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FictionAudio

Sea of Tranquility

Review by Mari Carlson

Spanning centuries past and present, on Earth as well as the moon, Sea of Tranquility (6 hours) by Emily St. John Mandel is as vast as an ocean and as ambitious as the determination to cross it. One awe-inspiring moment in a forest setting links its characters, which include a 19th-century British gentleman who is banished by his family to British Columbia, a 20th-century victim of a Ponzi scheme, a 22nd-century writer whose books about pandemics make her all too aware of another on the horizon and a 23rd-century investigator from the Time Institute who risks changing history with his findings. 

Narrators John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Moorey and Kirsten Potter bring out the eeriness of the novel’s central coincidence. Their well-paced voices—sometimes aloof, sometimes deadpan—foreshadow crises like the calm before the storm. As the narrators’ voices bleed into different sections, rather than remaining relegated to an individual character, the audiobook becomes something like a stage play in an interdimensional theater. 

With dignified eloquence, Mandel’s literary sci-fi novel raises questions and offers hope about the future consequences of pandemics, colonization and technological advances.

Read our starred review of the print edition of Sea of Tranquility.

Through multiple audiobook narrators, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel transforms into a stage play in an interdimensional theater.
FictionWomen's Fiction

The dynamics of loss

Review by bookpagedev
When his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can’t eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn’t know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who has moved to London to escape the rural life her California-born mother disliked. He swats at a nagging feeling that his wife never really loved him.
 
No sooner have they buried her than Robin’s brother Joe dies. It’s an unexpected, violent death that throws the entire extended family into emotional and financial turmoil and leaves them turning to a stunned Robin for help. Naturally, Robin struggles in his newfound role as man of the family, making awkward attempts to comfort a distraught sister-in-law and his aging parents. He deals with the pressure and his own repressed grief by stumbling into an affair with Zoe, his daughter’s 20-something friend.
 
The unnervingly perceptive Zoe is a less-than-welcome addition at Tideswell Farm, but she gradually charms the entire Meredith family—even Robin’s stubborn, unyielding mother—and encourages them to create their own changes rather than accept those thrust upon them.
 
Joanna Trollope’s writing once again shines as she explores the dynamics of loss in an unsuspecting family. As always, Trollope fills her novel with believable characters who say realistic things and live sloppy, imperfect lives like the rest of us. Even 4-year-old Hughie’s voice rings true; his quietly willful way of coping with his father’s death provides some of the most poignant moments in the book. And Zoe, with her piercings, purple hair and black clothes, should be the last person who catches the eye of a mourning middle-aged farmer. Yet through Trollope’s words, their relationship unfolds as naturally as the grief loosening its grip on the family.
 
Trollope excels at detailing ordinary, everyday life, then hurling life-changing twists at her characters without the slightest hint of melodrama or speciousness. Perhaps even more admirable is the restraint she shows by not whitewashing her stories. You come away from this book without an entirely happy ending, but somehow that makes it all the more satisfying.
 
Amy Scribner is a writer in Washington, D.C.


 

When his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can't eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn't know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who…
Fiction

The Yokota Officers Club

Review by bookpagedev

by Sarah Bird is a book of incisive wit and poignancy that uses an astonishing clarity of detail in painting its picture of military family life. Through the eyes of narrator Bernie Root, a survivor of the unsettled existence of a military brat, the reader experiences life on a U.

S. military outpost in Japan during the Vietnam War, and in flashback, during the days following the Korean War, when the Cold War was just getting into full swing. Perhaps one should say the reader experiences this life through Bernie’s nose and voice rather than her eyes. Bird excels at injecting not just the visual details, but also the smells and sounds of post-war Japan. Through odors that serve as the title of each succeeding chapter, and through Bernie’s incredibly truthful and true-to-life voice, the novel finds its emotional center.

Bernie, short for Bernadette Marie, is the oldest of six children of her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy pilot father. She flies to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, and finds that the short year she has been away at college has allowed her the distance to see the disintegrating tangle of ties binding together her once-close family. Bernie begins to realize that the problems of her mother and father began 10 years earlier, during her father’s first tour of duty in Japan. She sees that at the center of this entropic mess is a secret involving the family’s former maid, Fumiko. Bernie stumbles upon answers as she embarks upon a tour of Japanese air bases with a third-rate comic, her prize for winning a dance contest. Bird says this book is a “big, gushy valentine to military families,” and she has the first-hand knowledge to back up that claim, having been raised in a large military family herself. Her novel is about the incredible stress put on the fathers, mothers and children who must all do their jobs to represent the United States. It’s about living a life ostracized from the norm of every other U.

S. civilian and finding the inclusion yearned for only within the family. And it’s about how tenuous yet tenacious love is in such an environment.

This bittersweet comic novel is not a beach book, but it should be on every reader’s list of must-haves for the summer.

Bonnie Arant Ertelt is a writer and editor in Nashville.

by Sarah Bird is a book of incisive wit and poignancy that uses an astonishing clarity of detail in painting its picture of military family life. Through the eyes of narrator Bernie Root, a survivor of the unsettled existence of a military brat, the reader…
Science Fiction & FantasyAudioShort Stories

The Memory Librarian

Review by Deborah Mason

The dystopia envisioned in singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe’s third album, Dirty Computer, provides the backdrop for her first story collection, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer (12 hours).

New Dawn, a totalitarian regime that rules through surveillance and memory erasure, has deemed that only the “clean” are worthy. Others—particularly members of the LGBTQ community, people of color and their allies—are labeled “dirty computers” and must be reprogrammed or destroyed. The five stories of The Memory Librarian, each written in collaboration with a distinguished speculative fiction author (Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado and Sheree Renée Thomas), describe the fear of living under such a regime as well as the joy and courage that can be found in a community of resistance.

Monáe’s narration of the preface and first story is elegant and measured. Her reading of “The Memory Librarian” is particularly taut, reflecting the balancing act that the librarian Seshet must perform between her duties under New Dawn and the hidden memories and desires of her inner life. Voice actor Bahni Turpin’s performance of the remaining four tales is electrifying, particularly in the finale, “Time Box Altar(ed),” in which three children learn to dream of a better future, and then fight for it.

Elegantly narrated by author Janelle Monáe and voice actor Bahni Turpin, The Memory Librarian explores the joy and courage that can be found in a community of resistance.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

arie Brown, the heroine of Jenny McPhee’s clever debut novel, The Center of Things, is tall (she compares herself to Olive Oyl), unmarried, deaf in one ear and agonizingly early for every appointment. Marie has an estranged brother, a passion for old movies and an inexplicable compulsion to finish her philosophy of science paper, begun 15 years before during a brief, unsuccessful stint in grad school.

If she can just finish the paper, Marie thinks, she can discover her true self and make sense of the world.

Marie’s obsession leads her to spend long hours at the public library, where she meets the mysterious (and shorter) Marco, a “freelance intellectual” who habitually wears a loose blue suit which, Marie conjectures, might be either pajamas or a Chinese Communist Party uniform.

As if Marie doesn’t have enough going on, she’s also on the brink of her first big career break in her chosen field: tabloid journalism. For the past 10 years she’s worked at the Gotham City Star, “Manhattan’s only remaining evening tabloid.” When Marie’s childhood idol, film star Nora Mars (the girl next door gone awry), slips into a coma, Marie begs for the chance to write her first solo article. And so Marie sets out to discover the deep, dark secrets in the life of the former movie star, famous for such lines as, “The more I get to know other people, the better I like myself.” Part mystery, part comedy, part love story and part science lesson, The Center of Things bursts with quirky characters, entertaining references to old movies real and imagined, and ideas about the nature of the universe. Can a tabloid journalist who looks like Olive Oyl and thinks like Carl Sagan ever find love and happiness? In the affectionate universe created by author Jenny McPhee (whose father is writer John McPhee), even the most implausible things become possible. Besides, as the infamous Nora Mars once said, “Every story is a love story.” When she is not writing books for children, Deborah Hopkinson watches old movies in Walla Walla, Washington.

arie Brown, the heroine of Jenny McPhee's clever debut novel, The Center of Things, is tall (she compares herself to Olive Oyl), unmarried, deaf in one ear and agonizingly early for every appointment. Marie has an estranged brother, a passion for old movies and an…
FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

he 18th century was an age like no other. Cold blooded and cynical on the one hand and touchingly optimistic on the other, it was a time of social, scientific and political upheaval. The Music of the Spheres, Elizabeth Redfern’s first novel, combines the elements of mystery and history to produce a masterful piece of period suspense fiction set against the aftermath of the French Revolution.

When the monarchy toppled in France, no crowned head in Europe rested easy without a network of espionage agents. England was no exception, with its own spies and rumors of foreign agents who infiltrated every walk of life to lay the groundwork for a French invasion.

Redfern’s central character is Home Office agent Jonathan Absey, a spy-catcher who had served his country well in hunting down England’s enemies. His inside track to promotion and his peace of mind are destroyed by the murder of his 15-year-old daughter, Ellie; catching her killer becomes his reason for living. Jonathan loses his balance on the tightrope between personal and professional duty when a series of murders of red-haired young women, so painfully reminiscent of his daughter, point not only to French spies but to a sadistic killer in their midst. In order to solve the mystery of his daughter’s death, Jonathan must track down the murderer of the other girls. The trail leads him to a group of French expatriates and their British friends, amateur astronomers who hide their personal demons behind a faade of scientific fascination with the mysteries of the solar system. Jonathan’s intuition tells him that this seemingly harmless group of stargazers conceals spies, possibly traitors, and almost assuredly, a psychotic killer.

Like Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and David Liss’ A Conspiracy of Paper, this intensely atmospheric historical suspense novel is alive with the sights and sounds of the day. The author’s years of research allow her to draw on a wealth of period detail from 18th century medicine, mathematics, astronomy and the British government’s secret intelligence network, including the science of encryption. Solidly grounded in the history of a perilous time, the novel’s imagery and characterization bring 18th century London to life with its contrasts of wealth and squalor, poverty and power, and people it with a compelling cast of finely drawn characters acting out an intricate and powerful human drama.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

he 18th century was an age like no other. Cold blooded and cynical on the one hand and touchingly optimistic on the other, it was a time of social, scientific and political upheaval. The Music of the Spheres, Elizabeth Redfern's first novel, combines the elements…
FictionFamily Drama

Acts of Violet

Review by Sydney Hankin

Margarita Montimore, bestselling author of Oona Out of Order, flexes her full creative prowess in her third novel, Acts of Violet, about a sisterly rivalry shaped by magic and a generous helping of hope. 

When famous stage magician Violet Volk vanishes in the middle of her act, the world is left with questions: Was Violet a master of her craft, or did she have real magical powers? Why did she disappear? And what’s going on with her sister, Sasha, who is strangely reluctant to discuss what happened? 

As the 10th anniversary of Violet’s disappearance approaches, the public starts to buzz once again. Cameron Frank is determined to interview Sasha on his podcast; Sasha’s daughter, Quinn, knows that her mother is hiding something; and thousands of other people have their own theories. Montimore’s aptitude for world building is distinctive and remarkable, and she supplements Sasha’s first-person narration with podcast transcripts, newspaper articles, letters and websites to construct a convincing community around Violet’s story. 

The magician sister and her mysteries may be the nexus of Acts of Violet, but the novel is equally focused on Sasha. Striving to keep her privacy, Sasha attempts to evade the press (and sometimes her family) while navigating precarious sleepwalking and mental deterioration. She grapples with questions of morality, family and loyalty as she tries to make sense of her relationship with her sister and whether or not Violet’s actions are forgivable. Sasha is a more persuasive, complex character than Violet, though perhaps Violet’s inscrutability is inevitable, given her occupation as a magician. However, for readers who strive to connect with every detail of a story, a reread may be helpful.

Humorous but not disproportionately so, suspenseful but not frightening and emotional but not tearful, Acts of Violet offers something for everyone. A quick read with irresistible charm, it’s a comfort book in every sense of the word, blending mystery, science fiction and family drama to satisfy a craving you didn’t quite know you had. In the end, you’ll be left with the inkling that there might be some truth to magic after all.

A quick read with irresistible charm, Margarita Montimore’s Acts of Violet is a comfort book in every sense of the word.
FictionWorld Fiction

Diary of a reluctant scam artist

Review by bookpagedev

Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latest addition to that list is Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose strikingly accomplished new novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance takes the reader straight into the world of Nigerian 419s–the scams that begin with an email designed to deplete the savings accounts of a gullible recipient.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of Kingsley Ibe, fresh out of college with an engineering degree but unable to find a job. He tries to do everything the honest way (and the way his parents expect him to), but without a long leg, the Nigerian term for someone who knows someone who can help, he remains unemployed. This is a big problem for an opara, or elder son, who is responsible for the well-being of the family. After his father’s health takes a downward turn and his sweetheart, Ola, leaves him for a wealthier suitor, Kinsgley turns for a loan to his uncle Boniface, also known as Cash Daddy, who runs a successful empire of 419s. As the family situation grows more dire, Cash Daddy’s offers get sweeter, and before you know it, Kingsley is the #2 man, assisting Cash Daddy with large-scale scams and raking in the money.

Education may be the language of success in Nigeria, Nwaubani suggests, but it is money that does the talking. Kingsley suffers from initial attacks of conscience but soon he is delighted in the utter confidence and pleasure money brings. He wheels and deals and supports his brothers and sister in a style to which they all too soon grow accustomed. But accepting Cash Daddy’s charity does have consequences–eventual parental disapproval, combined with Kingsley’s loneliness, makes him question his difficult choices all over again.

Nwaubani sets Kingsley’s trip down the slippery slope of corruption against the backdrop of daily life in small-town Nigeria. She never shies away from the illegality of the scams, but she is tuned in to the subtle ways that people justify their involvement in criminal activity, especially when they feel that following the rules has gotten them nowhere. It is the ultimate irony that the globalization that has made the 419 scams so successful has also opened the doors to this remarkable piece of fiction.

Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latest addition to that list is Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose strikingly accomplished new novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance takes…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Turbulent, sweeping saga

Review by bookpagedev

he early work of novelist Jeff Shaara was inevitably compared to that of his father, Michael Shaara, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Killer Angels. With his first two novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara completed the Civil War trilogy his father had begun. The younger Shaara went on to write a best-selling novel of the Mexican-American War (Gone for Soldiers) and in his latest work, he shifts his focus to the American Revolution.

Shaara says his new book is the first of a two-part saga exploring the full sweep of the conflict that gave birth to this republic and routed the British after a brief but bloody war. Again choosing to go inside the minds of the principal players, he selects four of the most powerful personalities of the era: John Adams, Ben Franklin, George Washington and General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces.

Opening with a brief biography on each of the essential characters, Shaara leads us through the fast-moving American uprising that first protested, then sought to overthrow English colonial rule. Shaara uses the characters of Adams, Gage and Franklin to create a behind-the-scenes feel for the maneuvers on both sides.

The book succeeds in its effort to show how a real revolution is mounted, with men and women of varying personalities struggling to form a new nation under the penalty of reprisal and death. In much historical fiction of this period, the life of British society among the American colonials is shortchanged, but not here. Shaara provides a fascinating glimpse of the British ruling class in all its stiff, autocratic complexity. Some of the book’s finest scenes come when his supporting characters are allowed their time on the page, including such familiar names as Sam Adams, Lord Hillsborough, John Hancock, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Tom Paine and William Pitt.

Not content with a panoramic view, Shaara also explores how deeply the pressures of revolt cut into the social fabric of the day, splitting families and severing friendships.

Sweeping and turbulent, Rise to Rebellion rarely fails to satisfy the reader who appreciates historical fiction done with style, accuracy, sensitivity and analytical skill. If there were questions about whether Shaara would live up to his literary pedigree, this should be the book to finally silence the doubters.

 

he early work of novelist Jeff Shaara was inevitably compared to that of his father, Michael Shaara, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Killer Angels. With his first two novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara completed the Civil…

Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFiction

Your 2022 summer reading guide

List by the editors of BookPage
Summer reading
STARRED REVIEW

June 2022

Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

Maybe your perfect summer read is pure escapism, heady fun, nonstop thrills or great big heaps of feelings. Whatever your summer vibe, we’ve got a book for you.

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NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Monster’s Bones

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Dinosaurs are such a large part of our culture—from books, movies and amusement park rides to children’s toys, clothing and even dino-shaped chicken nuggets—that it’s hard to imagine a time before we knew these huge beasts walked the earth millions of years before us.

The backstory to that revelation is thrillingly outlined in a new book by Reuters senior reporter David K. Randall (Dreamland) called The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World. While on an outing to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Randall and his family kept circling back to the captivating, terrifyingly surreal Tyrannosaurus rex exhibit, prompting his son to ask, “Who found these dinosaurs?” This perfectly reasonable inquiry inspired Randall to consider “the human stories behind prehistoric bones.”

In The Monster’s Bones, Randall delves into early fossil discoveries and scientists’ subsequent interpretations of these bones’ origins. As it turns out, industry titans weren’t the only ruthlessly determined men of the Gilded Age. This era also inspired the “bone wars,” literally a race to find the largest and most complete dinosaur skeletons. Housing these displays at museums and universities was a huge status symbol and a way to draw in the public and boost admission.

Randall focuses on the stories of two very different men who participated in this competition: paleontologist and Princeton graduate Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Barnum Brown, a farmer’s son from Kansas who was a skilled fossil hunter. Brown would travel thousands of miles, from the American West to Patagonia, in order to hunt down prize specimens for Osborn’s American Museum of Natural History. Their intertwined story is full of adventure, intrigue and conflict, leading up to Brown’s world-changing discovery of the ferocious T. rex.

Exciting as any action tale, The Monster’s Bones features characters from all walks of life, from cowboys and ranchers to scientists, railroad magnates and university scholars. As with any valuable assets, greed was a big factor driving this race to succeed. However, it also pushed science ahead by leaps and bounds, leading to findings that still inform paleontologists and biologists today.

Exciting as any action tale, The Monster’s Bones shares the human stories behind some of history’s most thrilling fossil discoveries.
FictionComic Fiction

Flying Solo

Review by Amy Scribner

An old adage, adapted from the title of a Thomas Wolfe novel, insists that you can’t go home again. Linda Holmes’ deeply entertaining and heartfelt second novel, Flying Solo, counters with: Well, you can, but it will probably be messy and chaotic, and you’ll need some wine and a few friends.

Laurie Sassalyn’s beloved great aunt Dot has died. A journalist living in Seattle, Laurie has been tasked with going through Dot’s belongings and preparing her seaside house in Calcasset, Maine, for sale. Laurie travels to her hometown for the summer and sets to the task at hand with the help of her childhood best friend, June, and her ex-boyfriend Nick, now the town librarian.

As Laurie sorts through 90 years’ worth of photos, letters, books and memorabilia, she comes across a handcarved, beautifully painted duck tucked deep inside a chest. Intrigued, Laurie begins researching this mysterious duck and why Dot had hidden it so carefully. The more Laurie learns, the more she is convinced there is a secret attached to this simple wooden duck.

Summer reading
Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

NPR pop culture reporter Linda Holmes’ first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over, which was also set in Calcasset, is beloved by readers and critics alike. Flying Solo is another absolute winner. It’s hilarious and insightful, with vivid characters who act and speak in utterly human and believable ways.

Holmes describes Calcasset with such precision and love that it becomes an additional character. In particular, the local library features prominently in the story: “A small parking lot, a bike rack, and a book drop bin sat in front of the big stone building, more like a church than the kind of brutalist block big cities had, or the office-park splat of a structure that too many suburbs got stuck with in the 1970s. This building had been here since 1898 and was on the National Register of Historic Places. This was a proper library.”

Flying Solo has it all: a mystery, shady con artists, a fabulously funny and supportive friend group and even a steamy romance. In the end, though, it’s a deeply felt examination of the choices we make and the many ways we define family.

Linda Holmes’ second novel has it all: a mystery, shady con artists, a fabulously funny and supportive friend group and even a steamy romance.
FictionPopular Fiction

Counterfeit

Review by Alice Cary

A former college roommate drops into Ava Wong’s seemingly perfect life after 20 years and wreaks havoc in Counterfeit, Kirstin Chen’s lively caper about importing counterfeit high-end handbags from China. Chen’s third novel is a breezy read with unexpected twists, carried along by Ava’s seemingly heartfelt narration as she confesses her involvement to a police detective. Along the way, there are plenty of fascinating details about luxury goods and the shadow industry of fake designer products. (Even readers who aren’t fashion devotees will likely find themselves checking the prices of crocodile Birkin 25s and Hermes Evelynes as the plot thickens.)

Ava, a Chinese American graduate of Stanford University and law school at the University of California, Berkeley, is a corporate lawyer on leave with a toddler son and a surgeon husband. She’s given little thought to former roommate Winnie Fang, who abruptly left college and returned home to China after what appeared to be an SAT scandal. Upon their unexpected reunion, Ava is amazed by Winnie’s transformation from an “awkward, needy . . . fresh off the boat” college freshman into a glamorous, successful businesswoman.

Rather quickly, Winnie inserts herself into Ava’s life. The timing is just right for such an intervention, as Ava is particularly vulnerable: Her mother recently died, her son throws nonstop tantrums, and Ava can’t stand the thought of returning to her legal firm.

Summer reading
Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

Eventually Winnie recruits Ava to join her scheme: buying high-end handbags from luxury stores, returning imported counterfeits to the stores and then selling the real bags on eBay. Winnie maintains that it’s a victimless crime: “Those luxury brands, they’re the villains.” As the women dart back and forth to China and Ava falls in line with Winnie’s ways of thinking (“That level of audacity, daring, nerve—well, it was intoxicating.”), the novel explores questions of status, commerce and how the two are intertwined. As Winnie notes, “A Harvard degree is not so different from a designer handbag. They both signal that you’re part of the club, they open doors.”

Chen, author of Soy Sauce for Beginners and Bury What We Cannot Take, is a versatile, savvy plotter, and Counterfeit readers will be easily drawn into this morally complicated world.

Kirstin Chen is a versatile, savvy plotter, and Counterfeit readers will be easily drawn into this morally complicated world of high-end counterfeit handbags.
FictionComic Fiction

The Mutual Friend

Review by Carole V. Bell

The Mutual Friend is a stylized, laugh-out-loud funny social satire with devastating aim.

Like his long-running sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother,” Carter Bays’ debut novel is a New York City-set ensemble comedy with plenty to say about the discontents of modern life and the difficulty of connection, with one character who acts as a pivot around which the story hinges.

Alice Quick, originally named Truth, was one of twin baby girls adopted by two different families in the Midwest shortly after birth. A musical prodigy turned chronic underachiever, Alice feels rudderless and lost. She wants to be a doctor—possibly, maybe—but lacks the energy to follow through. Even registering for the medical school entrance exam is overwhelming.

When Alice’s roommate gets engaged, things go from difficult to worse. Alice is suddenly in need of shelter, and desperation lands her in a basement apartment near Columbia University. Finding housing in a convenient neighborhood seems lucky, but Alice quickly gets caught up in the whirlwind that is her new roommate, the imposing and mercurial Roxy.

Roxy is a tour-de-force character who epitomizes the ephemeral nature of life in 2015 New York City. She has a complicated yet hilarious relationship with reality, and the push-pull of her conversations with Alice is priceless. But Roxy is just one of the wonderful and absurd creations within Bays’ debut.

Like The Bonfire of the Vanities for the era of reality TV and social media, The Mutual Friend is a conflagration of cringe, as Bays paints a slightly heightened and terrifying vision of life in our age of distraction. Similar to Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel, No One is Talking About This, Bays’ novel sometimes replicates the thought processes of a brain addled by the overstimulation of the internet and omnipresent media: run-on sentences, a litany of random bits of information hitting the reader from multiple sources and a narrative that bounces from one topic to another with abandon.

More than anything else though, the nearly 500-page novel explores people bumping into one another and deciding if they have what it takes to make it stick. And because the book is poised for laughs and broad humor, its painful, critical sections hit harder. For example, Roxy’s second date with a slightly older man, Bob, whom she met on a Tinder-like service called “Suitoronomy,” goes south when she discovers that he’s the focus of a “DO NOT date this guy” blog post. Exposed, charming, dimpled Bob hits back with misogynistic venom. His response is beyond cringe; it’s repulsive. Yet it’s hard to dismiss Bob as a mere internet creep, as the novel gives him an origin story, too, and his tendency to follow the newest, shiniest thing is reflected throughout the larger story in many ways.

The Mutual Friend dwells at the corner of restless and randomness, displacement and dissatisfaction. The narrative is full of stray thoughts and chance encounters, everything fleeting and devastating. All told, it’s riveting.

The Mutual Friend is a conflagration of cringe, as debut novelist Carter Bays paints a slightly heightened and terrifying vision of life in the age of distraction.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Lunar Housewife

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

“Those were the good old days” is a phrase people love to say as they wax poetic about bygone eras. It’s understandable to feel nostalgic given our current chaotic landscape, but as The Lunar Housewife points out, it’s not necessarily merited. Caroline Woods’ historical thriller, set in the final days of the Korean War and the onset of the Cold War, spins a tale of big-city intrigue as it follows a promising young waitress-turned-writer and the increasingly disturbing secrets she uncovers. The result is an addictive binge of a read that’s equal parts intelligent introspection and nail-biting suspense.

It’s 1953, and Louise Leithauser has come a long way from Ossining, New York. The 25-year-old daughter of a housecleaner is now rubbing elbows with the likes of Truman Capote and Arthur Miller in New York City as a writer for the hip literary magazine Downtown. Louise is writing political pieces for Downtown (under a male pen name, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?), dating the magazine’s handsome co-founder, Joe Martin, and penning a sci-fi romance novel, The Lunar Housewife, in her spare time. She’s also certain her twin brother, Paul, who is missing in action in Korea, will come home any day now. But when Louise overhears a conversation between Joe and his colleague Harry regarding mysterious surveillance and their magazine’s dangerous connections, she begins to wonder if anything in her carefully constructed existence is really what it seems.

Coming off her critically acclaimed debut Fräulein M., Woods takes the reader into the tangled web of American-Soviet relations and the dark secrets underneath the New York literary scene’s sparkling surface. Even Katherine, the protagonist of Louise’s novel-in-progress, isn’t immune. A former World War II pilot who voluntarily defected from the States to go on a groundbreaking mission to the moon, Katherine starts to suspect all is not well on Earth or in space. Both Louise and Katherine live in a world that is run by men, but these smart, capable women are not going down without a fight.

The Lunar Housewife will have readers thinking long and hard about how good the “good old days” really were.

The Lunar Housewife is an addictive read that's equal parts intelligent introspection and nail-biting suspense.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Woman in the Library

Review by Jamie Orsini

Readers are treated to two expertly crafted mysteries in Australian author Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library.

Four strangers are sharing a table at the Boston Public Library when they hear a woman’s terrified scream. Winifred “Freddie” Kincaid, Cain McLeod, Marigold Anastas and Whit Metters form a quick friendship while they wait for security guards to figure out what happened. When a woman’s body is later found in the library, the new friends realize they didn’t just hear a scream: They may have overheard a murder. Freddie, Cain, Marigold and Whit set out to discover what happened that afternoon, but they soon realize that their meeting wasn’t random—because one of them is the murderer.

The Woman in the Library audiobook
Read our audiobook review! Voice actor Katherine Littrell brings a measured sense of menace.

But there’s yet another twist! The characters of Freddie, Cain, Marigold and Whit are just that: characters in a novel being written by an Australian woman named Hannah. She’s corresponding with an American writer named Leo, emailing him the chapters of her mystery novel as she completes them. Leo’s detailed responses follow each chapter, and readers soon realize he is more than an appreciative fan. Leo may be just as dangerous as one of the characters in Hannah’s story.

The author of more than a dozen mysteries, Gentill has created a smart, engaging novel that blurs genre lines. The mystery set within the library is a fresh take on the locked-room mystery, and Leo’s emails to Hannah create an increasingly ominous epistolary thriller, despite the distance between the characters. It’s an inventive and unique approach, elevated by Gentill’s masterful plotting, that will delight suspense fans looking for something bold and new.

Readers are treated to an inventive and expertly crafted mystery-within-a-mystery in Sulari Gentill's The Woman in the Library.

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Maybe your perfect summer read is pure escapism, heady fun, nonstop thrills or great big heaps of feelings. Whatever your summer vibe, we’ve got a book for you.
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The BookPage editors pick their 5 perfect summer reads

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Every year, the BookPage editors must once again ask the question: What, exactly, does “summer reading” even mean? Here are our definitions, in literary form.

The Season

I devour lighthearted, escapist romances and mysteries during the summer. Basically, if it can hold my attention despite all the distractions of a packed pool or a sunny park, it’s going in my tote bag. However, to keep my brain from snapping in half when I inevitably turn to more challenging books in the fall, I also make sure to reach for a few weightier yet still seasonably appropriate titles. Kristen Richardson’s history of the debutante is my gold standard. Impeccably researched but unabashedly glam and gossipy, The Season describes gorgeous gowns and high society queen bees with the same inquisitive rigor it applies to unpacking the intersections of race and class. In its various permutations, the debutante tradition encapsulates cultural ideas about femininity and its value; depending on the context, it can be regressive or liberating, stifling or affirming. (The chapter on African American debutante balls alone is worth the price of admission.) Make this your afternoon poolside read, and you’ll be the most interesting person at dinner later that night.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Deacon King Kong

When my yard is alive with bugs and birds, when they’re screaming and singing and zipping through the trees, I want a book that crackles with that kind of electricity, like Deacon King Kong. Set in 1969 Brooklyn, James McBride’s seventh novel opens in the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing projects where, in broad daylight, a 71-year-old alcoholic church deacon known as Sportcoat shoots the ear off a 19-year-old drug dealer. That seemingly gritty opening leads into an affectionate village novel that follows a multitude of characters, including congregants of the Five Ends Baptist Church, a lovelorn police officer and an Italian mobster known as the Elephant. As readers learn the truth about Sportcoat’s actions, they also follow foibles and treasure hunts and slapstick party scenes. No one’s the “bad guy,” not even the mob bosses or dirty cops. The dialogue is some of the best you’ll ever read, and many scenes are gut-bustingly funny. Summer is a joy, and so is this book.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Group

I am not a great lover of summertime. The heat, the dirt, the bugs—all of it sends me indoors with a glass of lemonade. This makes a book like Group by Christie Tate my perfect summer read. I tore through this book on vacation last year, using every moment alone in the empty, air-conditioned house to fly through a few more chapters while everyone else was outside. Tate’s memoir of the years she spent in an unconventional group therapy setting ranges from salacious to vulnerable to truly touching. All she has to do, her new therapist tells her, is show up to these group sessions and be honest—about everything. Sexuality, food, relationships, family, death—everything. As Tate slowly opens up to her fellow group members, she builds real friendships for the first time and learns to defuse the shame and low self-worth that had kept her from making authentic connections during her first 26 years. Perfect for a weekend trip or plane ride, this book’s got heart, hope and enough juicy confessions to keep you turning the pages at lightning speed.

—Christy, Associate Editor

All That She Carried

Whether I’m traveling across the world on a plane or installed under an umbrella on the beach, summer adventures inspire me to decenter screens and their attendant distractions. This means I have the capacity to focus on books that reward a reader’s careful attention, like Tiya Miles’ National Book Award-winning All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Miles, a historian and MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient, uses a single artifact—a simple cotton sack given to a 9-year-old child named Ashley by her mother when Ashley was sold to a different plantation—to offer insight into the often undocumented lives of Black women. As she traces the journey of Ashley’s sack from its origins in 1850s South Carolina through the Great Migration and to its eventual discovery at a Nashville flea market, Miles honors the strength of family ties and finds creative ways to fill gaps in the historical record. This book will make you both think and feel, providing a reading experience to remember.

—Trisha, Publisher

The Diviners

There is nothing I want more in the summer than a big honking series. (Especially if it’s complete. No cliffhanger endings for me!) I want to dive into a fictional world for as long as possible before coming up for air, and Libba Bray’s quartet of novels about supernaturally gifted teens solving mysteries in New York City during the Roaring ’20s fits the bill to a T. The series opener is replete with positutely delicious period vernacular and horrors both imagined (a murderous ghost resurrecting himself with body parts carved from his victims) and all too real (“color lines” at jazz clubs where Black Americans perform on stage but aren’t allowed to enter as customers). The Diviners is exactly the sort of tale I love to stay up into the wee hours of hot summer nights reading—which is good, because in Bray’s talented hands, some scenes are so terrifying that I wouldn’t be able to turn off the lights anyway.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Any book can be a beach read if you put your mind to it.
FictionCrime Fiction

Sleepwalk

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Sleepwalk is a wild ride across an eerie near-future America in the company of a surprisingly endearing kidnapper, arsonist and hit man. As emotionally charged as it is comically bleak, Dan Chaon’s fast-paced novel is both a dystopian thriller chilled to perfection and an often-touching exploration of the enduring power of parental and filial love.

Chaon’s off-the-grid 50-something protagonist, Will Bear, thinks of himself as a “blank Scrabble piece” whose collection of aliases is rivaled only by his stash of burner phones. Fresh from a courier assignment, he answers one of those burners and is greeted by the voice of a young woman who calls herself Cammie and claims she’s Will’s daughter, the result of a sperm donation made three decades earlier. Things only get stranger from there, as Cammie reveals that Will’s contributions may have resulted in a small army of offspring.

Sleepwalk follows Will and Flip, the pit bull he rescued from a dog-fighting compound, in a race across a bleakly beautiful American landscape that’s scarred by civil unrest and plague cities, its endless highways now dotted with military checkpoints and “rabbit-beetle hybrid drones.” Though Will, who’s fond of microdosing LSD and ruminating about his epitaph, is increasingly intrigued by the prospect of being the patriarch of an expanding brood, the criminal syndicate that employs Will has reasons for dispatching him to eliminate Cammie—reasons that slowly become clear to him.

As Will shifts from being the target of Cammie’s outreach to becoming her ostensible pursuer in a shifting game of cat-and-mouse, he also has considerable time to reflect on his own troubled early years in the company of a mother who was “on the sociopathic spectrum, I guess,” and was “part of an anarchist collective that was more or less a cult,” a life that launched Will on his own shadowy career.

Summer reading
Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

In Sleepwalk’s short, tightly written chapters, descriptions of apocalyptic cults, bizarre eugenics schemes and sheer mayhem vie with Will’s moments of profound regret and the faint hope that somehow his life could take a different path, as he longs to “wake up someday on a desert island with amnesia.”

The author of six previous books (both novels and story collections) that feature suspenseful plots and a distinctive literary flair, Chaon marries those qualities once again in memorable fashion while never losing sight of Sleepwalk’s emotional core: an interrogation of the power of ancestry and the way it helps shape our destinies.

Dan Chaon's Sleepwalk is both a dystopian thriller chilled to perfection and an often-touching exploration of the enduring power of parental and filial love.
FictionFamily Drama

This Time Tomorrow

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As This Time Tomorrow opens, Alice Stern is about to turn 40, and her life is mostly fine—not great, but fine. She works in the admissions office of the private school she once attended, she has a boyfriend and a handful of good friends, and she’s content to live alone in her basement studio in Brooklyn. But one aspect that’s not fine is Alice’s dad, Leonard, who’s dying. Leonard is essentially Alice’s only family, and she spends all of her free time visiting the unconscious Leonard in the hospital.

Summer reading
Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

Late on the night of Alice’s birthday, something mysterious happens, and when she wakes the next morning, she’s 16 years old and in her childhood home. With the help of her longtime best friend, Sam, who was with Alice on her original 16th birthday, Alice begins to puzzle out her new reality.

What follows is a time-travel story that blends aspects of other time-travel and time-loop stories, such as the movies Peggy Sue Got Married and Groundhog Day, which Alice references as she unravels her own mystery. The novel lays the groundwork for its more fantastical elements by situating Alice in a storybook setting: She grew up in a small house on Pomander Walk, a tiny hidden neighborhood of Tudor-style houses on New York City’s Upper West Side. When Alice was little, Leonard wrote a time-travel novel, Time Brothers, a mega-bestseller that spawned a much-loved TV series. He never published another book, but instead devoted himself to caring for Alice and attending fan conventions, where he and his writer friends debated fictional time travel.

While This Time Tomorrow is propelled by Alice’s quest to figure out what happened and learn what she can about her dad’s illness, it’s also a dual coming-of-age story. The novel’s more meditative passages convey Alice’s midlife regrets, her loneliness at being left behind by the friends who’ve married and had children, her yearning for something beyond the life she’s made and her grief and love for her dying dad.

Like Alice, author Emma Straub is a New York City native whose father is a well-known novelist. With wonderful place details, This Time Tomorrow evokes the Upper West Side of the 1990s and offers some sly observations on class, especially the subtle gradations between New York’s merely privileged and its ultra-privileged. Alice’s high school scenes are sprinkled with ’90s music and pop culture references, which will be especially enjoyable for millennial readers.

This Time Tomorrow’s many references to other time-travel stories occasionally stray into metafictional territory, but ultimately it’s a story with a lot of heart, some satisfying plot twists and a bittersweet, open-ended finale.

Emma Straub’s time-travel novel has a lot of heart, some satisfying plot twists and a bittersweet, open-ended finale.

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