The protagonist of David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return is Michel Adanson, a real life 18th-century French botanist. In this story, beautifully translated from French by Sam Taylor, Michel bequeaths a journal telling the tale of a secret and forbidden love to the daughter he both doted on and neglected. Whether the object of his passion felt the same is uncertain—she probably didn’t—and this is where much of Diop’s novel derives its power.
As a young man, Michel goes to Senegal to study the country’s flora and fauna, and spy, a little, for the Senegal Concession, which traffics in West African commodities, including slaves. The book’s title refers to Gorée Island and its ghastly holding pens where people were kept like livestock before being forced onto ships and taken away forever to the Americas. After a couple of years in Senegal a story reaches the young Frencfhman that can’t be true.
It seems that a young woman who was sold into slavery in America has somehow returned, even though she was believed to be dead. This obsesses Michel to the point where he drops his studies and sets out to find her. After being laid low by a fever, he meets Maram and falls passionately in love with her—or thinks he does.
Diop, winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize for At Night All Blood Is Black, is such a skilled and subtle writer that he won’t let us forget that Michel is a privileged white man despite all his sympathy for and even identification with his Black hosts. Though most of the story is told through Michel’s eyes, even the minor characters are memorable. Through Taylor’s translations, Diop lets us see the condescension of Michel’s better known contemporaries; the arrogant cruelty of the men who run the Senegal Concession; and the perfidy and shame of the man who caused Maram to flee her village. Diop also makes us love Ndiak, Michel’s wonderfully cocky teenaged companion, and we come to respect both the resourceful Maram and the proud and bitter Madeleine, whose portrait reminds the elderly Michel of Maram so much that he tries, pathetically, to court her. Beyond the Door of No Return is an engrossing work from a powerful and humane writer.
Beyond the Door of No Return is an engrossing work from a powerful and humane writer, David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.
Jayne Anne Phillips transitioned from highly praised short stories to novels in 1984, and several years have stretched between each new work. But that’s only part of what makes Night Watch such a meaningful literary event. Tracing an arc from catastrophic damage and loss to recovery through the Civil War and its aftermath, Phillips marries a timeless emotional quality and utterly contemporary sensibility to create a satisfying work in her first novel in a decade.
Much of the story is told in the observant but occasionally naive voice of ConaLee, a 12-year-old girl born in the first year of the war in the mountainous territory of West Virginia. She’s the offspring of a couple who migrated north from a plantation in South Carolina’s Low Country in the company of a compassionate “woods doctor” named Dearbhla, whom the girl thinks of as her “granny neighbor.” When the novel opens in 1874, ConaLee and her mother are being deposited at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (a real institution) by a former Confederate soldier ConaLee has come to know as “Papa,” even though he has been physically and psychologically abusing her mother.
More than a decade earlier, ConaLee’s real father had also shed his identity to enlist in the Union Army as a sharpshooter. After he was grievously wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, he spent months at a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, recovering from his injuries. He eventually healed physically, though with all memory of his former life erased. The novel devotes most of its attention to ConaLee’s mother’s return to sanity through the innovative methods implemented at the hospital by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, while the fate of her husband remains a lingering mystery.
How Phillips knits these two main threads together won’t be revealed here, because the novel features a healthy number of complications that bring the story to its resolution and will delight fans of plot-driven fiction. Phillips is also a sensuous writer, and the novel features numerous examples of captivating depictions of unspoiled nature. One of the most vivid scenes is a description of the sharpshooter’s last experience of combat that captures both the terror and exhilaration of war. Night Watch is escapist in the best sense of the word, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the experience of a distant era and identify deeply with the struggles of the people who lived through it.
Night Watch is escapist in the best sense of the word, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the experience of a distant era and identify deeply with the struggles of the people who lived through it.
Many are the delights and wonders of Daniel Mason’s North Woods, a novel so lush with stories and moods that it defies adequate description.
The story begins when a young couple are driven from their Puritan colony—him for reputedly consorting with heathens, and her to escape marriage to a minister twice her age—to a wild, idyllic place in the north woods. Then we shift to a vivid captivity tale, in which a young mother and her child are kidnapped from their village by Native American raiders and deposited by their captors into the care of an old woman living in an ancient hut in the north woods; eventually, soldiers arrive with ideas other than rescue. Next there is a memoir by one Charles Osgood, a veteran of the French and Indian War, worrisomely obsessed with finding and propagating the perfect apple. Osgood dies fighting on the loyalist side of the American Revolution and leaves his orchards to his twin daughters, Alice and Mary. Divided by jealousy and bound by love and guilt, they bring destruction to the orchards and his flocks.
Later a slave hunter stalks an escapee on her way to Canada. A 19th-century painter writes revelatory letters to his beloved and famous novelist friend. The sensual, alluring charlatan Madame Rossi arrives to conduct a seance. Included amid these stories are verses, riddles, ballads and even an erotic tale of the elm bark beetle. The inhabitants, owners, visitors, ghosts and the very forest itself transform over time. On it goes, in love and madness, to the present day.
North Woods is a love poem to the human and natural history of Western Massachusetts. One of the novel’s enticements is the exuberant descriptions of evolving nature. Another is discerning the relationships among the succession of occupants here in the north woods. Most brilliant of all is the novel’s daring storytelling, through which its tales come spectacularly to life. They are wise, profound, chilling, carnal and funny. North Woods is an amazing and deeply pleasurable tour de force.
North Woods is a love poem to the human and natural history of Western Massachusetts, full of tales that come spectacularly to life through Daniel Mason’s daring storytelling.
When Jacob Hampton returns home wounded from the Korean War, his parents couldn’t be happier. Before his conscription, they had disinherited him for marrying a poor, uneducated hotel maid who became pregnant soon after their elopement. Now that Jacob has come home, “They believed him ready at last to be their prodigal son,” writes Ron Rash in his stellar novel, The Caretaker. Jacob, however, quickly informs them, “I’m only here for my truck.”
A PEN/Faulkner finalist and three-time recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash writes about the North Carolina mountains and their inhabitants with exceptional beauty and grace. In The Caretaker, he has created a Shakespearian plot so riveting that it begs to be read in one sitting. An exceptional storyteller, Rash sets up an explosive standoff between Jacob and his parents from the start, then quickly sets into motion a jaw-dropping turn of events.
Rounding out the cast are Jacob’s wife, Naomi, who yearns for her husband’s return, dreams of their future, and is desperately trying to improve her third-grade reading skills as she writes to him. She is looked after by Jacob’s best friend, Blackburn Gant, who lives in a shack on the cemetery grounds, where he works as caretaker. He finds tending to the dead easier than dealing with the living, who are often repulsed by his limp and disfigured face, a remnant of polio.
Rash’s prose is spare, yet piercingly sharp, whether writing about a gathering of men at the Hampton family country store or Jacob’s life-and-death battle with a North Korean soldier. Like Richard Russo, he’s a narrative maestro who creates entire communities, giving brief but meaningful backstories to characters big and small, including the town doctor, the girl whom Jacob’s parents want him to marry, and the man in charge of receiving and delivering telegrams.
Readers will likely find themselves galloping toward the end of this novel, but should be sure to stop to appreciate its quieter moments, such as when Naomi reflects on the often-extraordinary beauty of an entirely ordinary day: “Maybe that was the saddest thing about life, that you couldn’t understand, not really, how good something was while living inside of it. How many such moments swept past, lost forever.” The Caretaker is an unforgettable novel of class, power, war, family, yearning and betrayal. Don’t miss it.
The Caretaker is an unforgettable novel of class, power, war, family, yearning and betrayal. Don’t miss it.
In his sublime 2021 novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, Chilean author Benjamin Labatut depicted the breakthroughs of real scientists and mathematicians as divine revelations and Greek tragedies. If When We Cease to Understand the World felt like the searing flash of a hydrogen bomb, The MANIAC is more of a measured descent into years of research and invention, with little sense of what’s to come beyond a pervasive, unnameable dread.
The novel is divided into three sections, the first of which is most similar to Labatut’s earlier work. “Paul, or The Discovery of the Irrational” tells the heartbreaking story of Jewish Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest’s succumbing to hopelessness amid the rise of Nazism, and his subsequent murder-suicide of himself and his son. The scene leading up to Ehrenfest’s final acts describes him moving like an automaton, a desperate machine that can do nothing but forfeit the game.
The second section is composed of a chorus of embittered, fearful and resigned voices, each sharing their impressions and memories of Hungarian genius Jancsi (Johnny) von Neumann, the inventor of game theory and a toxic proto-tech bro obsessed with finding “a mathematical basis for reality.” The final section recounts a contemporary John Henry-style battle against the machine, as Lee Sedol, a South Korean master of the game Go, faces down the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo. There is no dialogue in the novel, only quotations, and much of the narrative is told in summary—even the Go tournament is more analytical than propulsive.
Although The MANIAC is a sort of biographical fiction, its subject, artificial intelligence, is neither human nor much beyond its infancy. Labatut uses the language of parenting, birth, gods and creators, but this is no Frankenstein, and there’s no way to know what this baby will become. Von Neumann suggests that it could be our own new god, and indeed, as the lines of logic, gameplay and consciousness blur at the novel’s end, Sedol’s finale is nearly reverent.
For readers who come with curiosity and skepticism—the very mindset that has brought about our most disruptive evolutions in tech—Labatut’s book will provoke and inform, leaving us no more sure-footed in our nascent age of AI but certainly more aware.
If Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World felt like the searing flash of a hydrogen bomb, The MANIAC is more of a measured descent, permeated by a pervasive, unnameable dread.
A triple murder is at the center of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s superb second novel about the sleepy fictional town of West Mills, North Carolina, where rumors run rampant and family histories trace back through time like vines of wisteria.
Decent People, set in 1976, is quite different from Winslow’s debut novel, In West Mills, a multigenerational saga spanning the 1940s through the ’80s that won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2019. But both books are character-driven treasures, and while no major characters are the same, fans will recognize crossover figures and family names.
Winslow says he always planned to write more about West Mills, and creating Decent People was in some ways more straightforward than his first book. “A murder mystery isn’t going to go on for 20 years,” he says. “Keeping the scope short made things easier for me.” The author speaks from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he moved a year ago after giving in to “city burnout” in New York City.
With a population of about a thousand, West Mills is based on Winslow’s mother’s hometown of South Mills, North Carolina. He changed the town’s name after feeling bogged down by his quest for historical accuracy. (A canal runs through both places, for instance, but in Winslow’s creation, the water divides the racially segregated community.)
Therein lies a foundational truth of Winslow’s writing life: Nonfiction can bring inspiration, but fiction allows him “to be free to create worlds [by] using true information as the seed.” He can trace this inclination back to the earliest days of his career.
“I didn’t come from a bookish family at all,” Winslow says. “I do vaguely remember some Dr. Suess books, but no one was really reading them to me,” so he used them as coloring books instead. After discovering Toni Morrison’s Beloved in college, he decided to try his hand at writing. The hope was to write his father’s story to better understand him after his death. Before Winslow was born to his father’s third wife, his father had five children by age 24 with his first wife. His father also spent some time in prison for house burglaries but refused to discuss it. Of course, some questions can never be answered, so Winslow began writing fiction about his father instead—and then eventually about West Mills.
The seed for Decent People emerged at a family gathering, when Winslow’s aunt asked his mother if she recalled the tragic deaths of three older women from decades earlier. The women always drove to church together, and presumably due to some sort of vehicle mishap, they drove into the town’s canal and drowned.
Winslow started writing the story with gusto, assuming that the accidental drownings would lead to revelations about the characters who knew the deceased. However, he quickly found himself bored with his plot. “I had all this social commentary down about homophobia and drugs,” he recalls, “but it needed something else. And that’s when I turned it into three people who were murdered.”
Decent People opens as 60-year-old Jo Wright retires from Harlem to her childhood home of West Mills. She has barely gotten out of her car when she learns that three people have just been murdered: the town’s prominent Black doctor, Dr. Marian Harmon, and her two adult siblings. Jo’s fiancé, Lymp Seymore, is suspected of shooting the trio, who are his half siblings.
Jo is calm, smart and a bit glamorous, an amateur investigator whose nearly 6-foot height catches people’s attention. “If she was based on anyone at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher from ‘Murder, She Wrote,’” Winslow says. I suggest that she could also be perfectly portrayed by Emmy Award-winning actor Sheryl Lee Ralph of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” “Now that you’ve put that in my brain,” he says, laughing, “I’m going to envision her as Jo!”
“If [Jo] was based on anyone at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher from ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”
As Jo begins investigating the murders, she acknowledges the history of Black people doing “their own legwork and [gathering] information the police hadn’t even tried to find,” she says in the book. “Cases reopened, police chiefs proven lazy, racist. Or both.” She quickly discovers that several people have possible motives for the crime, and from there, Winslow leads readers through a story told by a large cast of characters, many of whom draw on memories from their pasts.
One of the novel’s central figures is a young gay boy, whose storyline is one of the notable differences between Decent People and In West Mills. “When I was writing In West Mills, the topic of homophobia wasn’t really on my mind,” Winslow says. “I was thinking of the town in a far more loving way. But with this book, I had to think about all of the disadvantages that a town like that can pose to a queer person, especially a young queer person.”
The result is a wonderfully jampacked saga that flows well yet feels much denser than its 272 pages. Winslow admits that he loves the plots and characters of Charles Dickens’ novels but doesn’t like to read—much less write—long books. He credits novelist Ethan Canin for teaching him how to keep his own prose spare through the concept of “scene hygiene,” which means “once the point of the scene is made, move on.”
For his next book, Winslow is toying with a few ideas for stories set in West Mills, possibly inspired by his mother and aunts. He’s also contemplating something autobiographical, although he feels his own life story lacks a central conflict. “I don’t want it to be ‘young gay Black male moves to New York and works a bunch of jobs, goes to college, has some boyfriends and breakups, and at the end of the book he’s 43.’” Though honestly, if Winslow is writing it, I’d read that, too.
Photo of De’Shawn Charles Winslow by Julie R. Keresztes. This article has been updated to correct and clarify details of the author’s life.
In Decent People, De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s fictional community of West Mills is now the setting of a terrible crime.
As Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel opens, it’s 1938 in the old walled city of Lahore, Hindustan (now Pakistan), and Samir Vij has just turned 10. He’s about to join the family perfume business as an apprentice; like his uncle Vivek, Samir has an unusually perceptive nose. On the other side of the walled city, 8-year-old Firdaus Khan is the only girl studying in her father’s calligraphy studio. Soon after, Samir and Firdaus encounter each other for the first time when Firdaus and her parents come to the Vij perfume shop for rose oil to add to a special manuscript that Firdaus’ father is illuminating. Samir, a Hindu boy, and Firdaus, a Muslim girl, feel an instant connection, one that’s deepened when Samir too begins to study calligraphy.
The novel follows Samir and Firdaus as their friendship turns to love over the next 10 years. But after World War II, local demands for independence from the British Empire grow louder. Seemingly overnight, the ancient, multicultural city of Lahore, where Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs live in peaceable proximity and friendship, descends into violence and chaos. The price of independence turns out to be Partition, which divides Hindustan into India and Pakistan. Hindu families in Lahore flee over the new border into India, and Muslims flee into the new Pakistan. Samir and Firdaus are driven far apart, their destinies seeming to diverge.
In The Book of Everlasting Things, Malhotra balances the larger canvas (the devastation of two world wars and Partition) with the smaller (Samir and Khan’s love story), weaving in additional family stories to reveal how past actions affect the two lovers over the decades.
Malhotra is a visual artist and the author of two nonfiction books on Partition, and her prose is often gorgeous and evocative. The novel shines in its sensory details, particularly in regard to smells, showing how perfumers take in the world. It’s also strong in its sense of place, with memorable images of pre-Partition Lahore, a place lost to war and the passage of time, as well as of post-World War II Paris and Grasse, France. Samir, the character at the novel’s heart, is more developed than Firdaus, but both characters share a vivid sense of longing.
Some readers may quibble that The Book of Everlasting Things moves slowly, but this is a long, meaty story with an old-fashioned pace. It’s a novel to sink into as Malhotra spins a bittersweet family saga of love, loss and connection.
In this absorbing novel, Aanchal Malhotra spins a bittersweet family saga of love, loss and connection.
To remember is not just to recall a thing. Remembering can be a way of putting things back together, in the way that dis-membering is to take them apart. Kai Thomas’ stellar novel, In the Upper Country, is all about this sort of re-membering. It’s inspired by the true stories of formerly enslaved and freeborn people (Black, Indigenous and some white folks) who built havens in Canada in the years just before the American Civil War. In a place where people have actual autonomy, what is remembered are not just memories but also the workings of relationships—the practice of hewing and maintaining bonds with family, friends and nature itself.
The story’s narrator is Lensinda Martin, a freeborn Black woman and one of the few people in the town of Dunmore who can read and write well enough to publish articles in the abolitionist newspaper. She’s also a healer, so one evening in July 1859, she’s called to assist a man who’s been shot on a farm. He’s dead by the time she gets there, and it turns out he was a slave hunter from the United States. Emboldened by the atrocious Fugitive Slave Act, he traveled all the way to Canada to kidnap a formerly enslaved woman named Cash and return her to captivity in Kentucky. Instead, the old woman shot him.
Much of the rest of the book follows a series of exchanges between Lensinda and the now-imprisoned Cash, who agrees to tell her tale only if Lensinda reads aloud the stories from other former slaves that were transcribed by abolitionists—a quid pro quo a la The Silence of the Lambs. Cash hopes her story will make it clear that she acted in self-defense and convince the powers that be that she has earned her freedom.
What makes Thomas’ sprawling novel stand out is his focus on the alliances that formed between Indigenous and Black communities as far back as the French and Indian War, as there was much to be learned in their mutual striving to protect themselves and keep their land from being stolen by white colonizers. As Lensinda reads tales that involve Cash’s husband, an Indigenous man, and other loved ones who were torn from her, Cash is made whole again. Whatever the court decides, this very old woman can die in peace.
Written with great power and a beautifully heightened eloquence that calls to mind the exhortations of the old abolitionists, In the Upper Country is, incredibly, Thomas’ first novel. What an auspicious debut it is.
Kai Thomas’ debut novel is written with great power and a beautifully heightened eloquence that calls to mind the exhortations of the old abolitionists.
Historical fiction presents a certain narrative highwire act in and of itself, and each author confronts the challenge of weaving fictional stories into real historical events differently. No matter the approach, though, the balance of verisimilitude and invention is paramount. With The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre, Natasha Lester takes on that challenge and more, producing a remarkable novel that walks in multiple worlds during a pivotal moment in time.
The title character, an American orphan who attended a Swiss boarding school on a scholarship, grows into a woman determined to prove herself in any theater in which she’s asked to do battle. Over the course of Lester’s novel, which jumps from France to Switzerland to Italy and beyond during the 1940s, we see Alix join the staff of Harper’s Bazaar, secretly work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and, in postwar Paris, take up a position at a new fashion house run by Christian Dior. But even as her high-fashion dreams seem to be coming true, Alix realizes that the ghosts of war are not done with her yet.
Lester’s ambitious premise, placing her protagonist at the center of both covert work during World War II and the founding of one of the most recognizable fashion brands in the world, is both daring and compelling. It’s easy to imagine that her novel could have shifted too far into espionage and therefore dimmed the light on the world of haute couture, or that the fashion might have outshined the world of spies and code names. But readers can put such worries to rest, thanks to Lester’s command of her narrative and deep grasp of her protagonist. Through tight, page-turning prose and a richly developed view of 1940s Europe, Lester weaves a spellbinding portrait of a woman who knows how to survive—and how to win.
Alix is such a strong central character that the rest of the narrative shapes itself to her like a well-tailored gown, making The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre a wonderfully human and utterly gripping work of historical fiction.
Natasha Lester’s central character is so strong that the rest of the narrative shapes itself to her like a well-tailored gown, making The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre a wonderfully human and utterly gripping work of historical fiction.
Readers of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s award-winning debut novel, In West Mills, a multigenerational saga spanning the 1940s through the ’80s, will be thrilled to return to the titular small town in Decent People. It’s 1976, and the town’s only Black physician, Dr. Marian Harmon, has been found dead from a gunshot in her West Mills home, along with her brother and sister.
The Harmons’ half brother, Lymp Seymore, had a strained relationship with the victims, and he is immediately questioned by police, who show little interest in actually solving the shocking crime. Lymp’s fiancée, Jo Wright, begins sleuthing on her own, and her investigation leads her to believe that more than one person had a motive for the crime.
As the story unspools, Winslow shifts point of view from character to character, successfully developing a large cast that’s connected by multiple intermingling plotlines, including a particularly poignant one involving a boy facing homophobia. Revelations about the cast’s relationships not only move the mystery forward but also contain pitch-perfect zingers and crushing truths about race, privilege, pride and shame. For example, Savannah Russet, the white daughter of the Harmons’ landlord, was disowned by her family when she married a Black man. Savannah was also best friends with Marian, and they had a very public argument not long before her murder. But when a police officer telephones Savannah during the investigation, he reassures her that there’s no need to come in for questioning because “You don’t exactly fit the profile, if you know what I mean.”
Anyone who adored Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, take note. Winslow invites readers on a satisfying ride that, through his keen observations of human nature, leads to deeper considerations of the glacial progress of racial equality. “It’s 1976. There’s no Klan anymore,” Savannah’s father proclaims at one point, but then he quickly admits to himself that “it still existed, and that it always would.” To reveal such underlying truths, Decent People twists the light this way and that, showing the simmering tensions that can indeed turn deadly.
In his second novel, De’Shawn Charles Winslow invites readers on a satisfying ride that, through his keen observations of human nature, leads to deeper considerations of the glacial progress of racial equality.
Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive friendships that can occur between two girls.
When your heritage and ancestry are the reasons for your oppression, to whom can you turn in order to survive, but to family? Hokeah’s exceptional debut novel follows a Native American man’s life through the many leaves of his family tree.
Egan’s empathetic interest in human behavior is what drives The Candy House, making her companion novel to A Visit From the Goon Squad more than a literary experiment.
Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift, was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting follow-up will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent.
Taken together, the 13 stories in Berry’s How It Went create a tale that gently unwinds and doubles back on itself, not so much like a river but more like a flowering vine.
The year’s best fiction included a remarkable number of groundbreaking story collections—some deeply interconnected like Oscar Hokeah’s and Jonathan Escoffery’s, others bound mostly by theme and setting, such as Manuel Muñoz’s. We also reveled in several major releases from well-established authors, including Celeste Ng, Ian McEwan, Yiyun Li and Gabrielle Zevin.
Sophomore novels from Hernan Diaz, Namwali Serpell, Douglas Stuart and Elif Batuman surpassed the high bars of their debuts, and first-timers Tess Gunty, Sarah Thankam Mathews and Bonnie Garmus made a hell of a splash.
In Lauren Groff’s Matrix, 17-year-old Marie de France becomes prioress of a run-down abbey in 12th-century England. Ill-suited to a life of privation, Marie struggles in her new role, but she forms strong bonds with the women in her charge, and the abbey begins to flourish. When tensions rise between the abbey and the outside world, Marie’s work and leadership are challenged. Fans of historical fiction will savor this gripping, atmospheric novel, which poses questions related to faith and female desire that will inspire great discussion among readers.
Anthony Doerr’s ambitious, sweeping Cloud Cuckoo Land follows a group of characters across the centuries, all of whom endure transformational events and share a love for an ancient tale called “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” Doerr tells the stories of Anna and Omeir, two youngsters in Constantinople in the 1400s; Zeno, an octogenarian librarian in modern-day Idaho; and Konstance, a teenage girl traveling on a spacecraft in the 22nd century. Inventive and accomplished, Doerr’s novel is an unforgettable tribute to the power of stories and the endurance of the human spirit.
Set in the 1970s in Illinois, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads chronicles the lives of the Hildebrandts, a suburban family going through a period of change. Russ Hildebrandt, an associate pastor and church leader, has decided to split from his wife, Marion. Their daughter, Becky, and son Perry are dabbling in drugs and a more radical lifestyle, and Clem, the oldest son, makes a drastic choice that shocks the family. Franzen’s wonderfully detailed, emotionally intimate novel is satisfying on every level, with marriage, morality and religion among the book’s many talking points.
Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young Black woman, delves into her disturbing family history in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Brought up in a family of formidable women in Georgia, Ailey takes inspiration from the great activist W.E.B. Du Bois while wrestling with her heritage and selfhood. As she learns the truth about her family tree and the impact of slavery on her forebears, Ailey draws closer to self-acceptance. Jeffers explores issues of race, history and female relationships through this luminous story of a woman coming into her own.
Tackle some of the most acclaimed blockbuster novels of recent years with your book club.
Louise Kennedy, chef of nearly 30 years and author of the short story collection The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, emerges with a debut novel that will fill every historical fiction fan with gratitude. Trespasses exposes the crushing realities of Northern Ireland during the “troubles” while paying respect to the people who found their way through the destruction.
The novel centers on Cushla Lavery, a Catholic teacher living near Belfast who also works part time in her family’s pub. The sectarian violence between Republicans (largely Catholics) and loyalists (largely Protestants) has become overwhelmingly ingrained in society. The school’s headmaster even insists that Cushla’s 7- and 8-year-old students devote time each morning to reporting and commenting on the day’s most horrific news, from bombings to internments.
Quicker than she can make sense of, Cushla forms new relationships that drive her personal life into the public eye. There’s Michael Agnew, an older, married Protestant barrister with whom Cushla begins a surreptitious affair. There’s also Davy McGeown, a child in Cushla’s class whose father is brutally beaten. Disaster soon becomes inevitable, but no matter how close Cushla’s life comes to collapse, Kennedy’s unyielding narrative voice exhibits heart-wrenching impassivity, forcing readers to grapple with their own prejudices and morals.
The novel’s brilliance lies in Kennedy’s commitment to nuance. Simple definitions of “right” and “wrong” are nonexistent in Cushla’s world, as Kennedy is more concerned with contextual authenticity: How do our choices affect our environments, and conversely, how do those environments shape the choices we make? Reading Trespasses is an exercise in trust, in letting oneself accept the transient failures of an individual while holding fast to their implicit humanity.
Impeccably written, Trespasses is a story that every reader will internalize differently. In only 304 pages, it achieves the complexity of a multigenerational saga without sacrificing the striking intricacies of its central protagonist’s story.
Reading Trespasses is an exercise in trust, in letting oneself accept the transient failures of an individual while holding fast to their implicit humanity.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
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.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
