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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.
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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.
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Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways. 

The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he’s reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library. 

Many things about Murakami’s work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.

Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
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When one of the two central characters in your debut novel is dead, there are unintended consequences, as Anna Montague reveals at the start of our conversation about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? In the book, Magda, a psychiatrist who is turning 70, takes a lengthy, life-changing road trip with the cremated remains of her best friend, Sara, buckled into the passenger seat beside her.

“My apartment is just covered in urns,” Montague says, speaking from the Brooklyn apartment into which she has just moved. “I’m actually really looking forward to exploring other decor options once the book is out. I have maybe 15 in my entryway.”

In fact, Montague’s late grandfather, who was the manuscript’s first reader, suggested she call her book The Urn. People have already been sending them to her, and no doubt she’ll be getting more with the publication of her highly anticipated novel. What’s more, one of these gifted vessels may actually contain remains. “It sounds distinctly like there are some ashes in it,” Montague says, laughing, “but it seems to be locked. I don’t know who sent it, so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern with that one.”

“I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

While she was working on the book, Montague lost not only her 100-year-old grandfather, but two other dear people: her 94-year-old grandmother and a woman named Dorothy (Dot), one of her father’s elderly neighbors whom she had befriended. One day, as Montague dog-sat for Dot’s husband, who was traveling, she suddenly realized that Dot’s ashes were in an urn in the room where she was writing. She notes that “many of the impulses that Magda has” towards her friend’s urn in the book—like talking to it—“are very true to real life. At least for me. I found that the desire to connect and pay homage to that person still very much existed in ways that I didn’t expect.”

Montague’s initial inspiration for the story came when her therapist dropped her. “It’s not as sad as it sounds,” she interjects, explaining that during the pandemic, her therapist—whom she guesses was in her 70s—decided to downsize her practice to only patients she was seeing regularly. “When I asked her what she was planning to do with all of that newfound free time,” she continues, “there was a pause. And she said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll travel.’ I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

Thinking about her therapist led Montague to the character of Magda, and Sara’s character appeared soon after. “I thought I was drafting a short story,” Montague recalls. “And within a couple of pages, Sara was already there. I thought, ‘Okay, this is perhaps not a short story, and this is definitely about the relationship, the friendship between these two women.’”

Readers who plunge into this heartfelt, well-told saga may be surprised to discover that Montague is only 31. “It is very easy for me to write from the vantage point of a senior citizen,” she admits with a laugh. “Perhaps too easy.” She describes her friendship with an 80-year-old named Lena, noting, “if you just had a profile of the two of us, you would never know that I was the younger one. [Lena] likes dancing to house music and afternoon boat cruises, and I am often in bed with a cup of tea at an hour that I won’t disclose. But I’ve spent a lot of my life around significantly older people, many of whom were mining the difficult space of recognizing that their lives were more than likely half over, sometimes more than three-quarters over.” The conversations Magda has with herself about what it means to enter her 70s are drawn from ones Montague has had “with many of the older folks in my life.”

“Most women I know become happier and more fulfilled as they get older,” she adds, “and I wanted Magda to very slowly come to terms with that.”

 “That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.”

Montague got to know Lena through SAGE, a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ elders and fosters intergenerational connections among LGBTQ+ people. Hearing about Lena’s experiences living in New York informed Montague’s writing, including her decision to set How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? in 2011, just before New York state’s Marriage Equality Act.

“One of the things I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the inherent queerness of female friendship,” she explains. “The intimacies that are allowed both privately and publicly to female friends that aren’t allowed to men. As an adult, for example, I’ll often have a friend stay over, and my male friends would never have a sleepover. . . . Women are encouraged to support each other in ways both emotional and physical [that] are so different from the ways that men are socialized.” She suggests that the intimacy of female friendships can be confusing for male partners, even a source of envy, “because it’s a degree of closeness that they have not been allowed. And maybe it’s even a degree of closeness . . . they have not been able to achieve with their partners, you know, because those needs are being met elsewhere.”

Montague dedicates her book to her friend Isabel, whom she calls “the platonic great love of my life.” They met at summer camp and have been “a constant” in each other’s lives since they were 13. The two talk every day, and as Isabel is a poet, they often confer about writing projects.

Once Montague decided that Magda would take a road trip, she says, “I had a pretty good sense of where she would go, but I didn’t have as much of a sense of what would happen to her emotional or intellectual self along the way. That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.” She adds, “The first draft had many more flat tires and a number of more absurd characters who didn’t make it through to the final manuscript.”

Montague also turned to psychology textbooks for reference. They were useful for chronicling Magda’s psychiatric practice as well as Magda’s own inner struggles, which are much harder for Magda to face than her patients’ quandaries. Montague confesses, “There were many moments when I just wished I could grab Magda by the shoulders and shake her. And then I had to remember that I was the one creating this person and all of her problems—which meant I was also responsible for solving them.” Never fear, readers. The solutions—and the long and winding roads that Magda takes to reach them—are one of the many delights of this book.

The author still feels connected to Magda and Sara, and anticipates that these characters may reappear in her writing. However, she is now “very much in the weeds with the next one”—something completely different. Montague is an extremely busy literary professional: She also works as an editor for Dey Street Books, focusing on narrative nonfiction, science and wellness books. (She recently worked on NPR music critic Ann Powers’ “kaleidoscopic” biography of Joni Mitchell, Traveling.) Montague says that it helps that she suffers from insomnia, which gives her time at night for her own writing. Writing fiction while editing nonfiction dovetails nicely for her. “It feels like there’s just enough distance between the two, but there’s enough overlap that I can learn and apply those learnings to the other,” she explains.

Montague has always filled her life with books, and juggling between different ones is nothing new. As a preschooler in Irvington, New York, she kept books in multiple rooms so that one was always at the ready. She kept one in her bedroom, another in the kitchen and yet another in the front hallway so she’d have something to look at while putting on her shoes. She began writing short stories at a young age as well. “I was always particularly captivated by people and their motivations for—everything really,” she says with a laugh. “I think at the heart of it, that’s always a principal focus and fascination of mine.”

What about that therapist who dropped her and inspired How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? Does she plan to send her a copy?

“Yes,” Montague says. “She was very excited to hear about the book, and we’ve exchanged letters here and there. My current therapist is also excited to read it, but I’m a little scared of what they’ll make of it.”

Read our review of How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Anna Montague author photo by Hannah Solomon.

Anna Montague’s empathic debut novel, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?, follows a woman entering her 70s and coming to terms with the loss of a friend through the twists and turns of a summer road trip.
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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.
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Soon after Magda Eklund turns 65, she and her longtime best friend Sara have a discussion about birthday parties. Magda brings up one of her earlier parties, where Sara was at first “nowhere to be seen,” eventually arriving late. Sara reassures her by saying, “Mags, I will only ever surprise you by showing up, how’s that? For the rest of your life, whenever you least expect it, I’ll be there.”

That prescient pledge turns out to be the premise of Anna Montague’s debut novel, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? By 2011, when Magda turns 70, Sara has died—quite suddenly—and her husband has asked Magda to become caretaker of Sara’s ashes because his girlfriend is moving in. Magda, a psychiatrist, obliges: The ebullient, artsy Sara was the shining light in her life, and after her death Magda has drifted. She spends all of her time helping patients in her Manhattan practice, while steadfastly ignoring her own confounding issues. She continues to write letters to her late friend, noting, for instance, “How perhaps I’ve always been a better custodian of other people’s feelings than my own.” However, when she stumbles upon Sara’s plans for the two of them to celebrate Magda’s 70th birthday with a road trip, Magda decides to forge ahead with the journey.

In lesser hands, this setup—having a deceased major character—might present hurdles, such as the difficulty of revealing layers of the past while advancing the plot, and of making Magda’s interior psychological journey compelling. Rest assured, Montague nimbly tackles each of these challenges and more, including frequent, well-balanced doses of humor and pathos. Magda’s road trip, which includes stops in Virginia, Tennessee, New Orleans, Texas and New Mexico, allows her to meet an intriguing succession of characters, all while learning more about her own psyche and her relationship with Sara. At one point, she wanders into a women’s retreat, where the dubious director’s words prove apt: “The real trips happen here, in our heads. In our hearts.”

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is a noteworthy debut about looking back while moving forward. Friendship, love, regret, repression, grief, yearning, aging and new beginnings—Montague explores each of these themes with both creative and contemplative depth.

Read our interview with Anna Montague about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Anna Montague explores friendship, aging, grief, regret and love with both creative and contemplative depth in her noteworthy debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
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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.

On the second page of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s novel Clean, we learn that “the girl dies.” That startling disclosure propels readers into an extended, engrossing monologue that blends a taut mystery with a vivid account of the hardships of a servant’s life in the home of the family for whom she works.

Addressing unidentified interrogators located on the other side of a one-way mirror, Estela Garcia asserts early on that her account “has several beginnings” and that “nothing is ever as simple as it seems.” From that it’s clear that the story of the circumstances leading to the tragic death of 7-year-old Julia, the daughter of lawyer Mara Lopez, and her husband, physician Juan Cristobal Jensen, of Santiago, Chile, will be a digressive one. 

For Estela, hot, dry Santiago provides a dramatic contrast to her home on an island off Chile’s southern coast. Mara is pregnant when 33-year-old Estela joins the household, and the maid quickly must adapt herself to the demands of her employers, which become even more challenging after Julia’s birth. She’s a difficult child, especially when it comes to her resistance, as she grows, to eating.

In Sophie Hughes’ spare, quietly eloquent translation, Zerán portrays a life of incessant toil, interrupted by the Sunday of leisure Estela often spends without leaving her room. Her employers make little effort to relate to her on a human level, and she’s haunted by her separation from her mother, who had urged her not to work as a domestic servant. 

Estela’s melancholy, which at one point drives her into a protracted silence as she goes about her duties, is interrupted only briefly when a mutt she names Yany follows her home from a nearby gas station, later returning for periodic visits that must be concealed from Mara and Juan. The “charmless dog” is involved in the cascading series of events that culminate in Julia’s death, and by the time Estela’s narrative comes to a close, the ultimate responsibility for that tragedy is anything but clear. Clean is a well-drawn character study whose sadness lingers in the mind. 

Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean is the story of a live-in servant who is involved in a child’s tragic death. This well-drawn character study’s sadness lingers in the mind.
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Teenage years are hard enough to get through as it is. Add a fractured family life, and the terrain gets even rockier. That’s the situation facing Cora Mowat, a Scottish girl growing up in a grimy post-industrial town along the Firth of Forth, in Only Here, Only Now, Tom Newlands’ uncompromising debut novel.

The book spans four years, from 1994 to 1998. Newlands has created a memorable character in Cora, who, at the outset, is 14 and lives alone with her mother, a wheelchair user, in Muircross, “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget.” With that description, who could blame her for having her “heart set on skipping this housing estate and vanishing,” preferably to college in Glasgow?

As Cora and her mother wait for approval on an application for a better house in Abbotscraig, a school psychologist recommends that restless Cora be “checked for anxiety, and for being hyper.” Like Newlands, Cora has ADHD, which she describes by saying, “It’s like you’re always tired but you can never rest.”  

That’s just one of the hurdles Cora has to negotiate, all of which Newlands describes with memorably earthy phrases. Her mom’s new boyfriend is “a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker” who has a missing left eyeball yet is kind to her, unlike the other “kitten stranglers” her mom has brought home. After he moves in with them, however, Cora wonders what he’s doing with CDs, alarm clocks, vacuum-packed legs of lamb and other seemingly stolen merchandise in his room.

By year’s end, a sudden tragedy upends Cora’s life and expectations. Newlands dramatizes the resulting changes in the book’s subsequent sections, first in Abbotscraig in 1996, where Cora has a relationship with a young man who’s a troublemaker, and then in Glasgow in 1998, where she is forced to confront her choices of the past four years and decide what she wants to do next. 

The book sags a bit in its middle section, but the tension and distinctive characterizations return in the novel’s final third. Only Here, Only Now may be one among many coming-of-age stories, but this winning debut is distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters and the originality of his prose.

Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
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

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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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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.
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Thunder Song

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

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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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Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.

The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?

Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.

I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.

At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.

There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.

“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”

I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?

I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.

Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.

And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.

Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write? 

Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.

“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.

Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.

Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.

Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.

Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”

This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.

The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?

I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.

Read our starred review of The Mighty Red.

Author photo of Louise Erdrich by Jenn Ackerman.

Love, a river and sugar beets—in Louise Erdrich’s stunning 19th novel, it’s all connected.
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.
Review by

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.

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