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FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Time of the Child

Review by Arlene McKanic

This reviewer has to wonder why an author as brilliant as Niall Williams, whose latest book is the resplendent, suspenseful Time of the Child, isn’t at the top of every reader’s mind. Few contemporary novelists create worlds and characters so amazingly alive and specific. Williams knows every nook and cranny of his Irish town Faha, from its weather, which is so damp that nothing ever dries out completely, to its farms and pubs and how it’s slowly losing ground to the estuary. His characters, even those we see only briefly, are unforgettable. Though the town is full of people, you’ll never mix up one with another. Even Faha’s animal citizens are memorable: Consider Harry, a dog who likes to nap in the middle of the street, making cars drive around him.

Time of the Child is a sequel to Williams’ other masterpiece, This Is Happiness, and is set around Christmas in 1962. Noel Crowe, the protagonist of that book, has moved to America, and our focus is now on the town doctor, Jack Troy, and his daughter Ronnie, who lives with him. In Faha, the doctor is a revered, stoic and necessary presence. He might as well be a granite plinth with a mustache. But within this pillar of rectitude, so many passions roil.

For Jack, like Faha itself, is a dour-seeming being who is full of love. He loves his patients in his brisk and discerning way. He pines for a lost romance, even as he pushes 70. And he loves his daughters, especially Ronnie, whose unmarried state he feels responsible for. When a local boy finds a baby in a churchyard and brings her to the doctor for care, the floodgates in Jack burst. Both he and Ronnie fall in love with the child, and as the unwed Ronnie can’t adopt her, he hatches a scheme so harebrained that it warms your heart even as you think, “Are you serious?” This is where the novel’s suspense comes in, as well as Williams’ genius for making you laugh out loud while he breaks your heart. Anyone who cherishes great writing should want more and more from Williams.

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Bishop’s Villa

Review by Thane Tierney

It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would. 

But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz. 

The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated. 

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A lost New York City tradition

Behind the Book by Daniel M. Lavery

Like most people, I hate moving house. Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there, no matter how cramped the apartment or inconvenient the neighborhood. I never want to have to pack up my things, or unpack my things, or measure the width of a door frame to see if the couch is going to fit through it.

“Of course the couch is going to fit through it,” I say, every time. “The very fact that the couch is here now is evidence that the couch fits through the door.” Nevertheless, on every moving day it transpires that I was somehow wrong, that the couch must have been transported through the door and into the living room by acts of contortion or wizardcraft, or it has gained weight in the interim, because it certainly doesn’t fit through the door now.

“Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there.”

“Leave it, then,” is my only moving strategy. “I don’t want it now.” No matter how attached I might have formerly been to an object, be it my own bed, a box of books, an antique, or half my wardrobe, if it causes me even a minute’s extra work or mental calculation on moving day, all I want to do is get rid of it. Once I am moved into my new place, of course, the old spirits of avarice and acquisitiveness return to me in greater strength. I begin to meditate again on the pleasures of the getting of things. But ownership in all its forms is hateful to me on moving day; there is no possession I treasure more highly than lightness.

I didn’t realize just how good I had it. During my research for Women’s Hotel at the New York Public Library, I came across some old newspaper columns about the local tradition of Moving Day. For hundreds of years, well into the middle of the 20th century, all New York City leases expired at the same time on May 1st, which meant that everybody moving house in a given year did so not only on the same day, but at the same hour, as this column, “May Day,” from the April 30th 1873 New York Times describes:

“When New Yorkers celebrate the day, as they do invariably, it is, if not in sack-cloth and ashes, amid dust and piles of carpets and confused heaps of furniture. . . . The annual spectacle of a whole drove of Gothamites struggling amid pots and pans, and pictures, and rolls of carpet, to break away from the ties of place and friendship just as they are warming in their old nest, to find a new and cold home and cultivate fresh friendships, is not the kind of picture to gaze on with poetic rapture.”

The heyday of the women’s residential hotel was very short-lived; it really only existed in a handful of major cities for a relatively small portion of the population. I knew I was trying to capture a brief phenomenon that never much resembled how most people lived most of the time. Part of the pleasure of writing historical fiction, for me, has to do with attempting to re-create the experience of an extinguished tradition, to capture a kind of urgency that no longer exists. Women’s Hotel takes place over a period of several years in the early-to-mid 1960s, and I knew I wanted to open the action with a small-scale, vestigial remnant of Moving Day at the Biedermeier Hotel.

“I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats.”

There’s a temporal lag at the Biedermeier, although not from any active attachment to the past. It’s a few years out of step, more by default than by accident, although there’s plenty of the accidental there too. The height of popularity for women’s hotels came during the 1920s and ’30s; the Biedermeier is the sort of place women are more likely to land in without meaning to than to aim for directly. Most of the hotel residents have no plans for the future, only anxieties, and half of them aren’t even able to join in with the present. They are formally unattached people; everyone who lives at the Biedermeier, lives alone.

Few of them have ever been married, but none of them is married at the time of their residence. Even fewer of them have children, but those who do either cannot or will not live with them. They are not allowed to cook in their rooms (although at least one of them secretly owns a hot plate for drinking midnight cups of cocoa in bed), and the hotel has recently stopped providing breakfast. I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats, and so Women’s Hotel begins with “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.”

It’s always the same way with me, whenever I have to move. Come to think of it, it’s the same way with me before I’ve had breakfast. I can never see past it and into the afternoon.

Read our starred review of Women’s Hotel.

Daniel M. Lavery author photo by Eustache Boch.

Daniel M. Lavery reveals the research that went into his delightful slice-of-life historical novel, Women’s Hotel, and discusses the universally torturous experience of moving house.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

4 can’t-miss book club picks

Feature by Julie Hale

In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the summer. Set in 1962, the novel is narrated by Ruthie’s brother, Joe, and by Norma, a girl whose remote, unapproachable parents seem to be harboring secrets. Spanning five tumultuous decades, the novel brings these parallel narratives to a surprising climax. Peters’ sensitive depiction of family members learning to live with loss is unforgettable. Themes of loyalty, memory and guilt will spark lively conversation among readers.

Inspired by historical events, Tan Twan Eng’s atmospheric novel The House of Doors is about writer W. Somerset Maugham, who, with waning health and a declining reputation, goes to Penang in 1921 in search of material for a new book. He finds what he’s looking for after reconnecting with his friend Robert Hamlyn. Robert’s wife, Lesley, shares information with Maugham about her murky past, including her links to Chinese revolutionaries and a murder—perfect fodder for a novel. Writing with wonderful detail, Eng delivers a smart, suspenseful narrative that sheds fresh light on a fascinating era in history.

Rio and Gibraltar, a successful Black couple, leave behind the world of Boston academia to build a new life in Gabriel Bump’s electrifying book The New Naturals. With the backing of a rich patron, they start an experimental community founded on tolerance and trust. The community—based in a bunker-like space under a hill—draws a variety of wayward souls, but friction soon arises, and the couple’s dream of an ideal society is threatened. Grief, social justice and the nature of community are a few of the novel’s engaging discussion topics.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s genius reenvisioning of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, has been hailed as one of the best books of the century. Demon, the narrator of the novel, lives in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, with his mother, a drug addict. He’s creative and smart, but faces enormous challenges when his mother’s death lands him in foster care. Kingsolver portrays Demon’s difficult coming-of-age with vividness and immediacy. Featuring a sprawling plot and expansive cast of characters, the novel is an epic for our times and a modern book club classic.

Choose one of these buzzed-about novels for your book club and get set for a great meeting.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Our Evenings

Review by Alden Mudge

Alan Hollinghurst’s exquisitely fashioned seventh novel arrives in the form of the memoir of David Win, a gay, mixed-race, somewhat successful actor in British experimental theater. The novel opens with a prologue in which David acknowledges the death of Mark Hadlow, “an ethical businessman, a major philanthropist, married to one woman for seventy years.” Mark and his wife Cara changed David’s life by awarding him a scholarship to attend an elite English boarding school. Interested and caring but not close, they remain connected to David until their deaths.

So too, in a different way, does their son, Giles, who is David’s teenage tormentor when we encounter him in the novel’s first chapter. David has been invited on school break to the Hadlows’ farm to meet his benefactors. David does everything possible to avoid Giles, who as a boy and, later, as an adult, is filled with resentment, right-wing political ambitions, vanity and bluster. By the time of his father’s death, Giles is the leading government minister heading the Brexit effort to rid Britain of immigrants.

At its most graspable, Our Evenings is about the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one. Hollinghurst explores this divide through the consciousness of an extremely bright and observant brown-skinned English boy who is attracted to other boys, born to an unknown Burmese father and an English dressmaker from a middling town in the countryside.

Of greater interest is that which is harder to describe. Hollinghurst has an astonishing ability to convey the ineffable; seemingly minor exchanges among boys at school or classmates at Oxford, for example, burst with revelation. He unveils the subtle gestures of class distinction and cultural power as they modulate over the course of roughly 70 years. Hollinghurst is not half Burmese, but his artistry is such that we feel the same visceral shock as David himself when strangers other him. The novel also continues Hollinghurst’s profound examination of gay love amid homophobia. The author manages to do all this while keeping his story at human scale, without grandiosity or abstraction. In short, Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment.

Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment: an intricate vision of the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one from Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

This Motherless Land

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Nikki May’s second novel, This Motherless Land, opens in Nigeria in the late 1970s after 9-year-old Funke Oyenuga’s comfortable world is shattered when her mother and younger brother are killed in a car accident. Her father folds under pressure from his extended Nigerian family and sends Funke to live with her maternal grandparents at a remote estate in rural England. Isolated and miserable, a victim of her aunt Margot’s racism and condescension, Funke strives to fit in, even dropping her Nigerian name and going by Kate. But the aggressions pile on: She’s sent to the village school while her cousins Liv and Dominic are enrolled in private education, and sleeps in the attic even though there is an extra bedroom. Funke’s grandparents, though grieving, are no match for Margot’s selfish sulking. Only adventurous, spunky Liv offers Funke sympathetic companionship. But as the girls grow up, societal pressures and concerns about money, school and status get in the way of their friendship. After another traumatic accident, Funke is packed up and sent back to Nigeria to live with the father who so cruelly sent her away. 

In alternating chapters, This Motherless Land follows Funke and Liv into adulthood. Liv falls into a pattern of dead-end jobs, drugs and casual sex, before getting sober and accepting steady work at a day care center, while Funke pursues a medical degree in Lagos and restarts her relationship with her father and his new family. Though rocky at first, her return to Nigeria reconnects Funke to the spirit of her mother as she realizes just how many people her mother’s life has impacted for the better. 

With clever references to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, another novel that explores class, bad parenting and a beloved ancestral home, This Motherless Land reaches back to canonical English literature while presenting something new and fresh. Though there are a few hard-to-believe plot twists, especially toward the end, May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos, as well as the outsider’s view of English culture she presents, make this an engaging and thought-provoking family-centered novel about race and reinvention. 

Nikki May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos make This Motherless Land an engaging and thought-provoking novel about race and reinvention.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Shy Creatures

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Clare Chambers’ Shy Creatures begins in 1964 in the London suburb of Croydon, where Helen Hansford works as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital called Westbury Park. Though her mother discontentedly calls her place of work “a mental asylum,” Helen—unmarried and in her 30s—has found not only her professional calling, but also the love of her life in the very clever, handsome and married Dr. Gil Rudden. Their careful affair has been going on for years when a curious patient named William Tapping enters their lives.

Found at the age of 37—mute, half naked, and with a beard that looked like it was never trimmed—William had been living as a recluse with his aging aunt Louisa in their home in Croydon. When the police came to check on a reported commotion at the house, they discovered the two, and, for a lack of other options, called Westbury Park. Gil is eager to take on this once-in-a-lifetime case to help demonstrate a humane approach to psychiatric treatment. Helen, by Gil’s side in this mission, is thrilled to help after finding sketches that show William to be a terrific artist who loves to draw, especially birds and buildings.

Here, the story morphs into two tales running in opposite directions by means of alternating chapters. One follows Helen, now completely engulfed in the cause of restoring William’s life, as her above-and-beyond efforts to help him affect her own life and her relationship with Gil. In the other storyline, Chambers dives into William’s past, ultimately revealing a courageous secret sacrifice.

Chambers’ inspiration for Shy Creatures comes from a true story about a recluse treated at a mental hospital in 1952. Her reimagining is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.

Clare Chambers’ historical novel Shy Creatures is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Women’s Hotel

Review by Sydney Hankin

Somewhere in between a modern apartment building and a Hilton or Holiday Inn lies the Biedermeier, an unassuming hotel in the heart of 1960s New York City and the subject of Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel. The building’s hallways bustle with women both old and young, all hailing from different hometowns, with different backgrounds and big-city dreams. As residents come and go and life plans take detours, Women’s Hotel masterfully captures the joys of community, neighborliness and circumstantial friendships that this bygone mode of living made possible.

Katherine, a Biedermeier floor manager and Mrs. Mossler’s second-in-command, might ride the elevator up to retrieve pinking shears from Carol or down to negotiate favors with Kitty. She might walk over to Lucianne’s to gossip, visit J.D. to stare curiously at her stray cat or accompany Pauline to a meeting of political activists. In Women’s Hotel, these events aren’t linked by an ongoing mystery or conflict. Instead, each resident’s experience is blended stylistically in a way that imitates the inseparability of real lives. The intentionally minimal plot allows Lavery to focus on intimately exploring this unique moment in time; in his own words, the novel should “be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century.” In extracting beauty from ordinary stories easily overlooked, he’s created a memorable novel.

Lavery, a bestselling author, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast, writes in a style reminiscent of contemporary wordsmiths Nathan Hill and James McBride. Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, the Biedermeier is drawn so vividly that it nearly becomes a character in itself. The women’s hotel stands tall as a deeply loved, grounding constant for its countless tenants, tenants who will always tease, entertain, support, exasperate and—above all—protect each other to no end.

Read more: Daniel M. Lavery on the universally torturous experience of moving house.

Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.
NonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYASocial ScienceMysteryMemoirLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaEssays

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
November 4, 2024

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
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Book jacket image for Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Fire Exit

Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against ...
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Book jacket image for Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Wandering Stars

This remarkable novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, picking up with his unforgettable characters Orvil ...
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Book jacket image for Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

Sheine Lende

Sheine Lende focuses on a girl who must use her experience finding missing persons with ghost dogs to track down her own mother.
Read more
Book jacket image for Thunder Song by Sasha LaPointe

Thunder Song

Thunder Song is an essay collection full of sensitive meditations and powerful observations from Coast Salish author Sasha LaPointe.
Read more
Book jacket image for Where Wolves Don't Die by Anton Treuer

Where Wolves Don’t Die

In Where Wolves Don’t Die, Anton Treuer delivers an unflinching yet healing story that showcases Ojibwe culture while exploring themes of forgiveness and reconciliation.
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Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
NonfictionFictionHistorical FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsGraphic MemoirsDebut FictionClassics

The best graphic novels and nonfiction of 2024

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
October 8, 2024

The best graphic novels and nonfiction of 2024

Four graphic books make major strides with powerful art and stories, going back to a classic, and venturing deep into the woods.

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FictionHistorical FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsClassics

Big Jim and the White Boy

Review by Emily Koch

Countless readers have picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since it was published in 1885, and it’s commonly listed among the great American novels. Though the book is perennially popular, its author, Mark Twain, has been criticized for relying on racist caricatures when writing about Black Americans, particularly the character Jim, an enslaved Black man who travels with Huckleberry Finn in the book.

Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson offers the other side of the story of this American classic. The graphic novel retelling centers on Jim and his quest to reunite with his family after they have been sold away by Huck’s cruel and volatile father. Aided by the audacious Huck, Jim undertakes an epic journey across the antebellum South and Midwest. Interwoven with the narrative are glimpses of the elderly Jim telling his story to a group of his great-grandchildren in the 1930s, and flashes further forward in time to the 1980s and 2020s as his descendants in turn pass on the tale.

Walker and Anderson have collaborated before, on the Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. Walker’s passion for storytelling shines through his prose, with humor and wisdom thoughtfully sprinkled into a narrative that is also realistic about the horrors of slavery. An author’s note explains the linguistic choices he made to humanize Jim while remaining authentic to the time period.

Anderson’s illustrations are distinctive and his attention to detail is impressive: His characters are recognizable at any age. Vibrant color palettes by Isabell Struble will also help readers easily distinguish between the various timelines. The choice to frame the story as being told by an old and bickering Jim and Huck in the 1930s will make readers feel like part of the enthralled in-person audience, and demonstrates the power of oral storytelling in recording Black history.

This phenomenal graphic novel doesn’t set out to replace The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but to add immeasurably valuable context that has historically been left out. Jim’s story deserves to be told, and as Jim’s great-great-great-granddaughter says, “The story won’t tell itself.”

Big Jim and the White Boy is a phenomenal graphic novel retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, adding immeasurably valuable context and celebrating the power of oral storytelling.
NonfictionGraphic Memoirs

Brittle Joints

Review by Freya Sachs

In Brittle Joints, Maria Sweeney illustrates the complexities of living with chronic pain, trying to find comfort when healing is impossible and as the medical system repeatedly fails her.

As a child, Sweeney started counting her broken bones. It seemed as if they would just happen. After she was diagnosed with Bruck Syndrome—a rare progressive disease—the fragility of her bones and the pain in her joints had an explanation, but no possibility of a cure. So, in beautifully colored, evocative frames that reflect her effort to adapt to her advancing condition, Sweeney takes the reader through parts of her journey as she looks for relief.

For Sweeney, doctor’s appointments are often frustrating: either doctors do not know what to do, or they seem unaware of the pain they cause her; traditional pain relief comes with severe side effects and risks; people question her use of a wheelchair as someone who can—painfully—walk when needed. Through it all, her relationships with her boyfriend and friends provide comfort and understanding. Sweeney includes the story of her adoption from Moldova, adding another layer to how she understands and communicates her sense of self.

The graphic memoir as a form proves effective here; the images—in particular as Sweeney illustrates herself from childhood to adulthood—reveal her emotions as words on their own could not. Each mark on the page seems defiant, showing all that she has overcome to use the pen, to tell her story in word and image.

In beautifully colored and evocative frames, Brittle Joints shares illustrator Maria Sweeney’s experiences living with a rare disability.
FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsDebut Fiction

Vera Bushwack

Review by Mariel Fechik

In the woods of Nova Scotia, Drew is building a cabin. Save for the company of their dog, Pony, Drew is alone—a fact that everyone seems to have an opinion or an assumption about, much to Drew’s exasperation. But Drew is determined to live their dream life in their cabin, so they go to work, accepting help from local men to chain saw the trees on their property.

Sans chain saw, Drew is unassuming and a little awkward. But rev the engine, and they become the fiery Vera Bushwack, resplendent in assless chaps astride a noble steed, chain saw brandished like a sword. Drew can’t always be Vera, though, and when they aren’t working, they cycle through memories—some of kindness, some uglier.

Sig Burwash’s debut graphic novel, Vera Bushwack, is about self-love, queer comfort and the importance of learning to trust again after trauma. Despite its vibrant cover image, Vera Bushwack is a quiet book. Much of the story is relayed without dialogue, through surreal memory reels and montages of Drew and Pony’s new life, which are at turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

Burwash’s illustrations are endearing and strange, even off-putting at times, which complements Drew’s story perfectly. Sparse black sketches over muted, monochromatic backgrounds capture a sense of space and isolation while also telling an incredibly intimate story. One of Burwash’s biggest strengths as an artist is facial expressions; Pony, who is all ears and tongue, is simply a delight, while Drew’s emotional range, from blasé to maniacally gleeful, is something to behold.

Readers may be surprised to learn that the book is a debut, not only because of the clear skill it displays, but also because it feels so lived in. That’s a testament to Burwash’s talent. Vera Bushwack is sure to be a meditative balm for any queer person who sees themself in Drew—or in Vera.

In Sig Burwash’s debut graphic novel, unassuming Drew transforms into the fiery Vera Bushwack, resplendent in assless chaps, with the rev of a chain saw. Vera Bushwack is sure to be a balm for queer readers.
FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsDebut Fiction

Babe in the Woods

Review by Cat Acree

Julie Heffernan is predominantly known as a self-portraitist. Her astounding large-scale oil paintings are baroque, surrealist, highly staged and detailed, and often feature a woman—herself, bare-breasted, surrounded by a riot of flora and fauna. She frequently toys with traditional representations of women in art, depicting herself in big headpieces and bigger skirts, and using titles like “Self-Portrait as Gorgeous Tumor” and “Self-Portrait as Tree House.”

Many of Heffernan’s self-portraits are reproduced in Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, her first graphic novel and a mesmeric work of autofiction. It is a loose retelling of how she became an artist, leaving a Catholic home where art didn’t exist and meeting people who helped her to discover the world of art history and her own fierce opinion and creative voice. A version of Heffernan recounts these events—often in the form of a one-sided conversation with her mother—while hiking deeper into the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child. We know from the outset that she’s getting herself lost, and as her mind whirls through her memories, examining traumas and questioning everything with a furious intensity, it is clear that she is making a dangerous, terrible choice. She is being a bad mother, and she says so.

Throughout Heffernan’s labyrinthine walk in the woods, we are treated to “revelations,” each centered on a work of classic art. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, and here she delivers brief lessons on famous paintings such as “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Wildens, which is accompanied by Heffernan’s revelation, “DON’T GIVE UP no matter WHAT!” as she shows how the painting uses two women’s naked bodies to create the shape of a pinwheel, whirling like blades in the center of the scene. The women are about to be raped, but they still have “ACTION! MOTION!! AGENCY!!!”

Much of the illustration for the novel was done in Microsoft Paint, which gives the book a sketchy, glitchy quality, completely in opposition to her oil paintings. Many scenes, as well as some reproductions of her self-portraits, are pixelated, the color appearing to malfunction and separate. Details become difficult to see, and the viewer is forced into the same frustrating brain-fuzziness as Heffernan’s character. 

The varying styles, the collapsing of clarity, the tremendous rage and continual turning-over of past traumas—all these elements combine in Babe in the Woods to illuminate the mysteries of the creative process. It is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward. Reading it doesn’t feel like moving in a straight line, but rather a spiral, and as Heffernan writes, “a spiral always brings us back to a center, no matter how far we travel away from it.”

Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, Babe in the Woods, is a mesmeric work of autofiction loosely retelling how she became an artist while following a hike in the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child.

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Four graphic books make major strides with powerful art and stories, going back to a classic, and venturing deep into the woods.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionSocial ScienceLiterary FictionLifestylesHorrorHistoryHistorical FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsFantasyCultural HistoryCultural CriticismArts & Culture

What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Feature by the editors of BookPage
Model Home by Rivers Solomon book jacket

Model Home

Read if your Halloween plans are: A horror movie marathon, specifically A24 horror movies

Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted and determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.

—Laura Hubbard

Djinnology by Seema Yasminis book jacket

Djinnology 

Read if your Halloween plans are: Exploring potentially haunted places—abandoned strip malls, creaky old houses, creepy caves … you get the idea.

If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World, a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations. Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who has traveled the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee to explain his long and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects. Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.

—Alice Cary

We Love the Nightlife by Rachel Koller Croft book jacket

We Love the Nightlife

Read if your Halloween plans are: A bar crawl in a tiny costume, weather be damned

Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire has represented loneliness, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife. Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, Amber begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers an escape plan. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined. Despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music. We also get to see Nicola’s side of the story and her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction lovers and fans of relationship drama alike.

—Matthew Jackson

American Scary by Jeremy Dauber book jacket

★ American Scary

Read if your Halloween plans are: Watching a brainy horror documentary, or peeking at spooky clips on YouTube

Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. Dauber starts his “tour of American fear” with our country’s bloody beginnings and proclivity for blaming the devil for everything from bad weather to miscarriage (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?

—Amanda Haggard

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society by C.M. Waggoner book jacket

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

Read if your Halloween plans are: Curling up in a chair at home, reading a lightly spooky book or one of the more gothic Agatha Christies

Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle resides in a quiet hamlet in upstate New York. The only out of the ordinary detail about Ms. Pinkwhistle is that she loves to solve a good murder mystery—not only those in the books she protects and enjoys at work, but also the real-life, grisly deaths in the otherwise sleepy little town of Winesap. But when a string of local murders hits a little too close to home, Sherry realizes that she can no longer remain an unattached bystander. A demon, or several, might be at the heart of these ever-increasing deaths, and Sherry will need the help of her skeptical friends and her possibly-possessed cat to root out the evil in Winesap. C.M. Waggoner’s The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a stunning blend of genres, a dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery—and by the time readers realize this, they, like Sherry, are too deeply entrenched in the case to let it go. Waggoner infuses the pages with darkly humorous scenes and snappy dialogue, as well as unexpected magical touches that hearken back to the author’s previous fantasy novels, a combination that’s perfect for fans of horror tropes as well as lovers of mystery. Sherry Pinkwhistle is a sleuth to be reckoned with, and beneath her frumpy and soft exterior lies a pleasant surprise: a clever, determined heroine who will stop at nothing to protect the place she calls home and the people who live there. 

—Stephanie Cohen-Perez

Eerie Legends by Ricardo Diseño book jacket

Eerie Legends 

Read if your Halloween plans are: Circling up with friends and family for a night of scary stories

Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World arrives like Halloween candy, just in time for the spookiest season of the year. Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement these spine-tingling stories, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum—think Universal Studio monsters, or even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. As an added incentive, the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.

—Laura Hutson Hunter

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk book jacket

★ The Empusium

Read if your Halloween plans are: A hike contemplating the macabre beauty of seasonal decay—be sure to leave the woods before dark!

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Tokarczuk is known for her penchant for the mythical and her deft, dark satirical wit, and as the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The narration seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” A cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium is about the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe, and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, from which it draws inspiration. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczyslaw responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.

—Alden Mudge

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

What I Know About You

Review by Laura Sackton

In his beguiling debut novel, What I Know About You, Éric Chacour delicately explores the complicated circumstances that create distance between people, and the limits of what anyone can know about those they love.

In 1980s Cairo, Tarek, a doctor from a Levantine Christian family, begins a relationship with a young man. Up until this moment, Tarek’s life has been a series of expected events. He grew up to become a doctor like his father, and took over the family practice after his father died. He has played the roles his wealthy family expected him to: dutiful son, successful professional. 

The young man, Ali, comes from a poor neighborhood, and enlists Tarek’s help when his mother becomes ill. As their relationship evolves, Tarek is not prepared for all the ways his love for Ali changes him. He doesn’t know how to navigate a relationship that he must hide from his community. Ali upends Tarek’s neat, ordered life, and the turmoil affects Tarek’s entire family.

Despite several dramatic plot elements, this is a quiet, internal novel. Its brilliance is in the way Chacour plays with point of view. The opening section is written in the second person, and while at first it reads like it is addressing the reader, it soon becomes clear that something more complex is going on. Who is the narrator? Who are they speaking to? How do they know such intimate details about Tarek’s life, his doubts, fears, desires and joys?

In sparse but beautiful prose, Chacour invites readers into the secret world that exists between the mysterious narrator and Tarek. On the surface, What I Know About You is an emotional family story, a queer awakening, a tumultuous romance. It’s a richly textured portrait of Cairo from the 1960s through the 2000s, and a nuanced exploration of queer relationships in Egypt during a time of intense governmental and societal homophobia. But even more compelling than all that is the story underneath: the why and the how of the narrative itself. As the narrator muses at one point, “there’s no way to stay outside your own story.” 

Éric Chacour’s debut is an emotional family story, a tumultuous queer romance and a richly textured portrait of ’80s and ’90s Cairo—with an intriguing narrative twist.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Wildes

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is known for his comedic plays (The Importance of Being Earnest), fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and for his trial and imprisonment for his homosexuality. Less well known is that he had a family: his wife Constance, who advocated for more practical dress for women, and their sons Cyril and Vyvyan. In The Wildes, novelist Louis Bayard focuses on Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Like a play, The Wildes is structured in five acts. Act 1 opens in 1892 at a farm in the Norfolk countryside, where Constance and Oscar; their son Cyril; Oscar’s larger-than-life mother, Lady Jane Wilde; and their friends Arthur and Florence Clifton are spending a holiday. Soon, they are interrupted by the arrival of young Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. The spoiled Bosie, a student at Oxford, seems to be one of Oscar’s “poets”—young, literary men eager to spend time with the great writer. This section, the longest in the novel, often feels like a drawing-room comedy—both Constance and Lady Jane Wilde are wits—but woven throughout is the slow dawning of Constance’s understanding about Oscar and her marriage, as she pieces together the reality of Oscar and Bosie’s relationship.  

Act 2 leaps forward five years, to a villa in Italy where Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan are living. The scandal of Oscar’s trial for gross indecency and homosexual acts, and his imprisonment, have forced Constance and the boys into exile, and they are hiding unhappily under a new last name. Acts 3 and 4 leap forward again, skipping over the tragedy of Oscar and Constance’s early deaths to episodes in Cyril and Vyvyan’s adulthoods—for Cyril, a pivotal day in the trenches in World War I France, and for Vyvyan, a theater outing with a family friend, on a night in 1925. Act 5 circles back to 1892 in that farmhouse in Norfolk, with a hopeful reimagining of this family’s life.

Although Bayard’s ending asks a little too much of Constance, the novel gives its heart to her; she’s a believable, loving, heartbroken character. In The Wildes, Bayard has built a story beyond the well-known tragedy, and though the novel never gives us Oscar’s perspective, we see him through Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan’s eyes—as an engaged father, loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets, and a terrified man unable to love openly.

 

In The Wildes, novelist Louis Bayard shows us Oscar Wilde through the eyes of his wife and sons—presenting a portrait of the poet and playwright as engaged father, loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets and a terrified man unable to love openly.

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