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FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Death of the Author

A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
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FictionShort Stories

Five Tuesdays in Winter

Review by Alden Mudge

Lily King has been rightly praised for two terrific recent novels, Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. But who knew she was such an exceptional short story writer? Maybe a few readers of Ploughshares or O Magazine, where a couple of the stories gathered in Five Tuesdays in Winter first appeared. But about half of these stories are new. All of them flash with brilliance.

King’s stories are mostly situated in New England in the 1980s, and her characters are often in adolescence, revealed at their moments of emerging into adult life and consciousness. Three tales are about would-be writers whose experiences shape them: a teen girl just beginning to consider writing, a woman in her early 20s trying to figure out her life, and, in the collection’s exhilaratingly surreal final story, “The Man at the Door,” a married mother being confronted about her audacity in thinking she has the right to write.

Lily King shares the New England memories that inspired one of the stories in her first collection.

King places these lynchpin stories at the beginning, middle and end of the collection. But four other stories are from the perspectives of young men. This includes the astonishing “When in Dordogne,” in which a boy’s wealthy and neglectful parents leave their house in the care of two college students for the summer. “As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too,” the son observes sardonically. A disaster in the making, right? As it turns out, no. The college boys are funny, sensitive and caring. The story is a soulful exploration of male sensitivity and love.

The very satisfying title story is about the fairly rigid owner of a used bookstore, his teenage daughter and the bookstore’s sole employee, who agrees to teach Spanish to her boss’s daughter. Over five Tuesdays, a tentative and then quite wonderful relationship develops among the three of them.

King’s observations are both sharp and generous. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection worth dipping into again and again.

King's sharp and generous observations make for a story collection worth dipping into again and again.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

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…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Blue-Skinned Gods

Review by Leslie Hinson

In the town of Tamil Nadu, India, Kalki isn’t the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, but few people know that. After all, his skin is blue, just like Vishnu, and his family has built an entire ashram around him. People come from all over to be healed, and Kalki often succeeds.

Growing up in the role of a god comes with unique responsibilities. Kalki isn’t supposed to play with the other kids in his village, and his cousin Lakshman is his only friend. When a very sick little girl comes to the ashram, Kalki heals her, but he also notices his father giving her a white tablet to swallow. Then Kalki is asked to conjure horses, and again he succeeds—but also notices unfamiliar tire indentations leading up to the ashram. The most troublesome piece of evidence against his divinity is that there are some people Kalki can’t heal.

The fabric around the ruse begins to disintegrate, but it takes a long time. Kalki lives an incredibly sheltered existence. Occasional travelers who visit the ashram provide his only link to the outside world, and these interactions are years apart. His father is controlling and leaves very little room for new ideas.

When Kalki is 22, he leaves Tamil Nadu for a world tour with his father. In New York, he reconnects with Lakshman and goes on a real-world adventure, during which he begins to understand the scope of what people will choose to believe. He plunges into the city’s underground rock music scene, which is as different as possible from life in the ashram. Kalki also learns his own backstory, an origin tale that is so fantastical and yet so plausible that it deserves a moment of appreciation.

As Kalki is forced to reckon with the lies that form the foundation of his life, SJ Sindu’s second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, pursues questions of sexuality, social hierarchy, family secrets, toxic masculinity and religious abuse. Sindu doesn’t quite nail the emotional payoff at the novel’s close, but she still delivers an exciting journey that lovingly explores the nature of chosen families.

Kalki isn’t actually the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, but few people know that.
FictionFamily Drama

A Little Hope

Review by Melissa Brown

“Life, this up and down life” is on full, multifaceted display in Ethan Joella’s debut novel. A Little Hope begins with a family facing one of life’s greatest tests: a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer within white blood cells. Greg Tyler and his wife, Freddie, are caught up in worry and fear. How do they tell their daughter, Addie, that Greg is sick? What will the next looming doctor’s appointment reveal? The calendar year may be sliding into fall and then winter, but it is just the beginning of a long, unknown road that neither of them wants to take. And they are not the only ones questioning and wrestling. They are so very far from alone.

The small, fictional town of Wharton, Connecticut, is a well-connected community of characters who feel like people you know or people you could be: mothers and sons, wives and husbands, lovers and friends, parents and those soon to be. The cast of characters—Freddie and Greg, Ginger, Luke, Iris, Alex and Kay, Suzette, Damon, Ahmed, Darcy—are honest as they move through the vagaries of love, illness, infidelity, death or disappointment as best they can, searching for a foothold in the midst of all that is happening. Their unceasing thoughts and fickle feelings all strike a familiar and fully human chord.

Joella’s poetic side shines in his moving but never maudlin novel. He captures loneliness, sadness, happiness and anger in all their fleeting hues. He has created a truly intertwined world around the Tylers, portraying their neighbors truthfully yet kindly. From beginning to end, A Little Hope finds the grace of the everyday and homes in on the surprises (both heavy and light) that each day can hold.

Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Joella’s world, it is blessedly more of the latter.

Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Ethan Joella’s debut novel, it is blessedly more of the latter.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In a farmhouse in rural New York, retired high-school teacher Billy Bryan tries to come to grips with the death of his wife of 37 years. Bryan’s daughter Cassy, now a grown woman, returns home to attend to the cleanup and distribution of her mother’s effects. In a forgotten corner of the attic, Cassy comes across an old scrapbook loaded with pictures of her father as a young man, a baseball player for a minor league team in pre-revolution Cuba. Leafing through the scrapbook, she is taken with the quality of the photographs, and she writes repeatedly to Cuba, eager to locate more of the photographer’s work. Amazingly, a letter arrives from Cuba: In a neat script, the photographer’s daughter, Evangelina Fonseca, told a fantastic tale . . . For Cassy, nothing will do but an impromptu visit to Cuba, and she insists that her father come along as tour guide. Initially not too wild about the idea, Billy allows himself to be drawn into his daughter’s enthusiasm, albeit guardedly. On the plane to Cuba, Cassy prods her father, You said you would tell me more about Cuba . . . So Billy Bryan, onetime starting catcher for the Habana Lions, lover of mercurial photographer Malena Fonseca, and friend of a brash young Castro, begins his story.

Deftly cutting between past and present, Tim Wendel spins Billy Bryan’s tale of love and baseball in Cuba before the revolution. Drawing upon the old sports legend that Fidel Castro had once been recruited by American baseball scouts to be a major league pitcher, Wendel paints a convincing picture of the young revolutionary, caught on the horns of a dilemma between superstardom and patriotism. Equally compelling is the portrayal of the aging Bryan facing the changes that the years have wrought both in Cuba and within himself.

Castro’s Curveball is a rich, finely crafted novel of revolution, romance, exotic travel, and (of course) beisbol.

Bruce Tierney lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

In a farmhouse in rural New York, retired high-school teacher Billy Bryan tries to come to grips with the death of his wife of 37 years. Bryan's daughter Cassy, now a grown woman, returns home to attend to the cleanup and distribution of her mother's…

FictionWorld Fiction

Rushdie’s wildly inventive new novel

Review by bookpagedev

In his wildly inventive new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie offers up a modern tale set in the international firmament of pop music. This is the writer who infuriated a sizable portion of the Muslim world with The Satanic Verses, so don’t expect a trite cautionary tale of decadent glamour and eventual comeuppance a la Jackie Collins. Rushdie has more than drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll on his mind. Much more. His lengthy, allusion-packed narrative is, in fact, a riff on the Orpheus myth, in which said hero must descend into the underworld to reclaim his love.

The novel begins at nearly the end of the story, as legendary singer Vina Apsara vanishes from the face of the earth during an earthquake. With Vina when she is presumably swallowed up is a photographer named Rai, who becomes the narrator of the book. Rai (whose real name, Umeed Merchant, can be translated as "seller of hope") has known Vina since they were both children in Bombay. As her constant friend and sometimes lover, he becomes the somewhat unwilling Boswell for her and for Ormus Cama, a giant of musical talent and the love of Vina’s life.

The story these three share begins in India, and ricochets around the globe — London, New York, Mexico, Southeast Asia. Rushdie cleverly constructs a parallel, though hardly less turbulent, history for the last 60 years, with the British in Vietnam along with the Americans, Kennedy narrowly escaping assassination, and Watergate just the fictional plot of a pulp thriller. Against this hyperbolic backdrop, Ormus and Vina are separated and reunited more than once, and both rise to the pinnacle of stardom. But their star-crossed love, mythic and transcendent, never seems to survive on solid ground. Rushdie’s breathless, often funny prose is laced with real and imagined song lyrics, and informed by countless references to Eastern and Western gods, both secular and divine. Indeed, throughout The Ground Beneath Her Feet, there is a startling juxtaposition of opposites: English v. Indian cultures, the terrestrial v. the unearthly, the often ridiculous world of celebrity v. the intrinsic human need for a spiritual grounding. It’s as if, for Rushdie, the earth can’t bear the weight of such contradiction and must, in the end, give way to the inevitable cataclysm, devouring the folly of our human endeavors.

In his wildly inventive new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie offers up a modern tale set in the international firmament of pop music. This is the writer who infuriated a sizable portion of the Muslim world with The Satanic Verses, so don't…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Sentence

Review by Matthew Jackson

Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich understands the sense of significance, whether subliminal or overt, that we can glean from stories—and what this offers our daily lives. The Sentence, Erdrich’s latest novel, unfolds over the course of one tumultuous year, and its persistent search for meaning reveals astonishing, sublime depths.

Tookie is an ex-convict turned bookseller working in a Minneapolis bookstore after years of reading for pure survival. Her voracious appetite for words has made her very good at what she does, but on All Souls’ Day in 2019, her world is thrown into disarray by an unlikely challenger. A customer who recently died has made her way back to the store, bringing along some revelations in a mysterious handwritten book, and she won’t leave until Tookie can figure out why she returned in the first place.

Though this often comically unpredictable ghost story forms the spine of The Sentence, Erdrich also branches out to explore the broader landscape of Minneapolis in 2019 and 2020, from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Yet her narrative never loses its grip. As vast as its scope may be, The Sentence doesn’t feel overstuffed because Erdrich roots it in Tookie’s own longings, beliefs and challenges.

Tookie isn’t just plagued by a literal ghost; she’s also haunted in other ways, and as she searches for the significance of these hauntings, she finds that she’s far from alone in her experience. Erdrich’s prose, layered with unforgettable flourishes of detail—from the mesmeric spinning of a ceiling fan to the quest for the perfect soup—enhances and deepens this growing sense of a larger, collective haunting.

The Sentence is an imaginative, boldly honest exploration of our ever-evolving search for truth in the stories we both consume and create. It’s a staggering addition to Erdrich’s already impressive body of work.

Unfolding over the course of one tumultuous year, Louise Erdrich’s novel searches for meaning and reveals astonishing, sublime depths.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Oh William!

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Readers first fell in love with Lucy Barton in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, a gentle reflection on the titular character’s life and parental influence during an extended hospitalization. In Oh William!, it’s been years since Lucy left her first husband, William. But despite the many affairs he conducted during their marriage and her own affair that prompted her departure, they remain each other’s confidants.

As the novel opens, Lucy has been widowed for a year after the death of her second husband, David. She explores her grief throughout the book, but her devotion to William also demands her attention. As in each of Strout’s novels about Lucy, her narration is nearly a stream of consciousness. The novel’s lack of chapter breaks reinforces its interior nature and invites readers to immerse themselves in Lucy’s ruminations.

As Lucy contemplates her lasting bond with William, she considers their marriage and the ways their relationship has affected their daughters. She also takes the reader through the pair’s misadventures in their later years. It isn’t always clear whether Lucy likes or respects her ex-husband, but her tie to him is unbreakable, her curiosity about him unwavering: “I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.”
Likewise, William turns to Lucy, rather than to his current wife, when his sleep is disrupted by night terrors involving his late mother. And it’s Lucy he seeks when he confronts a secret his mother kept from him.

Pulitzer Prize winner Strout is a master of quiet, reflective stories that are driven more by their characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty to love as Lucy and William set out to explore his family history. At each step, Lucy contemplates her relationships to the people around her. Though she often feels invisible, her ties to William, their daughters and the strangers they encounter remind her that she has a place in the world.

Strout is a master of reflective stories that are driven more by characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty more to love about Lucy and William.
FictionDystopian Fiction

The Perishing

Review by Carole V. Bell

Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving an immortal protagonist.

In Depression-era Los Angeles, a Black girl wakes up naked and alone in a downtown alleyway. She doesn’t know who she is, not even her name. Her body and mind are bruised but not broken, her origins a mystery. She’s placed with a Black foster family, and her foster mother suggests the name Louise, which gets shortened to Lou.

Lou may not remember her previous life, but her intelligence and talent are evident. She goes to high school and becomes a trailblazing journalist at the Los Angeles Times. But her feelings are divided; she vaguely thinks there might be a birth family out there for her, and a face continually haunts her, showing up in her sketches and dreams.

This is just one part of a story that hops between various time periods, including the future. As an immortal being, the woman known as Lou has lived many lives and has seen many things. Her storytelling is peppered with social observations and grim philosophical pronouncements about gender, race and the inhumanity of humankind. “We fight among ourselves in this village of earth,” she says, “wars to maintain elitism and its bounty, wars we should have never been fighting, where both winners and losers are traumatized and not just in war. But in love.”

The 1930s mystery of Lou’s family is a throughline in each era, as are recurrent themes of death and despair. As a new reporter, Lou’s beat is to report on the “tragic deaths of colored people,” and death touches her on a more personal level as well. In 2102, now named Sarah Shipley, the protagonist finds herself on trial. Acting as her own attorney, she pleads not guilty. “He got what he deserved,” she says. “I can defend all my lives. . . . And anyway, no woman kills unless in self-defense. If not in defense of a current wrong, for all the wrongs that came before without justice.”

Deón’s writing is beautiful, with a rat-a-tat quality, like brutal poetry mixed with fierce prose. The noirish plot is sometimes hard to penetrate, but fans of challenging and ambitious speculative fiction should be pleased.

Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving time travel and multiple lives.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! When Cousin Curtis called last month to thank you for the lovely book you sent him, he mentioned that he was throwing a surprise party this month for his wife Wanda. Ah, yes, Wanda the Wife if Curtis is the guy who has it all, it’s probably because Wanda has been the one juggling it. Wanda’s birthday gift needs to remind her that she’s special and appreciated. What birthday gift is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and doesn’t require a sitter when left at home? Why, books, of course! A good story about friendship is always appreciated. Richard Ezra Probert, music teacher and wood/metal craftsman, has chronicled his friendship with Archie Raasch in Archie’s Way (The Lyons Press, $19.95, 1558217045). Amid the tools and planks, Archie and Richard forged a friendship that spanned 15 years. The lessons Richard learned (and subsequently shares with readers), however, will last a lifetime. Makes a wonderful gift for someone who has had or has been a mentor. Wanda remembers the mid-1950s (though she’s reluctant to admit it); every child was taught to fear polio, and the summers just seemed hotter back then. She would love Pat Cunningham Devoto’s first novel, My Last Days as Roy Rogers. Heroine Tab Rutland’s prologue foreshadows that the summer of 1954 was a messenger of great changes to come. Readers, prepare to discover a world where it does, in fact, matter from which side of the Mason-Dixon you come; proprietors are assisted by double-barrel shotguns, and creative accounting wasn’t created during the 1980s. A great novel for those who like to remember, or for those who are visiting post-World War II America for the first time.

You still laugh when Curtis recounts Wanda’s attempts to train that mutt she adopted; housebreaking remains a sore subject for poor Wanda, and a mystery to her canine. To show your support for her efforts, Why We Love Dogs: A Bark and Smile Book (Andrews McMeel, $12.95, 0836269713) makes a wonderful gift. Black-and-white photographs capture the essence of dogs; brief, large text descriptions remind humans of the joys of dog ownership (lest they forget the next time they discover that their potted plants have been mutilated!).

On the brink of a new millennium, teenagers everywhere have opinions about the world that they are inheriting. From Johannesburg to Kiev, Belfast to San Francisco, teens worldwide offer an honest portrayal of the state of things in Hear These Voices: Youth at the Edge of the Millennium (Dutton’s Children’s Books, $22.99, 0525453539). Author Anthony Allison is a photographer and youth counselor who has traveled to various points on the map, talking to at risk children about their experiences and their hopes for the future. Complete with striking black-and-white photographs, Hear These Voices presents gripping stories in a forthright and respectable manner. Perfect for educators, counselors, or anyone else who is concerned about today’s youth. A time management queen like Wanda probably feels like her reign is always in jeopardy. Life Balance, Inc. president Mary LoVerde has written Stop Screaming at the Microwave: How to Connect Your Disconnected Life (Fireside, $12, 0684853973) for seasoned veterans or novices at the keeping up with life game. LoVerde presents a step-by-step approach, taking small steps to the big finish. She identifies plans of action with regard to family, career, social life, and beyond. Readers, beware: after reading about how to keep up, you might find yourselves actually (gasp!) getting ahead!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! When Cousin Curtis called last month to thank you for the lovely book you sent him, he mentioned that he was throwing a surprise party this month for his wife Wanda. Ah, yes, Wanda the Wife if Curtis is the guy who has…

FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

O Beautiful

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Jung Yun’s second novel is a riveting story of a Korean American woman claiming a country that has done its best to reject her.

After decades as a model, Elinor Hanson went back to school and reinvented herself as a journalist. Barely supporting herself with freelance work, she is surprised when one of her graduate school professors offers her a plum assignment: covering North Dakota’s oil boom for a prominent magazine. Elinor, who grew up on a U.S. Air Force base in North Dakota, is curious about the changes this new gold rush has created, so she agrees to travel home.

Elinor barely recognizes the state she left behind. Its small towns burst with new arrivals seeking opportunities, and fracking has all but destroyed the land. But the anxiety expressed by longtime residents is dishearteningly familiar to Elinor, and her encounters with sexism and racism quickly bring back the trauma of life on the air base. Elinor is the daughter of an American airman and a Korean woman who met overseas, and on the base, other wives withheld their friendship from Elinor’s mother, while other husbands were all too willing to flirt.

As Elinor grapples with the difficult assignment, she is drawn into an unsolved missing persons case: a white woman who disappeared while jogging eight years ago. But that story doesn’t allow her to forge fresh investigative paths or distract from the rage she realizes has been simmering since her teens. In fact, the longer Elinor stays in North Dakota, the angrier she becomes, and a meeting with her sister only exacerbates the flood of bad memories. When some of her former classmates reach out about a harassment suit against her professor, she begins to question his motivations in passing on the assignment in the first place.

O Beautiful moves swiftly, with all the force of a finely honed thriller. As Elinor reckons with her past and the ways people have treated her, her mother and her sisters, she begins to examine the anger and love she feels for both her family and country. Open-ended and openhearted, O Beautiful may provide Elinor with more questions than answers, but it also instills in her a newfound determination to claim America as her own

Open-ended and open-hearted, O Beautiful instills a newfound determination in its Korean American heroine to claim America as her own.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

Review by Alice Cary

“The Arctic had a way of reminding you that your life was unimportant, expendable, and easily extinguished,” writes Nathaniel Ian Miller in his stellar first novel. He knows this harsh environment all too well, having lived there as part of the annual Arctic Circle artist and scientist expeditionary program. During his residency, he happened upon a century-old hut where a hermit once lived on an otherwise uninhabited fjord. Although biographical details of the man are sparse, the discovery inspired Miller to write a fictional account of his life. The result, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, seems so authentic in both detail and slightly archaic narrative voice that it’s easy to forget it’s not an actual memoir.

Growing up in Stockholm, Sven Ormson is determined to escape an unhappy life of “menial drudgery.” He dreams of polar exploration and reads not only famous, heroic accounts but also all of the “terminally dull voyage narratives” he can get his hands on. At age 32, he sets out for Spitsbergen, a Norwegian archipelagic isle in the Arctic Circle, where he begins working in a dangerous, soul-sucking mine. Before long, a horrific accident leaves him not only disfigured but also “resolved to spend [his] life alone” as an Arctic trapper. And he’s hardly a gifted trapper.

Thus begins a truly walloping tale of solitude and survival told in visceral detail, a combination of Miller’s wild imagination and his beautifully precise prose. By design, the novel is so full of lengthy descriptions that a certain amount of perseverance is required of the reader. But Sven is an insightful yet comically ironic narrator, and there is often great excitement in his story, including “ice bear” attacks, near starvation, northern lights and the haunting sounds of calving glaciers.

The arctic landscape is mostly barren, but Sven encounters a parade of quirky yet meaningful characters who appear, disappear and sometimes reappear in his life. He also offers a surprising amount of social commentary, touching on corporate greed, the plight of workers, the tragedy and senselessness of war, the rewards of canine-human relationships, the necessity of intellectual pursuits and more.

Although The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is a vastly different book from Peter Heller’s The Guide, these two novels may appeal to the same audience: readers who love exquisite nature writing and crave no-holds-barred, extreme outdoor adventures. Miller goes one step further, however, by imbuing his novel with an unforgettable narrator who asks essential questions of human connection, a remarkable achievement for a novel ostensibly about solitude. What makes a family? What makes a devoted friend? What makes a great life?

Like the arctic landscape itself, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is beautifully stark and unimaginably rich, a book that will long be remembered by its lucky readers.

Like the arctic landscape itself, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is beautifully stark and unimaginably rich, a book that will long be remembered by its lucky readers.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Island of Missing Trees

Review by Freya Sachs

Imagine a fig tree speaking, the unexpected perspective its voice would lend to a war-torn island’s history, full of forbidden teenage love, reunions and cultural divides. Such is Elif Shafak’s intergenerational novel of love, loss and family, The Island of Missing Trees.

The novel moves between 1974 Cyprus—as cities collapse amid war, as neighbors are made enemies depending on whether they are Greek or Turkish, Christian or Muslim—and London in the 2010s. Ada Kazantzakis, teenage daughter of Kostas and his wife, Defne, is fascinated and bothered by the fig tree that her botanist father spends so much time and energy tending. While Ada wonders at her father’s obsession, the tree tells her own story, offering the keys to discover how this family came to England, far from the island that Ada only knows in stories, the place that Kostas still calls home.

The novel shifts easily in time and space, but even more interesting is the way that it functions as a story of environment and species. The fig tree notices birds and bats, other trees and ants; she sees and comments upon politics, war, love and the broad impact of human choices. She sees into the hearts of humans, animals and the earth, and tries to convey the beauty and challenges of doing so.

Shafak’s novel, particularly in the meditative moments when the fig tree speaks, asks readers to see beyond themselves, to consider cultures and conflicts that are not their own, to see how each action ripples.

Elif Shafak’s novel asks readers to see beyond themselves, particularly in the meditative moments when a fig tree speaks.

Trending Fiction

FictionDebut Fiction

Two turtledoves

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

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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.

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FictionSpeculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

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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.

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