A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In fact, The Book of Kings turns out to be one of the most ambitious, eccentric, morally driven books ever run off a press.
At its most frustrating, it is indeed grandiose in the manner of self-taught philosophy. Lyrical passages are artificially sweetened. But for much of its length, inspired writing gives impassioned witness to the destruction of 50 million human beings by totalitarian ideas, insane or wicked tyrants, and feckless democracies. Thackara reminds those who have forgotten and teaches those who never knew that World War II was more about evil than about heroism.
This is not the blue-collar combat experience of American moviemaking. The major characters of The Book of Kings, beginning with four young men who room together at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930s, move at the highest levels of European society, government, or military life. One of them knows Hitler; his friend becomes a world-renowned antifascist writer. Others include a famous film star and an important Wagnerian soprano. These grand beings have highly attenuated emotions.
Nonetheless, most will directly experience the horrors of the war, and the novel thus becomes propaganda at its most idealistic and benign. When portraying concentration camp atrocities or battlefield slaughter in high-resolution detail, Thackara’s elevated language accurately hits the high key of his humanistic theme.
Unfortunately, the cat’s out of the bag in postwar episodes. Elevated dialogue becomes pompous or goofy when the guns fall silent; noble ideas curdle into elitist fantasies. For a humanitarian, Thackara has a disturbing penchant for believing his characters superior to the bulk of humanity. Even so, this original if flawed novel is rewarding for its view of the war as primarily a European tragedy, its high-minded if self-righteous aims, and its stunning scenes of credible action in a world gone morally dark.
Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received The Stephen Crane Literary Award.
The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In…
Spring is getting closer every day, and with all that excitement bubbling up, perhaps your attention span is short circuiting. No need to worry—the editors of BookPage have just the ticket in the form of five quick but stunning reads.
Julie Otsuka is a master of the short novel, and her National Book Award finalist, The Buddha in the Attic, is an epic saga written with brevity. In just 144 pages, Otsuka captures the lives of a group of Japanese women who immigrate to America, meet their husbands (many of whom lied about their ages and occupations), find work as farmers and maids, navigate the racist and classist minefields set by their white employers, raise children and scratch out a living, only to disappear suddenly as the United States enters World War II. The story is relayed by a first-person plural narrator who encompasses dozens of experiences, and it unfolds in a series of snapshots that coalesce into an astonishing mosaic of Japanese American life at the beginning of the 20th century. You can sense the mountain of research that Otsuka distilled into each beautiful sentence. It’s innovative, surprising and deeply moving.
—Christy, Associate Editor
The Body in Question
A courtroom drama that spotlights the jurors’ sequestration instead of the case itself, Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question enraptured me from the start. The protagonist, a middle-aged photographer whose life is consumed by caring for her much older husband, views the jury’s three-week isolation as a respite from assisting him. Her liberation leads to an affair with another juror that, though initially secret, begins to bleed into their surroundings with far-reaching consequences. At 192 pages, The Body in Question keeps readers engaged with fast-paced developments and characters who are eccentric in their ordinariness. Ciment’s sparse writing enhances the mundanity of sequestration, even when a case is as monumental as this one. Though the subject matter is complex, the narrative progresses without judgment, in the same way a jury must consider only the facts laid before them before reaching a verdict.
—Jessie, Editorial Intern
In Waves
A comic book moves more quickly than other types of literature, so even though AJ Dungo’s graphic memoir is actually quite long, the total time readers spend with the book isn’t. In Waves is powerful, as Dungo blends moments from surfing history with memories of falling in love with and then losing his partner to cancer. The sections on their time together will absolutely wreck you, but as those dark waters ebb and flow, the story of surfing offers levity, revealing the sport’s legacy as a refuge for Hawaiians. An especially helpful dose of hope comes from the friendship between surf legends Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake: “Duke represented the blissful nature of surfing. Tom personified the idea that surfing could provide comfort to those who felt broken.” In Waves engages with both the depths of Dungo’s grief and the safe haven of surfing, offering a quick dip that will leave readers a bit battered by the waves.
—Cat, Deputy Editor
A Spindle Splintered
We are currently living through an absolute gold rush of sci-fi and fantasy novellas, and among all those tiny universes, Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered contains a multiverse. It’s a Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and “Sleeping Beauty” mashup that’s just as fun as it sounds and way smarter than it needs to be. It follows Zinnia Gray, a young woman with a rare condition that will cause her to die before her 22nd birthday. During her “Sleeping Beauty”-themed 21st birthday party, Zinnia jokingly pricks her finger on a spindle and ends up in a fairy-tale world, complete with a princess on the verge of succumbing to her own curse. You can sense Harrow’s glee on every single page, especially when she drops references and jokes tailor-made for a specific type of Tumblr-using, fandom-obsessed, very online reader. But this novella is as poignant as it is pop-culture obsessed, spinning a tale of sisterhood that defies the bleakness of every reality.
Have you ever gone on a walk with a friend in nature and ended up in a highly personal or philosophical conversation? That’s sort of what reading Becky Chambers’ novella is like. It’s a thoughtful fable that effortlessly incorporates profound questions—such as, why does human life need a purpose?—into what is essentially a road-trip story about a monk and a robot. The novella’s first half is so charming and soothing that by the second half, when Chambers’ protagonists are forging paths through the literal and metaphorical weeds, you’ll find yourself hanging on their every word. It all works because Chambers never loses the trees for the forest. In one moment, her characters will be discussing whether death is necessary to give life meaning, and in the next, they’ll be discussing the point of onions. Imaginative and comforting, A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a sheer delight.
—Stephanie, Associate Editor
Keep it short and sweet with these five succinct books.
“I never intended to write a story with a cake in it,” says Charmaine Wilkerson, former broadcast journalist and, with Black Cake, first-time novelist. “It just sort of walked into the story.”
And what a remarkable story it is. Wilkerson’s exquisitely written novel is a globe-trotting, multigenerational family saga set in the Caribbean, California, London, Scotland and Rome. Its rich plot—which includes a suspected murder—unfolds at an enthralling pace.
The novel begins with a short, enigmatic prologue set in 1965, then jumps ahead to 2018, when an attorney summons Byron Bennett and his estranged sister, Benny, to listen to a lengthy recording made by their late mother, Eleanor, who divulges startling secrets about her life. “Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before,” she says.
“I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.”
When Benny was growing up, her mother taught her to make the special titular black cake, saying, “This is island food. This is your heritage.” Wilkerson, who grew up in Jamaica and New York and now lives in Rome, explains during a video call that the Caribbean fruitcake known as black cake has long been a family favorite, a descendant of “the good old-fashioned English plum pudding . . . transformed, over time, by tropical ingredients.”
Long ago, Wilkerson’s mother mailed her a copy of her recipe, filled with comments and instructions. Later, after Wilkerson’s mother died, a younger relative asked her for a copy. “I don’t think I’d looked at it for years,” Wilkerson recalls, “but I knew exactly where to find it. I’ve moved a number of times in my life. I am not the neatest person in the world, but I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.”
Don’t expect to find the recipe within the pages of this novel, however. Wilkerson didn’t want readers to presume that this is simply a culinary tale. “It’s about the idea that there’s the story you tell about your life, about your family history, about your culture. And then there are the stories that are not told, or concealed, or not fully revealed,” she says. “The cake symbolizes the history of this family, in which the children, who are now grown, really don’t know the half of what their parents went through. Their journey of discovery is going to actually change the way in which they see not only their parents, their family history, but their own relationships.”
Warm, engaging and thoughtful, Wilkerson speaks precisely and with a hint of a lilt in her voice, a remnant from her childhood in Jamaica. Although she repeatedly states that she’s a private person, the handful of memories that she shares are reminiscent of her prose—sensory-filled, memorable and layered with meaning. She recalls her first taste of sugar cane during a school field trip, when the bus broke down next to a sugar cane farm and someone chopped up pieces for the children to taste. She also offers a tantalizing clue to how she ended up living in Rome: “Most people who end up moving to Italy and staying there move for two reasons: It’s either art history, or it’s a love story. You can guess which one.”
Prior to writing this novel, Wilkerson spent several years working in short fiction—notably, flash fiction. The crafting of Black Cake first began when she wrote a short scene about two teenage girls swimming in Caribbean waters in the 1960s. “They were driven by this visceral ambition and connection with nature and this determination to swim, despite the fact that they were afraid,” she says. Next, she wrote some seemingly unrelated scenes set in contemporary times. “At a certain point,” she says, “I realized they were all the same story. And that’s when I knew I had a novel, you know—that I wasn’t just all over the place. I was circling an idea.”
Like a shark, perhaps?
Wilkerson laughs, saying, “That’s me, a shark. I don’t always manage to get a bite of food, but I did this time.”
She certainly has. Black Cake is slated to become a Hulu series with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and creator Marissa Jo Cerar (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) at the helm—not too shabby for someone who has long dreamed of telling stories. “I’ve always dabbled and written and read,” Wilkerson says, “but the act of writing regularly and making sure that you don’t lose the thread when you have all these different voices is something that takes consistent work. I came to that fairly recently.”
“That’s me, a shark. I don’t always manage to get a bite of food, but I did this time.”
While Wilkerson’s mother gifted her with her prized recipe, her father’s work as a textile artist helped her zero in on her writerly goal. She remembers loving the smell of the dyes in his studio, and admired how he “was able to take art and turn it into a discipline.” After his death in 2013, she took one of his flannel shirts (which she still wears regularly) and finally began to write fiction. “I realized I had to stop thinking that I was being frivolous and recognize that it was work. So, I made some changes in my life.”
As a child, Wilkerson watched her father swim in the ocean toward the horizon until he disappeared, and similar imagery figures prominently in Black Cake. (Byron is a renowned oceanographer whose mother taught him to surf, and who encourages young people to “catch the wave and ride with it.”) “I think that’s what we do in life,” Wilkerson says. “We try to make a plan, but then life happens, and we try to use everything we’ve brought with us.”
Undoubtedly, she has ridden her own wave like a pro. “This is what I have wanted to do for a long time,” she says.
Photo of Charmaine Wilkerson by Rochelle Cheever
Rooted in memories of her family, Charmaine Wilkerson's debut novel explores an island of mysteries and a cake full of surprises.
It’s vacation week in Blackpool for Ruth Singleton and her family in 1959. Consumerism is on the rise, while the British textile industry is in its death throes; seaside resort towns like Blackpool will be devastated when the end comes. Ruth’s husband Jack starts his holiday with several secrets: he’s been offered jobs by both his union and the mill where he works. (“Jack is a fervent believer in cotton.”) And he’s received a surprising letter from Crete, where he spent time early in World War II.
Teenage daughter Helen feels thwarted by her restrictive mother at every turn, while seven-year-old Beth, who is recovering from a long illness, is babied, swaddled in heavy clothing and still made to take naps by Ruth. Believing the child is not long for this world, Ruth frustrates Beth’s attempts to complete the various tasks in her I-Spy at the Seaside magazine. Every chapter begins with one of the magazine’s challenges, which grow subtly more sinister in tone as the plot progresses.
All of Sallie Day’s characters ring true. Though he has his flaws, Jack is an honorable man. Helen’s efforts to shake free of her mother’s control are thoroughly convincing, and Beth, who has horrifying memories of the hospital and her surgery and who can “see the disgust in her mother’s eyes and feel the revulsion in her touch” over her scars, is heartbreaking and valiant. There are well-drawn secondary characters too. But it is Ruth who dominates the story. She is a demon cleaner who believes Jack will be faithful because she’s a good housewife. The world is beginning to change—feminism is in its early stages—and Ruth is determined to fight for her corner. “Ruth doesn’t see herself as an individual. How could she be when she’s bringing up two daughters? If she’s doing it properly there isn’t time to be an individual—when she’s not the children’s mum, she’s Jack’s wife. What decent mother has time to be an individual?” There’s something admirable about Ruth, although nothing very likeable. The Palace of Strange Girls is a striking first novel.
It’s vacation week in Blackpool for Ruth Singleton and her family in 1959. Consumerism is on the rise, while the British textile industry is in its death throes; seaside resort towns like Blackpool will be devastated when the end comes. Ruth’s husband Jack starts his…
2022 brings exciting releases from longtime favorites Jennifer Egan, Julie Otsuka, Mohsin Hamid and Kate Quinn, plus follow-ups from Namwali Serpell and Linda Holmes, and a slew of adult novels from stars of young people’s literature: Jason Reynolds, Nina LaCour and Kelly Barnhill.
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson Ballantine | February 1
Did someone say “Oprah”? Debut novelist Charmaine Wilkerson’s decades-spanning family drama will make its way to Hulu as a limited series, to be written and executive produced by Marissa Jo Cerar, creator of “Women of the Movement,” who has teamed up with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment. But before we’re completely submerged in media buzz, the novel itself stands out among upcoming family sagas, as it takes two estranged siblings from the Caribbean to London to California as they follow their mother’s final request for them to reconnect, discover their family’s secrets and, after all is said and done, eat their mother’s famous black cake.
What the Fireflies Knew by Kai Harris Tiny Reparations | February 1
The first fiction title from Phoebe Robinson’s publishing imprint, Tiny Reparations Books, is the debut novel from Kai Harris, which is told from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl over the course of a seminal summer spent with her sister and estranged grandfather. We’re feeling strong uplifting vibes from Harris’ artist statement: “I want my words to be a safe space, a retreat, a giant bowl of comfort food (with ice cream on top). I want my words to be truth and light.” You can read an excerpt from Harris’ novel in Kweli Journal, in a special issue on Black girlhood that was guest edited by Nicole Dennis-Benn.
Nobody’s Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong Grand Central | February 8
The acclaimed poet (Negotiations) and BookPage contributor (!) turns to fiction with her first novel, a triptych that follows the lives of three Black women with albinism, each navigating romance, autonomy, grief and their own sense of power. We’re feeling the emotional lyricism of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, set within a Southern milieu.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka Knopf | February 22
Julie Otsuka writes compact, ferocious little novels that land with a wallop: Her first, When the Emperor Was Divine, won the 2003 Asian American Literary Award and the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and her second, the internationally bestselling The Buddha in the Attic, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award and won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her third novel, which also clocks in at fewer than 200 pages, is her first in over a decade. It follows a passionate group of recreational swimmers after a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool, in particular one woman whose diminishing memory is exacerbated by the loss of her daily laps. By the time her estranged daughter returns home, the woman has been swept away into memories of childhood and days spent in a Japanese American internment camp.
The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith Ballantine | March 1
Readers of children’s books and YA know and love bestselling author Jennifer E. Smith (The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight), and now everyone else will know her, too, because she’s making her adult fiction debut in March. The Unsinkable Greta James is about an indie guitarist who, after the death of her mother and an onstage breakdown, joins her father on what was supposed to be his wedding anniversary cruise in Alaska. Goodness knows we love emotional tales set at sea, and it’s also pretty cute that Smith’s novel is being published by Ballantine, where she worked as an editor once upon a time.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler Putnam | March 8
There is truly no way to predict what kind of book Karen Joy Fowler will write next. Her previous novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves(2013), which won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2014 California Book Award for Fiction and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, was about a middle-class family raising a chimp. So naturally her next novel is a historical saga centered on the theatrical Booth family—as in John Wilkes Booth.
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo Viking | March 8
NoViolet Bulawayo made quite a splash as a first-time novelist a decade ago: In 2012, she was one of the National Book Award’s 5 Under 35 honorees, and her 2013 debut novel, We Need New Names, won multiple awards and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Her long-awaited follow-up is unlike anything else on this list, voiced by a chorus of animals who live in an unnamed African country and who must contend with the unexpected death of their leader, Old Horse. If this sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is: Bulawayo was inspired by the Zimbabwean coup and resultant fall of the nation’s president of nearly four decades in 2017, which led to online discourse and hashtags drawing a connection between the events and George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm.
The Great Passion by James Runcie Bloomsbury | March 15
The TV series “Grantchester,” based on James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers mysteries, is, I think it’s fair to presume, universally beloved. (It’s about a vicar who moonlights as a sleuth in 1950s Cambridge; if you don’t love it, you just haven’t read/watched it yet.) Along with penning his acclaimed, bestselling fiction, Runcie is also a documentary filmmaker, and his film resume includes a 1997 TV documentary about Johann Sebastian Bach, created for the BBC series “Great Composers.” In 2016, Runcie wrote a radio play, The Great Passion, about Bach’s writing of the St. Matthew Passion, and now we’ll get to enjoy Runcie’s creation in novel form, which follows the life of Bach from 1720 on, as well as the story of a 13-year-old boy who becomes a soloist for the great composer.
French Braid by Anne Tyler Knopf | March 22
More and more writers are setting their novels—or parts of their novels—in the “pandemic present,” and though we’re not surprised, we are pretty wary. So much about living through the COVID-19 pandemic can’t be fully understood yet, but we trust Anne Tyler to join Zadie Smith, Louise Erdrich and a handful of others in their incisive looks at our present challenges. The latest from Tyler, whose novel Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, follows a Baltimore family from the 1950s to the present, returning her many fans to the sweeping style of one of her best loved works, A Spool of Blue Thread.
The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn William Morrow | March 29
We’re big fans of Kate Quinn over here, but the synopsis of her latest historical novel is on a whole other level: It’s a World War II novel . . . based on a true story . . . about a Russian librarian . . . who becomes the deadliest female sniper in history. She’s called Lady Death! It’s also worth noting that this is Quinn’s first hardcover release from William Morrow, a clear sign of reaching that special level of publishing gold. Go Kate!
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan Scribner | April 5
This one’s another jaw-dropper: a “sibling novel” to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Good Squad. Coming to readers more than a decade after Goon Squad, The Candy House is the story of a brilliant man and his unique creation called “Own Your Unconscious,” which is technology that allows you to access all your memories—and share your memories with others. We’re intrigued, especially by the enigmatic (you might even say downright confusing) publishing materials’ explanation for the link between the two books: “If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music’s more disjunctive approach. . . . With an emphasis on gaming, portals and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.” Sounds weird! We’re in.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel Knopf | April 5
After the imaginative brilliance of both Station Eleven (recently adapted into a series on HBO) and The Glass Hotel (also in development for TV series), we’re willing to trust Emily St. John Mandel implicitly, which perhaps goes against our code as critics, but oh well. The St.-J-M literary universe, which binds together all of her novels, expands with Sea of Tranquility, an epic tale spanning from 1912 Vancouver Island to a moon colony 200 years in the future. Plus, the version of Sea of Tranquility distributed to independent bookstores will include a special chapter, which is a cool bonus for readers dedicated to patronizing their local bookstores.
True Biz by Sara Nović Random House | April 5
Sara Nović follows up her award-winning first novel, Girl at War, with a tale set within a residential school for the deaf. Its title is a phrase from American Sign Language that means “really, seriously, real-talk,” and as Nović is herself a member of the Deaf community and an instructor of Deaf studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, we’re expecting just that: real talk. Plus, there are already plans for True Biz to become a TV adaptation, produced by and starring deaf actor Millicent Simmonds, whom you may know from John Krasinski’s 2018 horror film, A Quiet Place. Nović will also be an executive producer on the show, and the studio has expressed further commitment to hiring Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to fill many of the creative and leadership roles.
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart Grove | April 5
With Shuggie Bain, Scottish American author Douglas Stuart became the sixth first-time novelist and second Scottish writer to win the prize since it was founded 50 years ago. Naturally, we’re bringing some very high hopes to his second novel, Young Mungo. It’s a story of star-crossed lovers: two young working-class men, one Protestant, the other Catholic, living amid the violent gangs on a Glaswegian estate. In a secluded pigeon dovecote, they find a private world to explore their love, but the threat of discovery looms large.
Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez Berkley | April 12
Take My Hand is poised to be a big breakout for Dolen Perkins-Valdez, though her list of achievements is already quite long. She’s the bestselling author of Wench and Balm, a PEN/Faulkner fellow, a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and winner of the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the ALA. This is her first novel since 2015, and it was inspired by a true event: the 1973 Relf v. Weinberger case, in which three underage Black sisters were sterilized without their consent, and a social worker’s whistleblowing blew the lid off the nationwide scandal. This novel fictionalizes those events through the story of a nurse in Alabama, and for readers of historical fiction, it’s one to watch for sure.
Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance by John Waters FSG | May 3
The very first novel from legendary filmmaker John Waters (Mr. Know-It-All) is a “perverted feel-bad romance” starring a clever con woman who steals suitcases at airports. Other important John Waters news (because we don’t have any further information about the book) is that he recently dedicated namesake bathrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art and appeared on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” plus there are murmurings about a new film project and an upcoming art exhibit. We love an irreverent, prolific genius!
Trust by Hernan Diaz Riverhead | May 3
Hernan Diaz’s debut novel, In the Distance, really put him on the map, earning him a finalist spot for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2018. Published by Coffee House Press in 2017, it was an exceptional entry in the recent list of great novels reimagining the narrative of the American West, garnering comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges’ work. Diaz’s follow-up, Trust, is an imminently intriguing story-within-a-story centering on a 1938 novel titled Bonds, about the immense fortune cultivated by a Wall Street tycoon and his aristocrat wife. Comparisons to Amor Towles are already swirling, so keep your eyes peeled.
Vigil Harbor by Julia Glass Pantheon | May 3
In her seventh novel, the 2002 National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes takes us 10 years into the future, where locals in a small coastal town are doing their best amid an increasingly terrifying world of escalating storms and domestic terrorist attacks. Then two outsiders come to Vigil Harbor, one of whom is a woman determined to solve the disappearance of a long-lost lover. Plus, there’s a secret involving a selkie! That’s a lot to unpack, so we’re looking forward to seeing Julia Glass’ navigation of it all.
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill Doubleday | May 3
2022 will be a big year for Newbery winner Kelly Barnhill, who in March returns with her first book for young readers since The Girl Who Drank the Moon (read about it in our list of most anticipated children’s books), and then in May delivers her first novel for adult readers, When Women Were Dragons. During the Mass Dragoning of 1955, hundreds of thousands of women, scattered all around the world, spontaneously transformed into dragons. At the story’s center is a girl who wants to understand why.
The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker Mariner | May 17
Sarai Walker’s debut novel, Dietland, was one of our Best Books of 2015, and with her second novel (finally!), she moves into historical fiction with a tale inspired by a tourist attraction near San Francisco: the Winchester Mystery House, a spooky mansion built by a turn-of-the-century American firearms heiress. The Cherry Robbers is a subversive gothic novel that follows the story of Iris Chapel, who attempts to escape her family’s multigenerational curse, in which each daughter is fated to die on her wedding night.
You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead Knopf | May 17
Hot on the heels of Maggie Shipstead’s finest novel and one of our Best Books of 2021, Great Circle, comes her first book of short stories! If Great Circle displayed her tremendous ability in crafting a tale of immense breadth, a story collection will swing the other way, allowing fans to revel in her talent for brevity.
Either/Or by Elif Batuman Penguin Press | May 24
Fans of The Idiot, New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman’s absurdist take on the campus novel, have waited five years to find out what’s next for her brainy but awkward heroine, Selin. In Either/Or, Selin returns for her sophomore year at Harvard determined to continue her search for self-knowledge (and possibly her pursuit of Ivan, her freshman crush).
The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz Celadon | May 31
Is Jean Hanff Korelitz on the cusp of becoming the next Liane Moriarty? It certainly feels like she’s close, consistently proving that she can hook readers with her well-balanced literary thrillers and family dramas. You Should Have Known (2014) was adapted as HBO’s 2020 series “The Undoing.” And her 2021 novel, The Plot, was one of those books we kept hearing about from other authors; clearly, Korelitz touched on something deeply true about the writing and publishing processes. Her next novel centers on privileged triplets who, on the cusp of leaving for college, discover a shocking family secret: There was a leftover embryo after their parents’ in vitro fertilization, and now they have a fourth sibling, just born.
Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour Flatiron | May 31
YA fiction superstar Nina LaCour is making her first foray into the realm of adult fiction, and the world has stopped on its axis while we wait for the quiet power of Yerba Buena. It’s the story of two young women, shouldering more than their share of trauma and pain, who find their way to each other, so I suppose we could all just start crying and hugging now.
Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrota Scribner | June 7
Tom Perrotta (Mrs. Fletcher) is the defining satirist of suburban politics, and if you haven’t read his 1998 novel, Election, you at least are likely familiar with the movie adaptation, starring Reese Witherspoon as the ambitious lead, Tracy Flick. To many, Tracy was a villain; to others, a feminist hero. Well, Tracy Flick is back, and she’s got her sights set on a promotion to high school principal. Perrotta will surely line her path with darkly comic hurdles and razor-sharp critique of the school culture—and larger world—around her.
Flying Solo by Linda Holmes Ballantine | June 14
“Pop Culture Happy Hour” host Linda Holmes’ feel-good, utterly enjoyable bestselling debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over, earned an easy spot on our list of the Best Romance of 2019. We’re thrilled to learn about the upcoming publication of Holmes’ second novel, Flying Solo, which sounds like pure joy—and pure gold. It’s about a woman named Laurie who has recently canceled her wedding and returned to her Maine hometown. She’s in charge of her adventurous aunt’s estate that has a mysterious wooden duck among its treasures, and then the duck is stolen, so of course Laurie must discover her great-aunt’s secrets. Sure, the premise isn’t breaking any new ground, but that doesn’t matter, because Holmes knows how to deliver exactly what you want in the most satisfying way.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks Viking | June 14
The acclaimed and beloved author of five previous novels (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning March) returns with a historical novel inspired by the true story of the thoroughbred sire horse named Lexington. Spanning from Civil War-era Kentucky to present-day Washington, D.C., the novel explores hidden legacies, the bonds between human and horse and the secrets held within art, the last of which fans will recall was also an element of Brooks’ novel People of the Book. Plus, we love a title that gets right to the point.
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog Penguin Press | June 14
Werner Herzog’s range as a filmmaker is massive, though I’ll always think of him as the documentarian who captured the saddest penguin moment of all time. (View Encounters at the End of the World at your heart’s own peril.) Considering the intensity of his storytelling, Herzog’s first novel inspires both excitement and trepidation. It’s based on the true story of a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda who defended a small island in the Philippines for almost 30 years after the end of World War II, and whom Herzog met in 1997 during a trip to Tokyo. The novel is described as “part documentary, part poem and part dream.”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin Knopf | July 12
The bestselling author of one of all our all-time favorite books-about-bookstores, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (whose film adaptation will star Kunal Nayyar, Lucy Hale and Christina Hendricks), returns! Gabrielle Zevin’s latest novel sounds gently provocative and wonderfully redemptive: Spanning 30 years, it follows two childhood friends who reunite in adulthood to create a video game “where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again.”
Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra Hogarth | July 19
World War II meets Hollywood in the third novel from Anthony Marra, whose first two novels, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (which won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was long-listed for the National Book Award) and The Tsar of Love and Techno, earned both critical success and book club popularity. Of course, everyone loves an escapist Hollywood story, but it’s all the better when those bright lights shine on something deep and true, so we’re looking forward to Marra’s epic novel of reinvention, politics and the lengths to which we’ll all go to survive.
Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah Algonquin | July 26
Here’s another debut we’re especially excited about: With solid Tommy Orange vibes, the first novel from Oscar Hokeah is a coming-of-age tale told from a chorus of multigenerational voices. Ever Geimausaddle is at the story’s heart, and as his family navigates the ups and (many) downs of life, they also have strong opinions about how young Ever’s future will look. Hokeah is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother’s side and of Latinx heritage from his father’s, and he works with Indian Child Welfare in his hometown of Tahlequah, OK. Plus, his writing creds are no joke: He has a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), with a minor in Indigenous Liberal Studies. He’s also a winner of the Taos Summer Writers Conference’s Native Writer Award. One to watch, for sure.
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford Atria | August 2
Throughout Jamie Ford’s previous three novels, including his acclaimed debut, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, readers have been transported to historical Seattle to discover the stories of Japanese and Chinese Americans grappling with buried memories, the fragile bonds within families and found families, and the choices we make to survive. Ford’s fourth novel tangles with many of these same themes through the story of Dorothy Moy, former poet laureate of Washington, who reconnects with her female ancestry as she searches for a way to help her daughter. It’s based on the story of a real person—Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to set foot in America in 1832—but with a speculative twist.
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid Riverhead | August 2
Booker Prize finalist and bestselling novelist Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is one of those spectacular novels that we urgently recommend to everyone, so news of his first book since that 2017 novel literally made me gasp so hard that I ran out of air. Like Exit West, The Last White Man has a dollop of the fantastical, as it’s set in a world where white-skinned people wake up with darker skin. Hamid is one of those writers who can package really complicated, difficult issues and make them reach anyone, even someone who maybe isn’t ready to hear about them. Also, it must be said that he has a great reading voice, so we hope that he’ll read this one on audio, as well.
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah Riverhead | August 23
When Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the first Black laureate since Toni Morrison in 1993, and the first Black writer from Africa to receive the award since Wole Soyinka (of Nigeria) in 1986. After Gurnah’s win was announced, it was incredibly hard for readers to acquire copies of his books—partly because of supply chain issues, and partly because his books had never found an audience in the U.S., and so were often out of print or just plain hard to find. Last fall, Riverhead announced plans to publish three titles from Gurnah: the novel he published in the U.K. in 2020, Afterlives, and then two out-of-print novels, By the Sea and Desertion. Coming in August, Afterlives promises to be brutal, sweeping, intimate and necessary, a multigenerational saga unfolding amid the colonization of East Africa.
Haven by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown | August 23
We’re living for this historical kick from bestselling Irish novelist Emma Donoghue! In her latest novel, she combines the spirituality of The Wonder (currently being developed as a film starring Florence Pugh) with the deep historical research of her timely 2020 novel, The Pull of the Stars (about the 1918 flu pandemic), for a tale about early Christianity. In seventh-century Ireland, a priest and two young monks journey down the river Shannon in search of a place to found a monastery, but they soon drift out to the Atlantic Ocean and arrive at a rugged island inhabited by huge flocks of birds, known today as Skellig Michael.
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell Hogarth | August 30
Namwali Serpell’s debut novel, the expansive yet intricate genre-bending saga The Old Drift, received piles of love—as it should’ve. Along with being one of our Best Books of 2019, it also earned a number of literary prizes, including an L.A. Times Award. Naturally our expectations are high for The Furrows, which is out to break even more literary rules. It’s set in 1990s Baltimore and will explore “different kinds of Black identity, as well as different modes of Black speech.”
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro Knopf | Fall 2022
Dani Shapiro is best known for her memoirs, such as Inheritance and Devotion, but she’s also a fabulous novelist and story writer. Signal Fires, her first work of fiction in more than a decade, is about a catastrophic event that utterly transforms the lives of two families over several generations. The fateful day occurs in 1985, when a car crash results in the death of a young woman. As Shapiro explains in a release from her publisher, the epiphanies within her own family history, as explored in Inheritance, led to the writing of this novel: “There’s a haunting question at the center of the book,” Shapiro says. “Is the past ever really past, and what is the price of denying our own history? In Signal Fires, each character is haunted, their lives shaped by what they can’t allow themselves to know or feel.”
The Mouthless God and Jesus Number Two by Jason Reynolds Scribner | TBD
NAACP Image Award winner, Newbery Honor recipient and former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds (Look Both Ways) is one of the greatest writers of children’s and YA literature, and we’re beyond excited that he’ll bring his gifts to a new readership, hopefully sometime this year. His first novel for adult readers is set within a carnival town that’s home to a boy named Mm who was born without a mouth. Says Reynolds, “I’m honored to tell the story of this boy, Mm, who has lived in my imagination for years, and has also been in the back row of every school auditorium I’ve visited.”
A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ Knopf | TBD
Nigerian author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s award-winning first novel, Stay With Me, came out in 2017, and people continue to ask us about it nearly five years later. It’s so wonderful when a truly great book has such staying power! Her second novel is rumored to come out this year, and it’s about “two families in Nigeria at opposite ends of the economic spectrum, whose lives collide when political turmoil erupts in their city.” In a statement from the publisher, Adébáyọ̀ said the book was conceived “after a detour compelled me to realize what remained invisible to me in a town that I had long called home. While it has taken a few years to write a novel I hope illuminates the tangled longings of its characters, I’m excited to share it with readers.”
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange Knopf | TBD
Tommy Orange’s 2018 debut, There There, was a groundbreaking work of fiction that well deserved all the love it received. Along with being one our Best Books of that year, it won the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction 2018 and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2019, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His follow-up to that smash hit is rumored to hit shelves sometime this year.
To the afterlife created in Alice Walker’s latest novel, say amen and believe. This place is a spiritual last stop for 200 miles before the Highway to Heaven, complete with redemption’s tools: clear hindsight, unadulterated instinct, forgiveness, and the chance to make amends for eternal peace. And it is from this afterlife that much of By the Light of My Father’s Smile is narrated, with the living and the dead haunting each other in vignettes of lust, transcendent love, self-determination, pain, and elemental human nature. Susannah and June are the daughters of African-American anthropologists who want to observe the secluded and nearly extinct Mundo Indian tribe of Mexico. An agnostic, their father agrees to be a minister and convert the unbelievers in exchange for church funding, moving his family to the tribe’s remote community in the Sierra Madres. By day he preaches Christian stories that he doubts in order to get closer to tribal secrets, while at night he defrocks and indulges his voracious libido with his haughty wife. Nature and the seductiveness of the tribe’s beliefs soon affect 14 year-old June (also named Mad Dog because of her precocious rebelliousness), who falls for the handsome Manuelito. One day, she comes home beaming from her newfound sexual experiences, only to get beaten by her father, who has discovered that she is sleeping with the younger boy. Susannah, the docile and loving daughter, witnesses the beating and is pressurized to choose between her sister’s and her father’s love, while June, reeling from his violence, eventually rejects both him and men in general. June becomes an obese, lesbian academic who searches continually for trust and an authentic sexual identity. Susannah marries a Greek, and later divorces, becoming promiscuous in search of her authentic sexual self. Their dead father haunts both of their explorations, narrating moments from their adult lives with regret and insight into his wrongdoings. But it is not until June and her father meet in this halfway house afterlife that he has the real chance and character to make amends, once he discovers that it is to our knees that we must sometimes be driven, before we can recognize, witness, or welcome our own light. Walker’s vision of death is a forgiving, restorative state, one that has the power to make both the living and the dead and entire tribes and communities whole again. Entwined with the novel’s episodes from life and death are weighty ideas about nature, women’s sensuality, and patriarchal controls over both, presented in a rich, unadorned language as powerful as muscles rippling under brown skin.
Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.
To the afterlife created in Alice Walker's latest novel, say amen and believe. This place is a spiritual last stop for 200 miles before the Highway to Heaven, complete with redemption's tools: clear hindsight, unadulterated instinct, forgiveness, and the chance to make amends for eternal…
An adroit blend of melodrama and literary fiction, Louis Begley’s Mistler’s Exit recycles character types, themes, and settings from his previous novel, About Schmidt. Again, our New York narrator is a wealthy, privileged, supposedly talented old man of acid tongue and heart. Again, too, his long marriage has been a facade hiding an unforgiven sexual betrayal. Still again, a quirky younger woman seizes upon him as her sexual ideal and leaps into his bed, eager and inventive.
But widower Schmidt ran south to make a new life at sunset. Mistler, whose wife is still alive, escapes alone to Venice to settle his head in light of the warning that liver cancer may kill him within months.
Not surprisingly, Mistler’s Exit draws upon Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but there are strong contrasts. Unlike Mann’s wasting hero, Mistler is self-consciously virile. He schemes to sell his advertising agency for a huge sum of money, only slightly concerned that concealing his illness might be sharp practice. He wreaks revenge upon the former Harvard roommate and business partner who once had an affair with Mrs. Mistler. He indulges in various sexual postures and recalls others.
Through Mistler’s recollections and chance meetings with old acquaintances, Begley sums up the man’s emotional life. It is not an especially pretty sight. He apparently came close to alienating his only child, a son who is an academic in California. He is obsessed by his late father’s affair with a luminous if romanticized woman in Paris. He admits his role in his wife’s discontent but moons after a blowsy old bag who rejected him in college.
Between such reflections and his snits about hotel service, Mistler and his adoring young woman eat in his favorite Venetian restaurants and visit his favorite Renaissance paintings. He ponders God’s cruelties while trying to recreate the most precious moments of his past.
Unfortunately, precious is sometimes accurate in a disabling sense. When a smug Mistler amazes his lover with philosophical speculations that would be at home in any college dorm, the reader wonders whether or not Begley entirely realizes the extent of his protagonist’s self-satisfaction and self-delusion. Similarly, the novel’s Manhattan social stratosphere is preposterous. Begley treats as contemporary the world of midtown eating clubs, but he surely knows that exclusivity has long since bowed to the need to swell the rosters to pay overhead, and that raspberries are not always reliable in winter. More importantly, his portrayal of elitist power is several decades out of date.
Reviewers often praise Begley’s precise, measured, well-tailored writing, and Mistler’s Exit is certainly a work of assurance. Is the coldness of the dying Mistler the consequence of his never having slept with the one woman he loved, the paragon who was his father’s mistress? Perhaps. But that is a kind of sentimentality difficult to square with Mistler’s betrayals of old friends and proprietary impulses toward women. Charles Flowers is the author of A Science Odyssey (William Morrow).
An adroit blend of melodrama and literary fiction, Louis Begley's Mistler's Exit recycles character types, themes, and settings from his previous novel, About Schmidt. Again, our New York narrator is a wealthy, privileged, supposedly talented old man of acid tongue and heart. Again, too, his…
Even 14 years after his dazzling debut, Jay McInerney is still the whipping boy for the literary brat pack of the mid 1980s, if only because he’s the only one who continues to publish. Older critics have always seemed preoccupied with pointing out the flaws of his novels. They jeered Bright Lights, Big City because it was brazenly written in second person. They trashed the satiric Story of My Life. They said Brightness Falls was an ambitious failure, and that The Last of the Savages was trying too hard to do too much. And in advance, the criticism from old-guard literati will be that McInerney’s latest, Model Behavior, will be derided for just being too too too stylish, too irreverent, too meta-, too indulgent. With all due respect to my elders, these critics are dead wrong, and Model Behavior continues McInerney’s project to track the arc of a generation reared on television and cynically soured by the excesses of a media culture fixated on glamour and capital. While Brightness Falls and The Last of the Savages don’t have the outright humor of Bright Lights, Big City or Story of My Life, McInerney has returned to comic form in Model Behavior. The gloriously outrageous novel chronicles the lifestyles of the not-so-rich and semi-famous, the characters whose alternating self-love and self-loathing give the New York literary/magazine scene a singular dysfunction. Connor McKnight is having a truly awful time: his model/girlfriend appears to have left him with no explanation, his moody writer friend Jeremy is worried about an upcoming review in the Times, his sister doesn’t eat, his gruff parents are coming for Thanksgiving, and his contract writing fluffy celebrity profiles will most likely not be renewed. Such a set-up allows McInerney to return to the themes and stylistics of his earlier work. He overlays the vodka-doused story of Connor with cheeky pokes at popular culture, using his sardonic pen to skewer the self-anointed beautiful people, revenge-seeking book reviewers, and brash magazine editors. McInerney is sly, mischievous, and sometimes downright nasty as he writes his most trenchant social critique since Story of My Life. It is obvious, though, that he’s having fun, writing short sections that contain everything from e-mail messages to book reviews. These coiled vignettes push the novel’s comedic envelope, but they also demonstrate McInerney’s unfailing desire to play innovatively with structure and form. Despite the numerous digs at anything and everything slick and postmodern, McInerney is a truly human writer, lending his flailing characters a distinctive pathos not normally found in such self-reflexive novels. The bad reviews will come, no doubt. Just don’t believe the hype. Model Behavior helps further cement McInerney’s place among the finest writers working today. Mark Luce is a writer who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
Even 14 years after his dazzling debut, Jay McInerney is still the whipping boy for the literary brat pack of the mid 1980s, if only because he's the only one who continues to publish. Older critics have always seemed preoccupied with pointing out the flaws…
Set in 1893 London, Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands follows an appealing cast of characters as they try to unravel a mystery involving missing working-class women and a menacing group called the Spiriters. Inspector Cutter of Scotland Yard takes on the case, and his investigative efforts are shared by journalist Octavia Hillingdon, who’s on the hunt for a good story, and university student Gideon Bliss, who’s romantically linked to one of the missing girls. Readers will enjoy losing themselves in O’Donnell’s atmospheric adventure, which explores themes of feminism, class and Victorian mores.
Clare Beams’ The Illness Lesson takes place in 1800s Massachusetts, where Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, open a progressive girls’ school after his dream of establishing a utopian community fails to bear fruit. Trouble brews when Eliza, a smart, inquisitive student, starts experiencing seizures and episodes of mania. After Caroline and other students experience similar symptoms, Samuel enlists the help of a doctor who proposes an unusual treatment. Beams’ ominous historical thriller is rich in period detail and brimming with tension, and its questions concerning gender and female agency will inspire great reading group discussions.
A Black teacher encounters ghosts both spiritual and emotional on a visit to her hometown in LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes. Mira is in town for her best friend’s wedding, which is taking place at the Woodsman, a renovated tobacco plantation that’s supposedly haunted by the ghosts of the enslaved people who were forced to work there. Mira hopes to see her old friend, Jesse, who was arrested for murder years ago. But events take a terrifying twist, and Mira is forced to come to terms with the past. Reading groups will savor McQueen’s well-crafted suspense and enjoy digging into topics like historical accountability and the weight of memory.
The House of Whispers by Laura Purcell tells the story of a 19th-century maid named Hester who goes to work for Louise Pinecroft, a mute older woman who owns Morvoren House, a lonely estate in Cornwall. Staff members at the house harbor strange beliefs related to fairies, superstitions that are somehow connected to Louise’s late father, a physician whose questionable work with patients took place in caves thought to be haunted. Beyond its eerie aura and propulsive plot, The House of Whispers boasts many rich talking points, such as Purcell’s use of Cornish legends and her ability to create—and sustain—a mood of omnipresent foreboding.
These atmospheric thrillers—quintessentially gothic, decidedly unsettling—are perfect winter book club picks.
Not that it’s a bad thing for your first novel to be a bestseller.
Still, being the author of that front-runner of a book and movie, The Horse Whisperer, just naturally boosts the pressure of expectations on your next one.
Nicholas Evans courts this danger by repeating the general theme of an unorthodox love affair between a man and a woman wholly united in trying to rescue innocent creatures. In the end, he finesses the problem: these people are themselves wounded souls and the animals they work so hard to save are not a gentle domesticated species gone wrong but those most legendarily dreaded of all beasts — wolves.
What’s more, Evans refuses to resort to meat tenderizing.
Actually, I don’t mind moderate anthropomorphism, on the theory that human beings can make no judgments about anything except on the basis of human experience. Nevertheless, Evans gets highest marks for The Loop in allowing wolves to be wolves. With nature’s tooth and claw on full display, you’ll find no feral Lassies here. However, in our time, we can afford to love wolves, and readers of The Loop will find themselves once more following the call of the wild, however it might bemuse our ancestors.
The humans aren’t idealized either. Helen Ross, the 29-year-old wolf biologist called in to investigate Montana ranchers’ allegations of wolf depredation, obsesses about the desertion of her lover. When she meets 17-year-old Luke, the stuttering son of area bigshot Buck Calder, the two are attracted by their common love and respect for all of nature’s wildlife — not to mention their united detestation for the bullying, womanizing behavior of Luke’s father.
Some readers (I’m one) may have their doubts about such a love affair, but these people are not one-dimensional characters. Evans is psychologically sound in his depiction of Luke’s stuttering problem, Buck’s marriage gone bad, and the various motivations of government officials and their rancher opponents.
As for The Loop, well, there is the Loop and then there is the loop. The first refers to what basically amounts to the eternal food chain of nature, "Where once there had been life, now was death. And out of death, thus, was life sustained." The second is a sadistic instrument devised by an old wolf-hunter as a substitute for poison.
Evans likes to play little tricks on readers, often leaving them with an impression that is corrected in the next chapter, usually for the better. His writing is expert, full of nuance and tossed-off imagery ("There was no moon and every far-flung star in the firmament was pitching for the job").
It will come as no surprise if this intelligent, provocative novel wins its own spot on the bestseller list. About both people and animals, Nicholas Evans is an alpha storyteller.
Not that it's a bad thing for your first novel to be a bestseller.
Still, being the author of that front-runner of a book and movie, The Horse Whisperer, just naturally boosts the pressure of expectations on your next one.
Before you begin Daniel Woodrell’s sizzling Tomato Red, strap yourself into your chair. The story starts with a firing-off-the-line, hell-bent-for-leather sentence that leaves readers breathless, laughing, and begging for more speed. None of this is new for Woodrell, whose five previous novels have garnered wild praise from authors as diverse as James Ellroy and E. Annie Proulx. And there’s a reason: Woodrell relies on corset-tight prose, too-real realism, and one hell of an ear for dialogue as he writes about tough guys and tougher broads, thuggish rednecks and determined drunks who live in gut bucket poor locales. With Tomato Red Woodrell returns to the fictional hamlet of West Table, Missouri, also the locale of his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Here he explores the bonds between Sammy Barlach, an ex-con trying hard to make it as a square john, and the Merridews: Bev, the prostitute/mom; Jason, the stylish son who may be gay; and the indomitable Jamalee, the feisty redhead who wants to use anyone and anything to get out of Venus Holler, West Table’s name for the wrong side of the tracks. Woodrell wanders this territory with complete mastery, capturing the sidelong glances that develop into whispers, the low-rent corruption of small town politics and the downright hostility aimed at Sammy and the Merridews by the authorities and the more upstanding residents of West Table. On the surface, these character are Ozark riffraff, but Woodrell refuses to either romanticize or patronize them. They live fast, drink hard, and skate along the gray area of the law, but they endure the hardships and slights, clutching their dreams when all signs point to nightmare. This amalgam of fatalism and optimism is cut with a delicate balance of violence, humor, and heart. Like Faulkner’s early writing about the Snopes family, Woodrell infuses his story with family and place. The family doesn’t sit around a dinner table and talk about their day, and West Table is not a very attractive place, but it is where Sammy and the Merridews are, so they try to make the most of it. Normally poor white folks are addressed in mocking, derisive and flat tones, but not here. Woodrell paints them fully, transcending simplistic stereotypes to craft characters whose foibles and complexities ring with compassion, fortitude, and authenticity. Noir master Raymond Chandler once said that good prose should be lean, racy and vivid. Like all of Woodrell’s fiction, Tomato Red has these in spades. So sit on the porch, pour some Maker’s Mark over ice, buckle up and let Woodrell’s singular voice carry you right into a glorious Ozark sunset. Mark Luce is a writer in Lawrence, Kansas.
Before you begin Daniel Woodrell's sizzling Tomato Red, strap yourself into your chair. The story starts with a firing-off-the-line, hell-bent-for-leather sentence that leaves readers breathless, laughing, and begging for more speed. None of this is new for Woodrell, whose five previous novels have garnered wild…
In the past, John Edgar Wideman has often taken an oddly intellectual, emotionally distant approach to some of his controversial novels examining the crucial challenges confronting the African American community. That has changed in his recent work. Wideman, in his last four novels, has firmly established himself as one of the foremost voices in black literature with a naturalistic, no-frills view of urban life. This welcome trend is continued in his latest book, Two Cities.
Wideman, a former Rhodes scholar and two-time recipient of the PEN-Faulkner Award, opens his new novel with a fictional remembrance of the much maligned John Africa and the MOVE community tragedy which rocked the city of Philadelphia a few years ago. However, this is not just a tale of history, memory, reclamation and racial analysis. Two Cities, despite its deceptive wrapper of protest and politics, hides a well-conceived romantic core of a pair of reluctant lovers brought together by circumstances and a legacy of old yellowed photographs.
The complex love story of Kassima, a young widow recovering from the loss of her husband and child to street crime, and Robert Jones, an intense but gentle man, reaffirms Wideman’s stellar ability to create characters who matter to the reader. Kassima is consumed by pain, grief, and a deadening sense of isolation that stifle her efforts to participate in the world around her. Robert, not swayed by her resistance, wishes to break through her defenses so she can understand that life does not cease after a harsh misfortune. His quest to win her heart gets an able assist from Mr. Mallory, Kassima’s eccentric tenant, who continually wanders throughout several black communities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia taking photographs and collecting valuable memories. The old man, with his bad leg and box camera, bestows a gift of wisdom upon Kassima borne of time and experience when she sorts out his belongings after his death.
The friendship of Kassima and Mr. Mallory rates as one of Wideman’s finest fictional achievements as he lets the characters tell their bitter truths in their own voices. Although the ailing elder asks the shy woman to burn his photos after his passing, she breaks that promise, choosing instead to keep them as a means of self-appraisal and renewal. Wideman’s use of a folksy, plain-speaking narrative approach draws the readers deep into the soul of his characters and the book. Sometimes it feels as if they are sitting in the room with us, chatting without any reserve or pretense.
An example of what can be done with familiar yet universal themes by a writer willing to surrender to the dictate of story, drama, and candor is shown in this brief, revealing excerpt taken from the heart of the novel: You’re a man. It’s different for you. Love’s different. A man can love. I mean some men have it in them to love. A woman just better not expect it. Better not ever take it for granted, because the ones can love come few and far between. Some men have it in them, but it’s way down the bottom. Usually youall lost track of it. Or hiding it Ôcause you’re scared. Usually youall don’t know how to find it even when you try real hard. Till it’s too late. But sometimes it’s down there. More than any of his recent novels, Wideman has found a fictional balance in Two Cities that will constantly thrill and astonish his readers. Criticized for being overdependent on style and experimentation, he has returned to the basics, to the fundamentals of good writing with impressive results. This is indeed Wideman at his storytelling best. Robert Fleming is a writer in New York City.
In the past, John Edgar Wideman has often taken an oddly intellectual, emotionally distant approach to some of his controversial novels examining the crucial challenges confronting the African American community. That has changed in his recent work. Wideman, in his last four novels, has firmly…
Think about the way you feel after a delicious meal. Although you know there are dishes to wash and leftovers to put away and perhaps a long drive home or work in the morning, as you look around the table at the faces of the people you love, and for that one moment, your spirit feels full, safe, happy, loving and loved.
If that’s how you’d like to feel after your next read, the BookPage editors suggest one of these 2021 releases.
The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is a vast undertaking, spanning centuries and incorporating multiple storylines. Amid this tangle of events, each character must face what feels like the end of their world, and it feels like a gift to the reader that Doerr’s response to each of these characters, even those who commit potentially unforgivable deeds, is mercy and hope and compassion. We have seen dark times before, and we’ll see them again—and maybe, if we trust in each other, it will all work out in the end.
If possible, this mystery is even better than the Osman’s charmer of a debut, The Thursday Murder Club. It’s a load of fun and an ode to how important the power of friendship is throughout one’s life but especially during the final stretch.
As BookPage reviewer Kelly Blewett put it, “These Precious Days reinforces what many longtime fans like best about Ann Patchett: her levelheaded appraisal of what is good in the world.” Indeed, this essay collection overflows with goodness: good writing, good stories, good people. (One essay is literally about a priest whose work with unhoused people in his community caused Patchett to label him a “living saint.”) This is a companionable book, full of warmhearted reflections on how to love what we love—books, dogs, family—a little better.
Today’s young readers are so lucky to have a writer like Renée Watson creating books for them, and Love Is a Revolution is a perfect example of why. This YA novel is a master class in characterization, from its grounded yet swoony central couple, to the family and friends who surround them, to Harlem itself, which Watson evokes vividly. Her respect for and belief in the power of young people comes through on every page, but what sets Watson apart are her words. Watson is a poet who writes novels, and that means every few pages, you will encounter a sentence so beautifully phrased that your eyes will brim with tears and your heart will be quietly filled.
A sweet and lighthearted rom-com that will appeal to readers who prefer stories that focus more on character than conflict, Very Sincerely Yours centers on the epistolary relationship between Teddy, a young woman who feels somewhat adrift in life, and Everett, the beloved host of a local children’s show. Both characters are lovingly and carefully drawn by Winfrey, who also creates a cozy, friendship-filled environment around her central pair.
On the one hand, reading Goodbye, Again feels like sharing a warm cup of tea with author and illustrator Jonny Sun. On the other hand, your pal Jonny might be a little depressed, or at least deeply introspective, and so your time together, while enriching, might make you cry. They’re good tears though—an overflow of feeling understood, of relief after hearing from someone else who feels as lonely, burnt out and hopeful as you do. Each short essay touches on an aspect of modern life that makes true connection, with yourself and others, harder. Together, they form a kaleidoscopic declaration that it’s worth the effort to nurture yourself and see what grows.
In her author’s note, Mary Lee Donovan writes that this deceptively simple picture book is her “love song to our shared humanity.” In multilingual rhyming couplets, A Hundred Thousand Welcomes offers a benediction for the sacredness of gathering together. Lines such as “The door is wide open— / come in from the storm. / We’ll shelter in peace, / break bread where it’s warm” have a plainspoken power, and Lian Cho’s friendly, colorful illustrations capture the joy of greetings and the happiness to be found around a shared table.
During the last months of Congressman John Lewis’ life, he put pen to paper to collect some parting thoughts after 80 years of remarkable activism and service. Carry On captures Lewis’ memories of growing up as the son of a sharecropper in Alabama, shopping for comic books at the flea market, joining the Freedom Riders movement and more. Interspersed are snippets of advice for the next generation who will carry on the justice work Lewis and others began during the civil rights movement. After his death in 2020, Lewis’ last book reads as an even more precious labor of love, laced through with the congressman’s trademark wisdom, patience, determination and hope.
The type of book that the word heartwarming was made for, Chambers’ sci-fi novella follows a monk who is literally devoted to small comforts as they brew tea, explore the wild edges of the world and try to offer solace and warmth wherever they can. There are some heady philosophical themes at play, but just enough to engage and not overwhelm your brain as you happily sink into this small, perfectly wrought gem of a story.
“Two lost souls find each other and the way forward” is a story I will read as if it’s the first time every time. In Dayna Lorentz’ middle grade novel Of a Feather, the lost souls are a young girl named Reenie who’s been sent to live with an aunt she’s never met and a 6-month-old owl named Rufus who has also found himself alone and unprotected in the wide, wild world. Watching these two slowly drop their defenses and open themselves up to healing, love and hope has tremendous appeal and power: It reminds us that no one is ever truly so lost that they cannot be found.
—Stephanie Appell, Associate Editor
If you’d like your next read to leave you feeling uplifted and filled with love, we recommend picking up one of these books.
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.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
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.
