Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin

Sign Up

Get the latest ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

All , , , Coverage

All Literary Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Only Here, Only Now

Review by Michael Magras

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.
NonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYASocial ScienceMysteryMemoirLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaEssays

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

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

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
Share this Article:
Book jacket image for The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red

Centered on a teen love triangle in a North Dakota community dominated by sugar beet farming, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red might just be a ...
Read more
Exposure by Ramona Emerson book jacket

Exposure

Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than Ramona Emerson’s debut, the National Book Award-longlisted Shutter.
Read more
berrypickers

The Berry Pickers

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 ...
Read more

BookPage enewsletter

Sign up to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday.

SIGN UP HERE

Recent Features

All Features
Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Red is an earth tone

Interview by Alice Cary

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.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionSocial ScienceLiterary FictionLifestylesHorrorHistoryHistorical FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsFantasyCultural HistoryCultural CriticismArts & Culture

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

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

Model Home

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

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

—Laura Hubbard

Djinnology by Seema Yasminis book jacket

Djinnology 

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

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

—Alice Cary

We Love the Nightlife by Rachel Koller Croft book jacket

We Love the Nightlife

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

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

—Matthew Jackson

American Scary by Jeremy Dauber book jacket

★ American Scary

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

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

—Amanda Haggard

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

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

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

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

—Stephanie Cohen-Perez

Eerie Legends by Ricardo Diseño book jacket

Eerie Legends 

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

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

—Laura Hutson Hunter

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk book jacket

★ The Empusium

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

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

—Alden Mudge

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

What I Know About You

Review by Laura Sackton

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mighty Red

Review by Alice Cary

A seemingly doomed wedding is the focal point of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, a propulsive novel that further justifies this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s acclaim. Time and time again, with just a few words of perfectly placed description—like “the layaway bridal gown hung like an apparition on the outside of the closet door”—Erdrich lends Shakespearean tones to her carefully drawn scenes.

Read our Q&A with Louise Erdrich about The Mighty Red.

Kismet Poe is a likable, confused teenager who desperately hopes that college will rescue her from the suffocating boredom she feels in Tabor, North Dakota, in 2008. Impulsively, she agrees to marry Gary Geist, a handsome young man who will eventually inherit two giant sugar beet farms. Quarterback Gary, however, is haunted by a tragedy involving his football teammates, the details of which are gradually and tantalizingly revealed. Kismet also remains attracted to another boyfriend, Hugo Dumach—a lovable, smart, homeschooled boy who “long[s] to challenge Gary to a duel.” He works in his mother’s bookstore, but plans to head to the oil fields to earn enough money to win Kismet over. In the meantime, Hugo and Kismet read and discuss Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as they try to resolve their romantic predicament. “Whatever Emma would do,” Kismet concludes, “I should do the opposite.”

Erdrich is a masterful literary juggler, commanding a richly drawn cast of characters whose encounters overflow with humor and pathos, as well as a variety of compelling storylines. Kismet’s father goes missing, for instance, and seems to have embezzled the church renovation fund. Her mother, Crystal, makes “bread from scratch not because it was artisanal but because it was cheaper.” Crystal and Kismet “had come to know on some level that they were the real Americans—the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans.” These, of course, are the people who populate Erdrich’s many novels.

The title refers to the Red River of the North, which snakes its way through the Red River Valley. This is very much a novel about the land and the people who have farmed it and fought to control it. Erdrich comments on the greed of agribusiness, noting that “this nutritionless white killer,” sugar, “is depleting the earth’s finest cropland.” Yet the book is also, as one character describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “about what’s most important . . . this kind of love between a parent and a child.”

With The Mighty Red, Erdrich takes on monumental themes in what just might be a new American classic.

Following a teen love triangle in a North Dakota community dominated by sugar beet farming, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Empusium

Review by Alden Mudge

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in September 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the novel draws inspiration both from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and from a real tuberculosis sanitarium, which, in an afterword, the author notes her effort to precisely recreate.

But this is Tokarczuk, for whom the factual and historical are just the beginning. She is known for how she mines her inspiration to achieve the mythical, and for her deft, dark satirical wit. 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 somber woods are seasonally populated by sooty charcoal burners, workers who in their off-hours fashion female effigies from moss and ferns and twigs. The narration, in the first-person plural, 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.” There are no graveyards in Görbersdorf, where disease presides, but a cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking.

While awaiting admission to the sanitarium, Mieczyslaw lodges at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen. The only other young person at the guesthouse is Thilo, an art student whose health is declining rapidly, and with whom Mieczyslaw develops an intimate friendship. The older men staying in the guesthouse come from various European cities, part of a society soon to collapse with the outbreak of World War I. After dinner, fueled by a ritual glass or two of the local psychoactive beverage, the men pontificate and mansplain, denigrating women in black-and-white terms that, Tokarczuk notes, are direct quotes from some of history’s brightest literary luminaries—Shakespeare, Yeats and many others. Mieczyslaw’s tablemates are full of certainty and unacknowledged fear.

Mieczyslaw listens, uncertain. The diagnosis that brought him to Görbersdorf came from his widowed father, who treated “the property entrusted to him in the figure of his son with great responsibility and—it was plain to see—love, albeit devoid of any sentimentality or any of the ‘female emotions’ that he so abhorred.” Mieczyslaw’s quest is to understand what, exactly, is wrong with him.

The Empusium is about a rigid patriarchal world and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—much like The Magic Mountain, which has been described as a bildungsroman. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczysl​​aw 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.

Olga Tokarczuk’s deft, dark satirical wit is on full display in The Empusium, which challenges the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe with horror and humor.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

The Book of George

Review by Maya Fleischmann

By George, she’s got it! Annoying yet affable, Kate Greathead’s George is a captivatingly mediocre antihero.

There’s nothing very remarkable about George or his family. They have their issues. George’s mother, Ellen, has become increasingly disconnected from him over the years, though she remains intimidating to him. Ellen is separating from George’s father, Denis, because Denis’s enthusiasm for luxury fashion has been draining the family funds. Then there’s George’s older sister, Cressida, who is unabashedly straightforward and critical of George, and, like his mother, regards him with a hint of contempt. Despite this friction, the unassuming George manages his family dynamics with seeming nonchalance. In fact, he rarely makes a fuss about the events in his life, and only occasionally shows passion for a goal or project, such as a college major in philosophy, before quickly returning to his habitual listlessness. This passivity even applies to his on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Jenny, who, like the members of his family, oscillates between having patience with him and finding him tedious.

The Book of George unravels George’s life in episodes that highlight his misadventures from ages 12 to 38. The epigraph, excerpted from a letter from the mother of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to her son, sets the narrative tone: Johanna Schopenhauer tells Arthur that while he has “everything that could make you a credit to human society . . . you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable.”

Greathead’s delicious deadpan delivery, with its understatement and ironic humor, is irresistible. The Book of George can take its place next to other novels with lovably frustrating main characters like Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.

Kate Greathead’s delicious understatement and ironic humor makes The Book of George an irresistible portrait of a lovably frustrating mediocre man.
FictionShort StoriesSatireLiterary Fiction

Rejection

Review by Thane Tierney

Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Intermezzo

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, tells a story of loss and grieving as two brothers reckon with the death of their father in ways that threaten to fragment their already troubled relationship. 

Peter Koubek is a socially and professionally competent lawyer living in Dublin in his early 30s. Beneath his polished exterior, he is bereft after his father’s death, suicidal and self-medicating with liquor and pills. His brother Ivan, younger by 10 years and once a chess prodigy, is now a loner struggling to maintain his early promise. At a regional chess match, Ivan falls for 36-year-old Margaret, who manages the local art center, and they begin a passionate romance despite their age difference. When Ivan confides in his older brother, Peter’s response is rude and dismissive. He is ashamed to confess to Ivan that his own love life is complicated. Peter is involved with two women: Naomi, a college student and part-time sex worker, and Sylvia, his first love, who suffered a disabling accident that led to their breakup years before. Peter and Ivan have long been locked into a cycle of judgment and disapproval. Now, their exchange crosses a line that it seems neither can come back from. 

As is typical in a Rooney novel, most of the traumas that shaped her characters—the father’s death, Margaret’s difficult separation from her heavily drinking ex-husband, Sylvia’s accident—happened prior to the events of the story. Rooney’s focus is instead on the various ways her characters are trapped inside their pain and if they are even going to emerge emotionally intact, and she brings skills she has honed on dissecting romantic relationships to the brothers’ bond with powerful results. Rooney underscores Peter and Ivan’s differences by changing her style when the focus shifts between them: Ivan’s chapters are told in a conventional third person, while Peter’s are narrated in a dreamy, stylized stream of consciousness that echoes Rooney’s countryman James Joyce. A tight focus on the siblings allows Rooney to delve into ideas about birth order and masculinity, while the careful balance between the novel’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Intermezzo Rooney’s most ambitious novel yet. 

The careful balance between Intermezzo’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Sally Rooney’s fourth novel her most ambitious yet.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Entitlement

Review by Michael Magras

Boy, the sacrifices some people will make to get ahead. It’s understandable to see another person’s shiny baubles and desire similar luxuries—but at what cost? This conflict of ambition provides the dramatic impetus for Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.

Brooke Orr, the novel’s 33-year-old Black protagonist, is a born-and-raised New Yorker who rides the subway every day, even knowing that there is a “lunatic at large who was jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic.” One of the adopted children of a white lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to reproductive justice, Brooke studied art history and spent several years teaching at a charter school but left it disillusioned because the school “only cared about STEM.” Brooke wants a more elegantly ornamented life. 

Then, a glimpse of a shiny bauble: In 2014, during the comparatively halcyon days of “Obama’s placid America,” she gets a job at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, dedicated to giving away 83-year-old Asher’s billions. Asher earned his money by taking over an uncle’s office supply store and then expanding into catalogs, real estate and malls. Asher comes to see Brooke as a protégé, in part because she reminds him of his daughter, Linda, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed on 9/11.

Soon, Asher is seeking Brooke’s advice on everything from gifts for his wife to candidates to favor with his riches. And Brooke discovers that she likes riding in Asher’s Bentley and wearing fancy clothes. As one character remarks, however, “Nobody gets something for nothing,” and as Brooke makes more and more uncharacteristic decisions, she learns that lesson all too well.

Entitlement isn’t as deeply felt as Alam’s previous novel, the brilliant Leave the World Behind, but anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in this excellent work.

Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Danzy Senna tried writing for TV. Instead, she wrote Colored Television

Interview by Carole V. Bell

Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television.  Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYASuspenseSocial ScienceScience FictionPopular FictionPop CulturePicture BookParanormal RomanceMemoirLiterary FictionChildren'sArts & Culture

Best Hispanic and Latinx titles of 2024 (so far)

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
September 1, 2024

Best Hispanic and Latinx titles of 2024 (so far)

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.
Share this Article:
Book jacket image for LatinoLand by Marie Arana

LatinoLand

Reporter Marie Arana paints a thoughtful portrait of how Latinos have shaped—and been shaped by—the United States in this punchy cultural history.
Read more
Book jacket image for Black Wolf by Juan Gomez-Jurado

Black Wolf

The Antonia Scott series is hands-down the best suspense trilogy to come along since Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
Read more
Book jacket image for Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar

Ultraviolet

Commenting on topics that range from patriarchy to colonialism, the internet to peer pressure, and first loves to heartbreaks, Aida Salazar delivers a fully intersectional ...
Read more
Book jacket image for No Going Back by Patrick Flores-Scott

No Going Back

The energy of No Going Back will sweep readers along, and they will sympathize with Antonio’s desire to become the person he knows he can ...
Read more
Book jacket image for American Diva by Deborah Paredez

American Diva

The exuberant American Diva celebrates “extraordinary, unruly, fabulous” women who earned their diva status and stood the test of time.
Read more
Book jacket image for Malas by Marcela Fuentes

Malas

With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a ...
Read more
Book jacket image for How to Eat a Mango by Paola Santos

How to Eat a Mango

Simultaneously lively and meditative, How to Eat a Mango would make an excellent addition to any series on mindfulness. It is no quiet book, however: ...
Read more
Book jacket image for Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Catalina

In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina, an adventurous free spirit and undocumented student at Harvard finds college to be a more ...
Read more

BookPage enewsletter

Sign up to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday.

SIGN UP HERE

Recent Features

All Features
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Recent Reviews

All Reviews

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features