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There’s a peculiar art to writing a novel that’s as inwardly focused as Death Valley the latest book from author and poet Melissa Broder (Milk Fed). While the narrative thrust of the story is determined by its first-person narrator’s outward wanderings, it is what’s going on inside her heart and soul that delivers the real, satisfying emotional punch. To pull that punch off takes prose that’s both memorable and relatable, as well as a narrator with an inner life that is fulfilling both thematically and narratively. That Death Valley manages this is enough to make it a thoroughly engrossing literary achievement—even before factoring in Broder’s humor, gift for linguistic flourishes and command of character.

Broder’s narrator is an author who heads to a desert hotel to work on her next book, leaving multiple personal crises back home in Los Angeles. Her father is still clinging to life in a hospital bed months after suffering an accident, while her husband’s chronic illness keeps him largely housebound and seems to be strengthening. On a short hike through the desert, the narrator finds a giant cactus with a wound in its side that feels like a doorway worth stepping through. What happens after she steps into the cactus is, of course, an entirely new journey, but Broder keeps it just as relatable even as her narrator begins shaping conversations between inanimate objects and seeing visions of the past and future colliding in her mind.

Through the voice of our nameless narrator, Broder immediately and thrillingly carves out a personality that’s equal parts emotional and wry; wise and impulsive. Even when she’s simply walking the halls of a Best Western, we feel like we understand this woman and grasp how her mind is being pulled in multiple directions at once.

Rich with observations about the shape of stories and the ways in which we center ourselves even in the narratives of other people, Death Valley is an exhilarating meditation on death, life, survival and how we use stories to get us through it all. It’s a triumph for Broder and an intensely intimate ride for readers.

Death Valley is an exhilarating meditation on death, life, survival and how we use stories to get us through it all.
STARRED REVIEW

Our top 10 books of October 2023

October’s Top 10 list includes Alix E. Harrow’s best book yet, plus the long-awaited second novel from Ayana Mathis, a pitch-perfect romance from KJ Charles and a breathtaking debut memoir.
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Book jacket image for Remember Us by Jacqueline Woodson

Remember Us

Jacqueline Woodson flawlessly intersperses explosive moments—and games of basketball—among quiet, reflective scenes while responding to her protagonist’s weighty fears with reassurance about the permeance of

Book jacket image for Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey

C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel,

Book jacket image for The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled

In The Unsettled’s short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting

Book jacket image for The Cost of Free Land by Rebecca Clarren

The Cost of Free Land

Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Rebecca Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native American

Book jacket image for A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Man of Two Faces

In his memoir, award-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait.

Book jacket image for How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

How to Say Babylon

Safiya Sinclair’s memoir should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all

Book jacket image for Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Starling House

Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House is a riveting Southern gothic fantasy with gorgeous prose and excellent social commentary.

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October's Top 10 list includes Alix E. Harrow's best book yet, plus the long-awaited second novel from Ayana Mathis, a pitch-perfect romance from KJ Charles and a breathtaking debut memoir.
Review by

For Bryan Washington, cooking, eating together or even refusing a home-cooked meal has far-reaching emotional repercussions. In his new novel, Family Meal, the relationships among friends are defined by the food they prepare and strengthened by the meals they share. Food provides the ultimate opportunity for community and witness against a backdrop of personal hardship and urban gentrification.

Cam is back in his hometown of Houston after the traumatic death of his boyfriend, Kai, who worked as a translator and split his time between Los Angeles and Osaka, Japan. Unable to shake the violent circumstances of Kai’s death, Cam is haunted by Kai’s memory and his nights spiral into bouts of indulgent drug use and casual sex. He eventually ends up at the bakery where he once worked, which is owned by Mae. She and her late husband, Jin, took Cam in after the death of his parents, raising him alongside their son TJ. Though the boys were once close, they drifted apart as adults, and TJ struggles to navigate Cam’s limitless despair and self-destructive behavior (Washington provides a content note suggesting that readers for whom self-harm, addiction and disordered eating are sensitive issues should go at their own pace). Feeling stuck in a relationship with a married man, TJ tentatively begins a new relationship with another employee at the bakery and explores his own nascent wish for independence. Meanwhile, Mae is under pressure to sell the business, and her thoughts about expansion are dependent on TJ’s plans. Or are they?

Although facing the people you’ve loved and left behind is often painful, as Washington demonstrates in Family Meal, it can reveal the unconditional love that remains. Shifting between points of view, Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion. The meals his characters enjoy together through it all—from congee to collards to croissants—remind us of the many ways that love, like food, sustains us.

Bryan Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion.
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C Pam Zhang’s sophomore novel has the same striking prose that made her debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), so remarkable, but the similarities end there. Land of Milk and Honey is much stranger and perhaps even more beautiful. It’s a dystopian novel about food, pleasure, power, monstrosity and womanhood. It’s about the threads that keep us rooted to ourselves and each other, and about what happens when those threads fray and dissolve. The sheer range of Zhang’s imagination is striking.

A gray smog has spread across the world, causing catastrophic food shortages and global famine. A struggling chef, adrift, alone and stranded in Europe when the U.S. borders close, takes a job for a billionaire, preparing meals for his elite research community on a mountaintop in Italy. There, she cooks extravagant meals with ingredients that have disappeared from the rest of the world—aged cheeses, fresh meat, delicate greens, strawberries. Slowly, she cooks her way back to herself, finding pleasures she thought she’d lost forever. But she’s also forced to confront the reality of what her mysterious employer and his genius daughter are doing in this strange paradise—and the narrator’s own complicity in it.

Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in this novel, but there is outrageous beauty. There is nothing nice in the way she describes the act of cooking, elaborate meals, butter or honey dissolving on the tongue, sex, bodily pleasure. Instead, Zhang’s prose is sensual, lavish, violent, incredibly close, without restraint. The narrator describes events from a distance of many years, but this only makes the heady details she recalls even more remarkable. For the narrator, and thus, for the readers, that old cliche “it feels like it happened yesterday” is undeniably true.

Land of Milk and Honey casts the kind of spell that readers can spend a lifetime hungering for. To read this book is to know yourself as a being made of skin and touch, a being made of other bodies. The impact is powerful and immediate. This is an astonishingly accomplished work, a deceptively simple dystopian vision that lays bare the heartbreaking complexities of seeking and giving pleasure, of wanting and loving in a world that is fundamentally shattered and forever shattering anew. It is the kind of uncomfortably honest art that disturbs and unsettles. It is also a generous and wildly celebratory ode to what keeps humans striving for something beyond mere survival: art, connection, taste, the sublime and fleeting pleasures of the body.

Read C Pam Zhang’s essay on Land of Milk and Honey.

C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.

Isle McElroy’s second novel, People Collide, is a body-swapping, Kafkaesque story that explores gender, identity and how well we can know one another.

On a fall afternoon, Eli arrives at his wife Elizabeth’s classroom at the end of the school day and can’t understand why Elizabeth’s boss is suddenly calling him Elizabeth. Slowly, Eli comes to understand that he is somehow inhabiting Elizabeth’s body, even as his memories and thoughts remain his own. And, just as mysterious, he discovers that Elizabeth has disappeared.

Both Eli and Elizabeth are writers, though Elizabeth is the more ambitious, accomplished one—and she’s been awarded a teaching fellowship in Bulgaria. Eli has tagged along for a year of expat life, adjusting to their too-small studio apartment and the moody southern Bulgarian city, and trying to write. So even before “The Incident,” as he calls it, Eli and Elizabeth are unsettled, foreigners in a foreign place. As Eli copes with this strange new reality and struggles to credibly inhabit Elizabeth’s body, he searches for his lost wife. Misunderstandings abound; their handful of friends, along with Eli’s mother and Elizabeth’s parents, all think that Eli has abandoned Elizabeth, though it’s Elizabeth (in Eli’s body) who has left.

People Collide asks questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics as it offers mysteries for Eli to solve. Where has Elizabeth gone? Is she still in Europe? And is she, in fact, in Eli’s body, as he is in hers? And if Eli-as-Elizabeth finds Elizabeth-as-Eli, what happens then? It’s not a spoiler to say that Eli does find Elizabeth, and McElroy’s language in describing the couple’s encounters is inventive and sometimes funny.

Later sections of the novel move into Elizabeth’s point of view, and then into the perspective of Johanna, Elizabeth’s mother, who sees 28-year-old Elizabeth and Eli as not-quite-adults. These late sections are quite moving, as Eli and Elizabeth slowly come to a changed understanding of themselves, one another and their parents. People Collide is a distinctive and atmospheric novel.

People Collide is an inventive and atmospheric body-swapping novel that raises questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics.
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In Undiscovered, a Peruvian journalist and novelist living in Madrid confronts her past, present and future in a meditative work of autofiction. Gabriela Wiener begins with a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to see the Charles Wiener collection of artifacts, noting “that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.” Her father has just died, and as she grieves, she examines his life, exploring his relationships with her, her mother and his mistress. As she aptly notes, “My penchant for playing detective on family cases has only gotten worse with time.”

Charles Wiener, the author’s great-great-grandfather, was an Austrian-French explorer who traveled extensively in Peru and came close to rediscovering the ruins of Machu Picchu. He is said to have taken 4,000 pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. Undiscovered insightfully probes his legacy, noting that he was more of a “media man” than a scientist. “Back then,” Wiener writes, “you just had to move some dirt around to call it archaeology.” She is particularly horrified to discover that Charles Wiener purchased, or as she corrects him, stole, an Indigenous child from his mother, taking the boy back to Europe with him.

Wiener freely discusses many aspects of her own life, including her discomfort as a brown-skinned girl around her white paternal grandparents. From time to time, she inserts humor, noting, for instance, that after her grandfather’s death, “my white grandmother became more affectionate toward us and started farting when she walked from one room to another.” She also muses about her relationships as a polyamorous woman. She shares a child with her husband, while her wife and husband also share a child, and she finds herself being unfaithful to both her husband and wife. “I’m at a loss about what to do with my life,” she confesses, interweaving this uncertainty with the effects of her family’s long legacy of racism, desire and colonialism. Long strands from the past entangle her every move.

While Undiscovered often feels more like an essay than a novel, Wiener delivers a no-holds-barred, unflinching discussion. She reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”

Even as it probes the author’s own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
Behind the Book by

The two institutions in which I spent the most time as a child in Lexington, Kentucky, were the library and the church. The library was a small local branch at which, every Saturday, I’d check out my limit of 20 books. These I devoured alongside bags of misshapen apples on sale at the store. The church offered free childcare in the form of Bible School. Sessions began with the Old Testament and ended with the Pringles I wasn’t allowed at home.

Both spaces fed the same fundamental need. I have always been a glutton for wonder. On the page, in the pew, I would sometimes experience a glorious expansion of my self beyond my body. I was equally moved to tears by the scene of a mouse warrior sacrificing himself in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series and a hymn about God so loving the little children that he gave up his only son. Both experiences ignited a physical charge: a tingling, a surge of heat and awe. I felt it in my body.

***

A few years later, I lost religion. I continued to reread the Old Testament long after giving up prayer. By then my family had moved to California. Under that terrifying expanse of Western sky, I anchored myself in the old story of the world as a place infused with meaning, wonder, flashes of justice and grace. The syntax of the King James translation is brutal and beautiful; I suspect that it moves beneath my prose, invisible yet substantial, bones beneath the skin.

Having lost God, I kept reading. I was still young enough to do so indiscriminately, omnivorously. John Steinbeck’s California, with its sweeping timescales and pitiless cycles of good and evil, strummed a chord of near-Biblical majesty. The Animorphs series’ interstellar battles writ large the dilemma of being a moral creature on Earth. Of course I read C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia, after which I wandered into Lewis’s little-known Christian space novel, Out of the Silent Planet. In a brilliant formal move, Lewis sidelines his scientists to secondary characters, an excuse to skip the trivia of how lightspeed engines operate. It is an awestruck Christian philologist—as in, he is literally stunned and kidnapped—who walks the alien planet with the wonder of an innocent in Eden.

“We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to our mouths and hands at the table.”

Perhaps this smacks of sacrilege, but just as I saw little distinction between the emotions at the core of religion and science fiction, so I failed to see the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, literary realism, magical realism and pulp. Say a child steps through a wardrobe to find a vast, snowy forest; say a band of outcasts wanders for 40 years in the desert before discovering their land of milk and honey; say a teenager traces the orbit of two moons in an alien sky; say a refugee from Oklahoma beholds the fertile swells of California: each is the story of the ordinary world as an aperture to wonder.

***

A decade later, I was stopped by this sentence in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

I was 20 years old by the time I read these words. I lived in the heart of a gray city: Cambridge, England, where I studied at the famous university and dreamed of being a writer. Because my admission into this rarefied space had involved an aesthetic as well as intellectual education, I did not mention the other books that Waugh reminded me of; they were not serious literature. Certain texts were “guilty pleasures.” Certain consumptions were not spoken of.

***

Another decade passed. It was 2020. Under the gray skies of Washington state, I lived in isolation during a pandemic that seemed to close off every possibility of wonder. In the face of national and global crises—protests, elections, the fate of family and friends—I became impatient with my body. It was an annoyance, if not an outright embarrassment. Every so often it would clamor for a lavish meal, or a drink with a friend, or a trip. I cut these desires out when they surfaced, reminding myself that I had my health and a roof over my head. I pared my life down to survival.

“There is nothing small about the story of one woman rediscovering the wellspring of her own pleasure. I have come to believe that there is nothing more universal.”

I was also trying to survive the publication of my first novel. I had not prepared for the vast sense of loss that swept in when writing, once my private refuge, became public. The vulnerability of this event is usually balanced by the consolation of community, but in the isolation of 2020, I had no chance to meet readers face to face, or share rooms with booksellers and writers. I never saw my book in the physical world. I had only my loss. Writing seemed void of its original meaning. And then, in the spring of 2021, I ate a meal, and I wrote a book.

***

My second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, concerns a chef who faces, in the starkest way, the quandary of seeking pleasure in a dying world. The novel asks, where do you go when what you love loses meaning? How do you contend with the immensity of that grief? Is it possible to find a source of meaning again, deep within yourself?

To answer these questions, I had to write into the body.

My own body came alive again in 2021, on the evening of my first meal out with a friend. We gathered in the courtyard of a Filipino restaurant in Seattle. Stiff after long isolation, we moved through the necessaries: health, work, hardship, loss. And then the food arrived. A pause; the air shifted. We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to our mouths and hands at the table. For a few moments, there was nothing else to think about. No way to be but human.

My first novel ended with a girl, denied and sacrificed, who finally dares to ask what she wants. Land of Milk and Honey begins with this question, which I reencountered at that restaurant in Seattle. To eat that night was to look beyond survival, to believe that the world was capable of offering more. What I had dismissed as shameful and selfish in myself changed form at that shared table.

***

I am increasingly interested in the body as an instrument of meaning. My love for church resided in the physical thrill of liturgy: the transcendence of a single body expanding to join a shared search for meaning. I now seek that connection in literature, in art, in music—and yes, in food.

One project of this novel was to depict how the urges of an individual body may be no different than the feeling in a church pew. It took rigor and deliberation to render pleasure seriously, especially a woman’s pleasure. Too often female pleasure is dismissed as frivolous, selfish, small. As spectacle, or as a base instinct to master. But as Paul D says to Sethe at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “You your best thing.” This novel is a love letter to food and pleasure as sacred, instrumental arts that our bodies are born capable of making.

This art can be found anywhere, in any form. If my novel is realism, then it is realism in the vein of Brideshead Revisited or the strange stories of Nicole Krauss, works alert to the epiphany in the daily. If my novel is speculative or science fiction, then it is the kind that blurs the spaces between the equal miracles of science, religion and magic. I am tired of constructing false boundaries: between my desires and my needs, between genres, between the high and the low. The chef in my novel grew up placing French-inflected Western fine dining on an altar. She learns to consider the other forms in which glory may also appear: in street food, in a meal of frozen peas cooked by an overtaxed parent, in a bag of Doritos.

There is nothing small about the story of one woman rediscovering the wellspring of her own pleasure. I have come to believe that there is nothing more universal. Consider the first fig I ate in the spring of 2021 in which I came back to life. My favorite fruit seller cut the fruit on his bare palm and offered me a taste. I was masked and wary, leaving the house only for what we called essentials; to accept the fig was to acknowledge a deeper form of nourishment. We spoke of the sweetness of figs, and asparagus, and the artichokes that would arrive next week, and the cherries promised next season, and all the seasons and meals and years ahead. Like many in the market, we peered through the narrow aperture of that year and chose to look toward abundance.

Read our starred review of Land of Milk and Honey.

Author photo by Clayton Cubitt.

C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, came out in the spring of 2020—a tremendously difficult time to be a first-time novelist. Yet her astounding voice and originality completely redefined the Western genre. Her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, is a true work of art, rooted deeply in pleasure, wonder and food.
Review by

In her kaleidoscopic debut novel, Oindrila Mukherjee brings the fictional Indian city of Hrishipur to vivid life. Located in northern India, Hrishipur is a young city, home to migrants looking for work, elite professionals dazzled by the glittering nightlife and ultrawealthy business owners searching for the next big deal. With luxury malls, exclusive apartment complexes and crowded streets, it is a place of dizzying extremes.

The Dream Builders unfolds over the course of one hot, dry summer. Maneka Roy, a university professor who’s been living in the U.S. since college, returns home to visit her father after her mother’s sudden death. Her parents moved to Hrishipur from their native Kolkata, investing in one of many new construction projects that never materialized. Now her retired father is struggling to make ends meet, and Maneka is confronted with a city that’s as foreign to her as the American Midwest once was.

But Maneka and her father are just two of the 10 characters whose lives and stories intersect in The Dream Builders. There’s also Ramona, Maneka’s wealthy childhood friend, who has just bought a flat in the biggest new construction in Hrishipur: Trump Towers. There’s Jessica, a single mother with an adopted daughter, and Gopal, an electrician fueled by gritty determination. In other chapters, a husband longs to reconnect with his wife, a spa worker worries about her family’s financial situation, and a photographer dreams of his big break. Mukherjee moves easily from one point of view to the next, highlighting the cultural, class and gender diversity of the city.

All of these characters are hiding from themselves, each other, their pasts and futures. They may be neighbors, friends, lovers, employers and employees, but their dreams, desires and wounds are not immediately apparent to one another. They only ever see other people in bits and pieces, which often leads to misguided assumptions about the relative ease or hardship of another person’s life. This dissonance gives the novel its richness and propulsive motion. Although Mukherjee lingers in each perspective for only a chapter, her characters are so specific, so immediately human, that they remain resolutely present long after the narrative has moved on.

The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world. They long for home, belonging, stability and comfort, struggling to root themselves even as the ground shifts beneath them. In the spaces between their stories, Mukherjee invites readers to unknot the deeper echoes and connections that make this beautifully structured novel such a strong debut.

The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world.
Review by

We like our politics to be binary. It is comforting to hear that we are on the good side and other people are on the bad. But life, obviously, is not binary, and neither are our politics. In V.V. Ganeshananthan’s second novel, readers are carried to a reckoning with this fact. 

Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, in the early years of that nation’s decadeslong civil war, Brotherless Night follows Sashi, a 16-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a doctor. As she grows up, she watches the Tamil minority fight against the oppressive Sinhalese, with her own brothers and friends buying into violent ideologies, and she begins to reconsider what healing and care really mean.

The novel begins by immediately challenging our assumptions and vocabularies. The brief prologue is written from Sashi’s perspective in 2009 as she tries to contact “a terrorist I used to know.” She continues by pressing the importance of that word, terrorist. In American culture, to which Ganeshananthan and Sashi are knowingly communicating, terrorist is akin to a slur; there are, by this definition, no good terrorists. 

Foregrounding this challenge prepares the reader for what is to come: a story about “terrorists” that destroys the very sense of that word. The first chapter begins, “I met the first terrorist I knew when he was deciding to become one.” As the reader and Sashi follow the community’s young men in their indoctrination, Ganeshananthan forces the reader to discard a binary description of the world in favor of a more complex, human one.

But language is not the only thing that Ganeshananthan grapples with here. Violence, too, is front and center in the novel. As the civil war erupts, Sashi begins to consider conflict and war on a large scale, and it becomes impossible for her to ignore that healing is more than a physical practice. Abandoning her medical aspirations, Sashi’s new mission becomes documenting human rights violations, and she describes the disasters of war in a vital, sharp way. Although this work allows Sashi and others to better understand the impact violence has on their society, it also proves to be a life-threatening business.

Through this moving story, Ganeshananthan traces the human aspects of war—the physical losses and tragedies as well as the conflicts of values that are often the true battlefields. Rather than justifying or lamenting the horrors of a civil war that ended a little over a decade ago, she shows that by focusing on all of the people involved, both “good” and “bad,” we can learn how and why humans fight—and why it’s so important to stop the cycle.

In this moving novel, V.V. Ganeshananthan traces the human aspects of war—the physical losses and tragedies as well as the conflicts of values that are often the true battlefields.

“Solitude is tolerable, even enjoyable at times. But when you realise that you’ve given your life to someone, yet you know nothing but his name? That kind of solitude is loneliness. That’s what kills you.”

In An Yu’s ethereal Ghost Music, a woman’s grip on her suffocating life loosens as she is drawn into a surreal world of secrets and ghostly experiences where her deep yearnings can finally resurface and transform her.

Thirty-year-old Song Yan has devoted the past three years to her husband, Bowen. She has also made room in her life for his disgruntled mother, who is recently widowed and now lives with them in their Beijing apartment. Although Song Yan traded her career as a concert pianist to be a dutiful wife, Bowen is more interested in his job as a BMW executive than in having children.

The disquiet between Song Yan and her mother-in-law is temporarily quelled by the mysterious weekly delivery of prized mushrooms, which the women cook together. However, Song Yan becomes increasingly frustrated with and disconnected from Bowen after she learns some information about his past. She turns her attention toward investigating who sent the mushrooms, which leads her down the proverbial rabbit hole to Bai Yu, a famous pianist who vanished a decade earlier. In the process, Song Yan rediscovers an aspect of herself that was also on the verge of disappearing.

Ghost Music, like Yu’s first novel, Braised Pork, is beautifully metaphoric and insightful. Song Yan’s first-person narrative reveals the full richness of her mind and senses, which have been stifled by her fear of shame and the disregard of her husband and mother-in-law. Throughout this haunting social commentary, Yu’s lyrical language and atmospheric descriptions bring out the contrast between Song Yan’s oppressive, superficial reality and the hypnotic world where she converses with fungi. Fans of literary novels with a supernatural edge, such as Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, take note.

In An Yu’s ethereal Ghost Music, a woman’s grip on her suffocating life loosens as she is drawn into a surreal world of unspoken secrets and ghostly experiences.

Sam

Review by

Allegra Goodman’s Sam stands out among realistic coming-of-age novels about contemporary American girlhood.

We meet Sam when she is 7 years old. She lives in an apartment on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her mother, Courtney, and half brother, Noah, a spirited 2-year-old with problems all his own. Sam’s father, Mitchell, is an itinerant juggler and magician who is often on the road. Noah’s father, Jack, is hostile to Sam. 

Courtney loves her children but is overwhelmed by the need to work multiple low-paying jobs to support them. She fervently wants Sam to get the education she herself was unable to obtain. 

During one of Mitchell’s intermittent appearances, he takes Sam to the local fair, where she summits a climbing wall in the rain and discovers her passion. She is a talented climber, but climbing is as much about failing and falling as reaching the top. This metaphor seems obvious, but in Goodman’s skillful telling, it feels real and fraught. We’re brought deeply into Sam’s sensibility, her need to win, her dislike of formal schooling and her desire to please her mother, who has worked so hard to give Sam a decent life. We viscerally feel Sam’s peril, both as a climber and as a young girl. We’re with her through loneliness, problematic boyfriends, self-doubt and loss of youthful confidence, and we connect with her desire to be herself and realize her own dreams.

The novel follows Sam until she enters junior college, and although there are many failures and falls along the way, this is by no means a gloomy story. Sam is a very appealing character, and so are the friends who sustain her. 

Sam’s struggles aren’t uncommon, but the way Goodman imbues them with weight and clarity is. We care deeply how Sam’s story turns out, thanks to Goodman’s brilliance and empathy.

Sam’s coming-of-age struggles aren’t uncommon, but the way Allegra Goodman imbues them with weight and clarity is.

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

The engrossing 10th novel from Nobel laureate Gurnah is filled with compassion and historical insight.

Afterlives book cover

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life.

All This Could Be Different

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

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.

The Book of Goose

Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah

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.

Calling for a Blanket Dance

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

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.

The Candy House

The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz

In this story collection, Muñoz forges a new Latinx narrative, wherein all aspects of Latinx life are displayed with richness and complexity.

Book jacket image for The Consequences by Manuel Munoz

Either/Or by Elif Batuman

Selin, the hero of Batuman’s The Idiot, returns with a voice that is more mature, reflective and droll.

Either Or book jacket

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

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.

Book jacket image for The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

How It Went by Wendell Berry

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.

Book jacket image for How It Went by Wendell Berry

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Escoffery’s connected stories offer an imaginative, fresh take on being a man and nonwhite immigrant in America.

If I Survive You book jacket

Lessons by Ian McEwan

This scathing, unsettling novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises.

Lessons cover

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Garmus’ devastating and funny debut novel blows the lid off simplistic myths about the 1950s.

Lessons in Chemistry book cover

Natural History by Andrea Barrett

The stories in Barrett’s dazzling collection demonstrate that while history distills events, fiction can bring messy humanity to life.

Natural History book cover

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Ng is undoubtedly at the top of her game as she portrays an American society overcome by fear.

Our Missing Hearts book cover

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

Despite its doomed Midwestern setting, Gunty’s debut novel makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have.

The Rabbit Hutch book jacket

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

It’s impossible to predict how, exactly, you’ll fall in love with this novel, but it’s an eventuality you can’t escape.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow book cover

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Diaz’s second novel is a beautifully composed masterpiece that examines the insidious disparities between rich and poor, truth and fiction.

Trust book cover

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Stuart’s follow-up to Shuggie Bain is a marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence.

Young Mungo book cover

Discover more of BookPage’s Best Books of 2022.

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.

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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.

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