in confino again. How does an itinerant photographer make a living if he’s prohibited from being an itinerant and a photographer?”
Elements of photography and filmmaking are all over Mercury Pictures Presents, to the extent that Marra considers his role to be as directorial as it is authorial. “I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world,” he says. At times, the narrative zooms in and out, cutting from present day to the future and back again. Other scenes have an undeniably cinematic quality, such as when Vincent and another character step outside to discover that it’s snowing in Los Angeles, which really happened on New Year’s Day in 1942. Even the process of editing out unnecessary scenes was informed by filmmaking. “If you look at Dostoevsky,” Marra says, “where people are ranting for pages at a time, you can tell that clearly Dostoevsky was a man who had never seen a movie.”
“I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world.”
Marra is especially intrigued by the machinations of fantasy, escapism and propaganda in this period, particularly as the government turned to Hollywood “to use the tools of cinema to mobilize the country for war,” he says. “I was interested in exploring how the camera—and more broadly, art—can be this source of witness and documentation, but also a source of deception. And how we as viewers are asked to tell the difference.”
But for every element of darkness and wartime despair, the novel also contains just as much joy, particularly in moments of comic relief. Marra considers this his “most comic work yet,” and found that humor “collapses the distance between character and reader in a way that nothing else really does. A good joke is really powerful in terms of bringing the reader to care about a character.”
Familial bonds provide some of the most buoyant opportunities for comedy. Most memorably, a lively trio of aunts, inspired by the author’s own great-aunts, provide a lifeline for Maria and her mother in LA. “In their black dresses and sunglasses,” Marra writes, “they looked like Grim Reapers going as Greta Garbo for Halloween.” He even gave them his great-aunts’ real names: Mimi, Lala and Pep.
“Even though I initially began working on this book some years ago, it was only during [COVID-19] lockdown that it took off,” Marra says. “I felt like I was drawing more and more on relatives and friends, if only to have the opportunity to keep company with those people again. . . . Obviously, staying inside during COVID is a lot different than experiencing confino, but I think just the sense that you’re isolated from your loved ones and limited in what you can do informed how I approached the characters and their stories.”
As Marra writes in an early scene, “So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face.” With Mercury Pictures Presents, he fits a multitude of memorable personalities into his frame, transforming the novel into something quite like an epic film. After all, he says, novels are most like movies in their power to “transport a reader to a place far from their daily life that nonetheless speaks to them in a deep way.”
Photo of Anthony Marra by Paul Duda.
Comedy and tragedy collide in the author's second novel, set amid the highs and lows of World War II-era Hollywood.
Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for fiction, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book is a searing portrayal of the Black authorial experience. At the center of the novel is an unnamed Black author on his first book tour struggling to navigate the publishing industry and make sense of the modern world. His narrative is offset by chapters recounting the story of Soot, a young Black boy in the South. Poignant and often funny, Mott’s novel draws readers in as it scrutinizes race in American society and the power of storytelling.
Marlon James’ epic fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf is narrated by Tracker, a hunter with an acute sense of smell. Accompanied by a shape-shifter named Leopard and a band of misfit mercenaries, Tracker travels through a landscape inspired by African mythology and ancient history on a dangerous quest to find a lost boy. Hallucinatory and violent yet marvelously poetic, this first entry in James’ Dark Star trilogy won the 2019 L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. There are an abundance of potential topics for discussion, such as James’ folkloric inspirations and Tracker’s unreliable narration.
Following the death of her aunt from an uncommon ailment called Chagas, or the kissing bug disease, Daisy Hernández decided to research the illness. She shares her findings in The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease. Hernández talked to physicians and disease experts throughout the United States, and her interviews with patients reveal the human cost of the American healthcare system’s inadequacies. Hernández displays impressive storytelling skills in this masterfully researched volume, which won the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s powerful chronicle of a toxic love affair, won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. In the book, Machado reveals that she fell hard for a magnetic, emotionally unpredictable woman who became abusive. In structuring her memoir, she draws upon various narrative devices and traditions (coming-of-age, choose your own adventure and more), and the result is a multifaceted, daring and creative portrayal of a deeply dysfunctional relationship.
Tracy Flick, Tom Perrotta’s protagonist from his darkly humorous novel Election, returns in Tracy Flick Can’t Win (6 hours), an engrossing story of retrospection, regret and self-fulfillment. Now the vice principal at a suburban New Jersey high school, Tracy is vying for the principal gig, which means navigating school politics and the sophomoric behavior of the adults around her.
Award-winning actor Lucy Liu’s sensitive performance of Tracy captures every moment of confidence and frustration. Her controlled tones highlight the loneliness, self-doubt and disappointment that Tracy feels after sidelining her political aspirations to take care of her mother and raise her daughter. “Better Call Saul” actor Dennis Boutsikaris’ entertaining performance of retiring principal Jack Weede’s misguided masculine mindset is sprinkled with guilt and shame. Other superb cast members (Jeremy Bobb, Ramona Young, Ali Andre Ali and Pete Simonelli) are equally impressive, conveying the nuances of strained personal and professional relationships while delivering quietly compelling reactions to the story’s climatic ending.
Actor Lucy Liu’s sensitive performance of Tracy Flick captures every moment of confidence and frustration in Tom Perrotta's engrossing novel of retrospection, regret and self-fulfillment.
In 1838, the French novelist George Sand (pen name for Aurore Dupin) decided that a winter away from Paris would be good for her, her two children and her ailing lover, Frederic Chopin, who had tuberculosis. The group landed on the island of Majorca, taking rooms at a defunct monastery, the Charterhouse, in the remote village of Valldemossa. (Sand wrote about their stay in a travel memoir titled A Winter in Majorca.)
This is where Briefly, a Delicious Life, the debut novel from Nell Stevens (author of the memoir Bleaker House), begins. “Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen two men kissing,” narrator Blanca says in the novel’s first line, describing when George arrives at the monastery dressed in her usual men’s suit and kisses Chopin. “It was 1838 and I had been at the Charterhouse in Valldemossa for over three centuries by then.”
Blanca is a ghost, a 14-year-old girl who died almost 400 years earlier. She has lurked in Valldemossa, and in particular at the Charterhouse, ever since, pestering badly behaved monks and trying to protect her long line of granddaughters and great-great-great-granddaughters. But her descendants have almost died out, the monks have gone, and Blanca is lonely. When the Parisian group arrives, Blanca instantly falls in love with George.
Blanca has a very long memory, but her voice is fresh. She’s often funny, sometimes enraged, full of longing—an all-too-human ghost. She can insinuate herself into people’s heads and bodies, experiencing sensory pleasures like the taste of an orange or the feel of a kiss. She can access people’s memories and see their futures, which helps to give the novel its structure, as the story moves between past and present.
Throughout their haphazard sojourn, George stays up late into the night writing and smoking cigars, and Chopin lingers at the piano, coughing and working on his preludes. But unlike George and Chopin, Blanca knows that the conservative Valldemossan villagers are suspicious of the Parisian visitors’ unconventional ways, and that their visit may end badly. Along the way are sections from George’s memories, as interpreted by Blanca—a youthful crush, an early marriage, attempts to find her way as a female writer in a man’s world—and from Blanca’s own past, her short life and doomed teenage romance in the late 15th century.
Briefly, a Delicious Life is an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. If the novel’s narrative drive is sometimes uneven, that’s a small quibble. Blanca, though a ghost, is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place.
Nell Stevens offers an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. Her ghostly narrator is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place.
The bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet returns with another spellbinding tale of memory’s power to bind us together. At once heartbreaking and uplifting, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy connects women who are generations and worlds apart.
Dorothy Moy lives in Seattle in 2045. A depressive and anxious 31-year-old poet, Dorothy experiences flashbacks, but not of her own experiences; she sees people and places that are unfamiliar to her. Then Dorothy’s 5-year-old daughter, Annabel, begins to exhibit peculiar behavior, describing visions she’s seen and talking about a boy looking for her. Hoping to spare her daughter a life of perpetual disquiet, Dorothy turns to epigenetics, the study of how behavior and trauma can be passed down through generations. She begins experimental therapy to discover the origins of her mysterious memories.
Ford’s writing is seductive as he intertwines the lives of Dorothy, Annabel and their ancestors within a rich swirl of history and imagination. We meet Afong, inspired by the first Chinese woman to immigrate to the U.S. in 1834, who tours the country as a spectacle for theatergoers; Lai King Moy, a young girl living through the bubonic plague outbreak in early 1900s San Francisco; Faye Moy, a nurse in her 50s who’s serving with the Flying Tigers, a combat air squadron, to fight against the Japanese during World War II; Zoe Moy, a student at an unconventional boarding school in 1927 England; and Greta Moy, a single woman in 2014 who develops a dating app just for women.
As Ford unravels the intriguing stories behind Dorothy’s recollections, he leads readers through her process of reconciling inherited memory with her present reality. The unfurling of ancestry and the passage of time are masterfully controlled and poetic, sumptuous and stark. Each time period is as expansive as the next, and within these eras, Ford plumbs the different sociocultural views and the changing roles and expectations of women, all while highlighting his strong characterization.
Exploring the bonds that transcend physical space, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is an enthralling, centuries-spanning tale, a masterful saga that’s perfect for fans of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain.
Jamie Ford’s writing is seductive as he intertwines the lives of Dorothy, Annabel and their ancestors within a rich swirl of history and imagination.
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.
