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All Literary Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary Fiction

Creation Lake

Review by Lauren Bufferd

From a women’s prison in California’s Central Valley to an elite community in 1950s Cuba, novelist Rachel Kushner is a master of the singular setting and bold protagonist. Creation Lake is no exception and, in fact, raises the stakes with its cerebral take on the spy thriller. 

Brainy, ruthless and beautiful, Sadie Smith (not her real name, mind you), has made a career of undercover work exposing and identifying radical activists. Once an employee of the U.S. government, she’s gone freelance and is working for a foreign conglomerate, trying to push eco-protestors into committing acts of violence. Sadie’s latest mark is an artsy, privileged Frenchman, Lucien, who ‘met’ Sadie in Paris. Believing that their encounter was a happy accident, Lucien has asked Sadie to accompany him to a small village where his family owns property and his school friend Pascal leads Le Moulin, a small agricultural cooperative protesting corporate farming. Lucien hopes Sadie can help them translate their ideas for an English-speaking audience; Sadie’s goals are a bit different. 

The Moulinards of Le Moulin, a sketchy and disorganized bunch at best, draw influence from an older revolutionary, Bruno Lacombe, who communicates only through rambling philosophical emails sent from an underground cave. Skeptical of all modern interpretations of civilization, Bruno believes that cultivating our Neanderthal characteristics might be the only way to survive. Despite her cynicism, Sadie is drawn in by the purity of Bruno’s ideas and by the extreme choices he’s made for his life, choices that force her to reconsider her own. 

Creation Lake is no Emily in Paris: Sadie’s corner of France is stale baguettes, superhighways, cheap wine and Guns N’ Roses cover bands. Sadie herself is no less acerbic; her only weakness seems to be a reliance on booze and vanity over her surgically enhanced (but tastefully so, she reminds us) bosom. Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species, should we take the time to think it through.

Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Colored Television

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s no little irony to the release of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. It’s come just when all those beleaguered novelists who thought writing for TV would make them some real money are realizing that writers’ rooms are the latest creative labor bait and switch. Instead of wealth and acclaim, they’re faced with impossible demands, zero respect and such dismal pay that they still have to take a second job to cover rent.

Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny belong to that class of people now called the precariat. These folks work, and may indeed be talented, but they find it tough to make a consistent living. Jane has published one novel and she’s been trying for a decade to produce a follow-up. She teaches, without tenure, to make ends meet. Lenny, supremely disdainful of just about everything and everyone, is an artist whose paintings don’t sell. Because of this, they suffer from a genteel homelessness; when we meet them they’re housesitting, yet again. This time their benefactor is Jane’s old friend Brett, who’s making a killing as a showrunner. Jane and Lenny have two young children to care for, too: Finn is bright and possibly autistic, and Ruby is now old enough to feel the effects of her family’s essentially vagabond state.

Then, almost miraculously, Jane finishes her book, a doorstopper about mixed-race Black and white Americans over centuries. She has a personal connection to the topic, since she’s biracial. But when she presents the fruit of her labor to her long-suffering agent, it’s rejected (unsurprisingly, to the reader). Shocked and desperate, Jane decides to pinch Brett’s agent. Instead of a book about mixed-race people, she’ll develop a TV show about them: “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” exults a TV producer she meets with.

Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable, evident throughout Jane’s time in what Hollywood types call “development hell,” and building toward a moment near the very end that will make you gasp, “Oh no!” The book is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.

Read our interview with Danzy Senna about Colored Television.

Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Bright I Burn

Review by Sydney Hankin

As the 16-year-old daughter of moneylenders from Kilkenny, Ireland, Alice Kyteler has learned to trust very little. Only the surrounding brooks and forests, the gold stashed in her floorboards, and her own mind make the cut. One wrong turn could paint an immediate bullseye on her back: For a woman in the 13th century, a charge of witchcraft is just a misstep away. With her mother dead at the hands of her father, and herself aware that she is rapidly approaching the age at which she must marry, Alice has more reason than ever to be on her guard around the men in her life.

Bright I Burn is strongly inspired by the few known details about Ireland’s first condemned witch, whose life author Molly Aitken thoughtfully explores into adulthood and old age. Four marriages—each unmistakably different from the last—shape Alice’s path through the highs and lows of motherhood, work, religion, loss and public life. While her experiences as a young parent are the most emotional and devastatingly palpable, Alice’s defining blend of pragmatism and spontaneity lend a unique outlook to her later years. As she learns to navigate grief and a world awash in fear, Alice’s wistfulness becomes lyrical poetry in Aitken’s hands: “Here, moth larvae nick away at bark until trees crash to the ground, and snow falls, suns set, and rivers change course. It is the place of great sky-shattering storms. A place where two women could stand naked, hair undressed for the wind to dance.”

Memories and dreams, along with letters, songs and the ever-present town gossip, are interspersed with the narrative, creating a quick-moving yet immersive experience that’s better felt than analyzed. While folks looking for a more historically expansive narrative may find Bright I Burn to be too interior, the author’s prowess in character building helps bring Alice’s story to life. Aitken instills a complex and heartbreaking grit in Alice which is both moving and painful to witness.

Bright I Burn is strongly inspired by Ireland’s first condemned witch, whose 13th-century life author Molly Aitken imbues with a complex and heartbreaking grit.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Black Butterflies

Review by Freya Sachs

Though the Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo may feel distant, they took place less than 30 years ago. Those terrifying moments in 1992 are vividly imagined in Priscilla Morris’ haunting novel Black Butterflies.

When the war is just beginning, Zora doesn’t believe it will last, and she stays in Sarajevo while her husband departs for England where their daughter’s family lives. As the shelling and attacks intensify, Zora—a painter and professor tied deeply to place—remains. Soon, leaving is no longer an option, and the city is divided by violence, hunger and cold. And yet, she finds ways to survive.

Black Butterflies is a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror. It is a story of art as a connector and community maker. Zora’s determination that there is always meaning and beauty to be found is compelling, as are her efforts to maintain relationships with neighbors and friends despite their differences and the circumstances. Some of the most powerful moments of the novel come when she is working on her paintings, in how Morris renders the horror and devastation of the war through Zora’s ways of seeing and describing.

By presenting the perspective of a civilian, Morris invites readers to engage with what it means to watch a war unfold around you, and to consider art as a mechanism of survival. This novel is both devastating and beautiful, infused with a sense of hope. 

Black Butterflies follows an artist’s life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, in a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Nathan Newman: A neighbor just like you

Interview by Cat Acree

Nathan Newman challenges readers to reckon with all the cruelties and joys of human interaction in their debut novel, How to Leave the House. Newman’s protagonist is a young man named Natwest, but he’s not the only central character: The novel intersperses Natwest’s interior narrative with the stories of the many people in his town whose daily lives butt up against his own.

Newman’s novel is transgressive and disruptive, an unserious look at serious things—in particular, how isolated we can feel when deeply immersed in our own problems. Here, Newman gets the main character treatment and shares their thoughts on art, storytelling, their neighbors and criticism in the internet age.

 

What is most likely to get you to leave the house?

Friends, a party, a trip to the cinema, an aquatic-themed fetish night—really anything social that might rescue me from the little cocoon of my writing room.

Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you?

I live on an estate with a somewhat uneasy and pretty diverse alliance of council flat owners, tenants, students, gentrifiers, care-service users. It’s always cordial. There is an estate WhatsApp group and everyone is currently unified against the midnight to 5 a.m. roadworks happening on the main street beside us. Nothing brings British residents together more than a good moan about the council—so that’s solidarity of some kind.

How to Leave the House follows Natwest throughout one day. Even though it takes place in his small town, the day’s happenings feel much like those of a big city, with horrors and chaos and hilarity around every corner, and human interactions that are intimate, intense and brief. Do you see similarities between big-city stories and small-town tales? Is How to Leave the House occupying both spaces?

I wrote the novel while living in London, right after my last year of university in Warwick (which is a very small town indeed). The spirit of both spaces is probably embedded in the book. Of course there are more stories on one South London street than could occupy a century’s worth of fiction, but I don’t think living in a small town is any different—except that you’re more likely to know the person you’ve just bumped into. The two are inextricable anyway: The bulk of How to Leave the House was written during lockdown, when London emptied out, and for anyone on the street it might as well have been a small town.

“Maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.”

Many chapters could stand as short stories. My personal favorites are about a dentist, a woman who dances a jig on her brother’s grave, and an egg fight. Which are your favorites and why? Yes, you have to choose.

Possibly Lily’s chapter—the one told entirely via text messages, imageboard posts and anonymous internet confessionals—because beyond her main story, there is a puzzle implanted in the heart of the section that nobody has yet cracked! Otherwise, Dr. Richard Hung, the dentist who is also an artist, but the only thing he can seem to paint is mouths.

Natwest is the apparent main character of the story, yet all these chapters have their own main characters. Amid our current obsession with main character energy, and the constant pressure to romanticize and glamorize our lives, how do you approach storytelling? How do you tell stories when everyone is the main character?

There are so many different people on the street, and they are all main characters in their own worlds—that’s a universal human delusion, and not unique to this generation (but it’s undoubtedly been massively exacerbated by the internet). Writing with this in mind seemed pretty sensible. My novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, jumping between different classes, genders, races and sexualities with a freedom that hopefully explodes, or at least formally adapts this obsession with main character energy. When you’ve been born into the internet, and this is how you are encouraged to process the world, the alternating chapters of How to Leave the House feel like the most interesting approach.

Early in the novel, an imam tells Natwest that “there are two types of people in this world. Charlie Chaplins and Buster Keatons.” Natwest is told that he wants to be a Keaton but must accept his fate as a Chaplin, and we return again and again to the motif of Keatons and Chaplins. What does it mean to be a Chaplin but to wish you were a Keaton?

I think the binary that Imam Mishaal projects onto Natwest is a little false, a reflection of his own internal struggle between the worldly and the spiritual, and his inability to synthesize the two. The novel is constantly setting up dualities like this—doubles, oppositions, contradictions—and each character chooses their own way of approaching them. Maybe the real point is that there is no difference between Chaplin or Keaton—to slightly paraphrase a line in the book: Chaplin/Keaton, McCartney/Lennon, Hegel/Kierkegaard—maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.

When Natwest encounters his former teacher Miss Pandey, she challenges him to rethink art in a particularly wonderful discussion. “What would happen if you treated every work of art as perfect, and then worked backwards?” she says. “If you presumed that every ‘blemish’ or ‘failing’ or ‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff was intended by the artist?” She says that such a mentality allows the world to “open up.” Do you approach art from this mindset, and if so, how do you hold on to that openness?

It’s an aspiration, and I don’t always achieve it! I think it’s also me-the-author being defensive, because a novel structured like this one—especially with the ending it has—is pretty vulnerable to some very obvious criticisms in the “‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff” department. But any criticism is a difficult line to walk. There is a difference, I think, between coming to an artwork with an open heart and mind, and consuming something without any discernment. The internet has encouraged us to consume without prejudice, flattening out once and for all any distinction between high and low culture. A tremendous libidinal liberation—and partly what this novel is about. But we need some way of reining it in and finding a middle ground. I think that’s what Miss Pandey is arguing for.

On your website, you have reviewed other authors’ websites. Is it not a conflict of interest to review Zadie Smith’s website, as she was your mentor at New York University?

I think every author hates making their own website, but it has to be done. It seemed like a fun inside joke to give some tongue-in-cheek reviews of other authors’ websites as a result. It’s not serious at all. That being said, it’s true that I attended NYU for a single semester over Zoom before dropping out. During that period I learned that Zadie is incredibly defensive when it comes to her website. After I gave it an 8/10 she launched a defamation suit, and we are now in a pretty fierce legal skirmish—fortunately it looks like I’m going to win.

I think her sales are plummeting as we speak.

Read our review of How to Leave the House.

Debut novelist Nathan Newman harnesses main character energy in How to Leave the House, a novel that hops in and out of the heads of the many residents of a small town as a young man named Natwest breezes by them seeking a missing package.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Reading outside the lines with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Interview by Eric A. Ponce

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented student, and her broad ambitions could easily be imagined as the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the recent prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and many others, readers might wonder, how much of Catalina is Villavicencio?

This uncertainty, it turns out, is deliberate: “I always want the reader to not necessarily be sure what my intentions are as a writer,” Villavicencio says. She found a model in J.D. Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family. “Salinger definitely does this. . . . You start to think Salinger might be one of the brothers, he might be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I liked the game of not knowing what Salinger was trying to do . . . but I always knew that I was wrapped around his finger.”

Read our starred review of Catalina.

Like those Salinger stories, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the book as being in the same tradition as other novels with young protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a lot of college students, dreads the approach of graduation and can’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life. By capturing the tumult of young adulthood, Villavicencio hopes to provoke readers to make something out of their mess. Her goal in writing is “empowering those who need to be empowered, embarrassing those who need to be embarrassed.” In the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was playing live in New York City, it was said that anyone who saw them was inspired to start their own band. Villavicencio wants her writing to have that same effect, for readers to “think they have to go make something. . . . [To think] I feel so alive, I have to go do something now.”

Musicians who make their songs feel personal were a big influence on Catalina, especially Lorde’s album Melodrama, where, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio wanted this book to “sound and feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes across in Catalina’s potent mix of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to think of her work in relation to Taylor Swift as well, whose fans pore over her lyric sheets looking for clues to her personal life.

“What your family, Telemundo and García Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories. . . . The American racial binary can’t imagine us.”

There’s an allure to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio wanted reading Catalina to be like eating popcorn or potato chips, to give readers that feeling of “you can’t just eat one,” she says. “You can discover something new in every sentence, but it can also just be really fun.” When Villavicencio was sharing the book with family and friends, the reaction of one of her partner’s family members, an older white woman without the same educational background as Catalina, was encouragingly positive. She told Villavicencio that she “really related to Catalina” and felt “included with the smart kids . . . in a way that she felt she’d been excluded before.” This kind of boundary breaking, where what might have been alienating is instead enjoyable, is the foundation of Catalina, as the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity yet manages to stay entirely her complicated self. “There’s something that feels very, very freeing about entering cultural institutions feeling like it’s all there for you to use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t have to take on the values to be able to use it.”

There’s another kind of empowering boundary breaking at work here as well, through Catalina’s position as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s parents passed away in a car crash, she was sent to live with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. before she was born. Raised by them in New York City, and unable to leave the country because of her lack of documentation, Catalina is thoroughly a New Yorker. Still, she experiences the city and the rest of the world around her through a different language, one indecipherable by Anglos.

This transcendent language is symbolized in the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording device made from knotted strings—a “tactile” form of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters at the campus museum where she works. Western scholars have never been able to decipher the language of the khipu, so it remains a mystery what exactly they were used to record. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are often illegible to one another both linguistically and culturally. But Villavicencio puts the symbol to a further purpose: On another level, the khipu illustrates the distance between oneself and “the parts of our ancestry we can’t tap into.”

“Who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder.”

Villavicencio speaks with a wary wisdom about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” pointing out that “it can mean anything! . . . What your family, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories.” In today’s political landscape, where everything hinges on identity, “there is an image for marketing,” she says, but it doesn’t account for the complicated ways history has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t imagine us. You have to use these terms defensively and it puts too much pressure on them. [Identity] has to encompass everything.” She says that you have to “go down to earth, face to face, [think about] who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder. Theory gets us out of doing the real work.” She is certainly doing the real work in Catalina, and readers will feel its impact.

In her clever debut novel, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in a tradition of blurring the boundary between art and artist.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionGothic FictionDebut FictionCrime FictionComing of Age

Find something new in these 5 debuts

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Smothermoss

First lines: “It is happening again. Snow melts, the crust of frost cracks and heaves. Water sinks below ground, swelling channels. Sap rises. Wild garlic sprouts, arbutus creeps, and bloodroot quickens. Curved shoots of spotted skunk cabbage thrust toward the light.”

Read if you enjoyed: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow or Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate. Then two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and the murderer may not have left the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

—Freya Sachs

 

Bright Objects

First line: “Barely an hour before my first death on a warm night in January 1995—when I blacked out in a crumpled Toyota south of a town called Jericho—a bright object was sighted somewhere in the constellation of Virgo, the sign of the maiden, not far from a star named Porrima, after the Roman goddess of prophecy.”

Read if you enjoyed: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh or The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

A fatal accident, a cosmic visitor and a mysterious stranger all come together in a small Australian town in Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects.

Young widow Sylvia Knight is recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and left her with serious injuries, both physical and psychological. Profoundly lonely, Sylvia works at the local mortuary, keeps her husband’s grave tidy and puts on a cheerful face for her mother-in-law, Sandy. But she is haunted by sketchy memories of the night of the accident.

When a rare comet appears, Joseph Evans, local meditation teacher and the heir of a wealthy family, sees the comet as a divine messenger and begins a series of mystical lectures that attract a cultlike following. He is eager to involve both Sylvia and Sandy, and Sylvia is distressed to see her mother-in-law drawn in by his promises. Wrestling with suicidal ideation, Sylvia finds her obsession with uncovering her husband’s killer pushing her to the edges of her sanity.

Bright Objects is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.

—Lauren Bufferd

 

Pearl

First line: “Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me Went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned Who do you think was saved?”

Read if you enjoyed: Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin, or Wintering by Katherine May

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne is taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes in her home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast, and to that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

 

Between This World and the Next

First lines: “Open your eyes. Empty your mind. What’s happening in the present will pass. This is what Song tells herself. It’s dark and hot and the middle of the night. Through the light that comes from the open door, she sees a bead of sweat on the tip of his nose.”

Read if you enjoyed: Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor or Hunted by Abir Mukherjee

As Praveen Herat’s gripping debut political thriller, Between This World and the Next, opens, Joseph Nightingale, a British war photographer nicknamed Fearless after a moment of heroism during the Bosnian conflict, has accepted his old friend Alyosha Federenko’s invitation to Cambodia.

Federenko stashes Fearless at the Naga, a gathering place for the gangs and soldiers of fortune set loose upon the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the chilling pleasures of this book is Herat’s vivid, knowledgeable portrait of this threatening netherworld, from outposts like the Naga to breakaway states like Transnistria. Also at the Naga is Song, a young Cambodian woman enslaved as a cleaner. Song cares for the young children who are brought to the Naga by adult predators and whose gruesome abuse is recorded on video. The existence of one of these videos, handed off to Fearless, sets the elaborate plot rolling with increasing velocity.

The final chapters of Between This World and the Next are breathtaking in their descriptive power and imaginative reach, and the novel’s ending is very satisfying. But some threads still dangle and not all questions are answered—which makes one hope for a sequel.

—Alden Mudge

 

They Dream in Gold

First lines: “His pillow ruptures between her knees. Feathers plucked from the breasts of live geese burst into the darkness of the room. She watches them by the flashes of the storm’s lightning.”

Read if you enjoyed: Village Weavers by Myriam J.A. Chancy or True Biz by Sara Novic.

Playwright and director Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, crackles. Her prose is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one.

Mansour, a child first of Senegal and then of the world, exudes music and wants to make his mark as a musician. Mama Eva, who raised Mansour and keeps her own secrets, aspires to culinary heights. And Bonnie, an only child raised by her grandmother, is entranced by Mansour’s sound on a demo CD before she ever meets him. They all have, as Sennaar writes, “a need for a life of wonder.” After Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, the lives of the women who love him are strung painfully taut as they wait for news: Back in her crumbling mansion in Switzerland, Mama Eva worries as she cooks for her long-awaited restaurant’s opening day, while pregnant Bonnie broods and paces.

They Dream in Gold wends from Mama Eva’s 1940s youth in Dakar to Bonnie and Mansour’s first meeting in 1960s New York City, to a Brazilian music festival in the middle of Carnival where Mansour’s star is born. Unreserved and confident, Sennaar’s piercing narrative voice reverberates through a novel pulsing with all the intensity it takes to compose a life and make it sing.

—Melissa Brown

These vibrant novels from first-time fiction writers grabbed our attention right from the opening lines.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionScience FictionLiterary FictionHistoryClassics

The Hold List: Hidden gems from heavy hitters

Feature by Meagan Vanderhill & Trisha Ping & Yi Jiang & Savanna Walker

The Host

Stephenie Meyer mastered the love triangle in her famous Twilight Saga, but Edward and Jacob aren’t the only Meyer heartthrobs. In her lesser-known sci-fi thriller, The Host, an equally intriguing love triangle (parallelogram?) forms between bad-boy Jared, sensitive Ian and Melanie—plus the parasitic alien borrowing Melanie’s body. After Earth is invaded by aliens, most humans become hosts before they can even begin to fight back, but a small group resists. When Melanie is captured, the alien Wanderer is placed in her body to to shut down the human rebellion. But Melanie won’t cooperate, and Wanderer finds herself inside a body that still desperately loves another. Wanderer and Melanie become unlikely allies as Wanderer begins to understand why humans fight for love. I find myself returning to The Host often and urge Twilight lovers (or haters) to give another Meyer story a try. When you do, let me know . . . Team Jared or Team Ian?

—Meagan Vanderhill, Production Manager

Thunderstruck

Most people know Erik Larson for his dual-narrative history, the deservedly omnipresent The Devil in the White City, or, my personal favorite, In the Garden of Beasts. However, 2006’s Thunderstruck deserves just as much praise. Like Devil, Thunderstruck centers a shocking, sensational crime—Hawley Harvey Crippen’s murder of his wife in 1910—within a historical event. But in this case, the event is more of a paradigm shift: Guglielmo Marconi’s attempts to patent and popularize radio communication. In a previous era, Crippen may very well have vanished before justice could be served. But thanks to radio, Crippen’s attempted escape to Canada was instead the first true crime news story to unfold in real time for a breathless readership. Larson weaves these tales together with his signature novelistic flair, producing highly entertaining portraits of the loathsome Crippen and the obsessive, passionate and at-times hilariously obtuse Marconi.

—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor

The Shuttle

Reading The Secret Garden (1911) has been a rite of passage for generations. But did you know that Frances Hodgson Burnett first earned fame and fortune by writing for adults? Burnett began her career selling romantic tales to magazines, publishing her first novel in 1877. Dozens more adult novels followed, the best of which is 1907’s The Shuttle. New York City heiress Bettina Vanderpoel has always wondered why her gentle older sister, Rosalie, cut ties to the family after marrying an English peer. Once she’s old enough, Betty crosses the Atlantic to get answers. Her adventure features a dastardly villain, a surly yet handsome lord, a crumbling estate (and an ensuing renovation to delight HGTV fans)and the most charming typewriter salesman in literature, plus plenty of trenchant observations on the differences between the English and Americans that still ring true. If you loved Downton Abbey or wish the works of Edith Wharton were a little less mannered, put The Shuttle on your reading list.

—Trisha Ping, Publisher

Outer Dark

Long before venturing southwest with Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, his most famous titles, Cormac McCarthy plumbed his native Appalachia for visceral cruelty and mythological beauty. Outer Dark may be the most eerie, devastating book in his flawless oeuvre. After falsifying the death of his newborn son—the product of incest with his sister, Rinthy—and abandoning him in the wilderness, Culla Holme wanders through a dreamlike, nebulous Southern landscape populated with bizarre characters. Meanwhile, Rinthy uncovers the empty grave and sets off in search of her child. Alternating between the two siblings’ perspectives, the novel reveals the staggering violence and deep tenderness within the human soul, both of which McCarthy captured with peerless acuity over his seven-decade career. Each scene in Outer Dark has a torrential fluidity: As you drift through this haunting, remarkable creation, remember to breathe.

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

A breakout success can bring new attention to an author’s body of work—or, one book can so define them that it overshadows earlier titles that are just as excellent. Here are four overlooked books from great authors that deserve their own moment in the limelight.
FictionLiterary Fiction

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her

Review by Arlene McKanic

In Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, a young British woman ironically named Vita suffers from a ghastly, debilitating condition that doctors have no name for. She calls its worst symptom, a crushing tornado of pain and helplessness, The Pit. Because Vita’s condition is unidentifiable, doctors won’t attempt to treat it. From there comes the diagnosis that gives the book its title.

The reader might think that Vita’s mysterious illness has something to do with the painful events in her past: the deaths of her mother and sister, a wicked stepmother, the boyfriend who got away, a stuttering career in the performing arts. Vita lives in a weirdly laid out basement apartment with Max, a surgeon who cares for her but too often treats her like one of his “really sick” patients. She spends much time contemplating her goldfish, Whitney Houston, and she’s visited now and then by the ghost of Renaissance soldier and poet Luigi da Porto. (He was the author of the original Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare pinched later on. Vita wrote a screenplay about him that went nowhere). Just as Whitney spins in her goldfish bowl, Vita spins in her unhappiness, and Luigi spins in his memories of the woman who jilted him after he came back as broken from war as Vita is broken from her life.

Then, one day there’s a leak from the upstairs apartment. Max isn’t home, and Vita must leave her bed to interact with her neighbors, the ebullient and not-quite-elderly Mrs. Rothwell, and Jesse, an American who helps Mrs. Rothwell around the house. Vita befriends both immediately. Is this her first step on the path to health?

Weinberg, author of The Truants, packs a lot into this slender novel. There’s rage at a medical establishment that won’t take women’s pain seriously, and a cargo ship’s tonnage of familial trauma. But there’s also the life-enhancing, life-saving power of love and friendship, and the strength of Vita’s unquenchable need to be healthy in body and mind. Maybe her name isn’t so ironic after all.

Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants, tells the story of a woman with an illness that doctors can’t identify, with rage at the lack of belief in women’s pain as well as hope for the life-saving power of love and friendship.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

They Dream in Gold

Review by Melissa Brown

Playwright and director Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, crackles. Her prose is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one. Over the course of 400 pages, Sennaar moves swiftly back and forth across continents and generations to tell a vividly realized story of family, identity and love.

Mansour, a child first of Senegal and then of the world, exudes music and wants to make his mark as a musician. Mama Eva, who raised Mansour and keeps her own secrets, aspires to culinary heights. And Bonnie, an only child raised by her grandmother, is entranced by Mansour’s sound on a demo CD before she ever meets him. They all have, as Sennaar writes, “a need for a life of wonder.” After Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, the lives of the women who love him are strung painfully taut as they wait for news: Back in her crumbling mansion in Switzerland, Mama Eva worries as she cooks for her long-awaited restaurant’s opening day, while pregnant Bonnie broods and paces.

They Dream in Gold wends from Mama Eva’s 1940s youth in Dakar to Bonnie and Mansour’s first meeting in 1960s New York City, to a Brazilian music festival in the middle of Carnival where Mansour’s star is born. The novel’s five parts flow in and out of each character’s past and present, examining the people who have shaped them, although some side characters are less compelling. Bonnie, Mansour and Mama Eva have each been orphaned in different ways and are looking for home, a place to stay and belong. Unreserved and confident, Sennaar’s piercing narrative voice reverberates through a novel pulsing with all the intensity it takes to compose a life and make it sing.

Mai Sennaar’s prose in They Dream in Gold is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Modern Fairies

Review by Lauren Bufferd

“Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are to this day some of the first stories we hear as children—and as we learn from Clare Pollard’s witty, sexy, historical novel, The Modern Fairies, they were all the rage in the court of Louis XIV.

The Modern Fairies is loosely based on a group of real-life salonaires who met at the home of Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a woman with a troubled past that included imprisonment and a childhood marriage to a cruel aristocrat. D’Aulnoy and her friends were the original collectors and disseminators of well-known folk tales a century before the Brothers Grimm. Just like the princesses in their stories, they inhabited a world of wicked mothers, murderous husbands, locked towers and poisoned fruit.

The women are joined by Charles Perrault, a wealthy widower and advisor to the king, who went on to great fame as one of the first authors to publish a collection of fairy tales. Over the course of a cold winter, certain details of these contes de fées prove a little too close to the realities of court. There is a spy at d’Aulnoy’s gatherings, and meetings become more dangerous as love letters are misdirected, husbands discover cheating wives, and both the local clergy and the king’s chief of police are put on high alert for any whiff of scandal.

The Modern Fairies is arranged as a series of stories within stories, each fairy tale as light as a bonbon yet cleverly revealing aspects of the teller’s situation, whether a violent husband, younger lover or jealous rival. An all-knowing narrator, perhaps Pollard herself, pops up to offer commentary on the societal restrictions experienced by these noblewomen and to reflect on the subversive ties between tales told and lives lived. An award-winning poet and translator, Pollard has great fun with these stories and with the gossip, the flirtations and the sheer amount of sex at the court of Versailles. She demonstrates, too, how important these women were for documenting, embellishing and preserving a wealth of stories, and like them, plays her part in translating an oral tradition into a written one that we can continue to delight in.

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.
FictionLiterary FictionGothic FictionDebut Fiction

Smothermoss

Review by Freya Sachs

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging curiosities, interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to and understand each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate.

The community shifts when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and  worry arises that the murderer has yet to leave the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. As the novel progresses, the land takes over—the mountains crack and communicate, and the rocks and stones have stories to tell.

In many ways, Smothermoss resembles a Southern gothic fairy tale, with elements—like the invisible rope attached to Sheila’s neck—that require a certain suspension of disbelief, and the setting of the 1980s South, a challenging place to find one’s voice. Ultimately, the story carries you away, with brief chapters, crisp scenes and high stakes. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

Alisa Alering paints the mountains, hollows, moss and quartz of the Appalachian landscape in all their full aliveness in Smothermoss, their gothic debut.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Someone Like Us

Review by Michael Magras

One of the many challenges of being an immigrant is how, as your perception adjusts to life in a new land, it can begin to feel like you’ve lost touch with your homeland. Dinaw Mengestu plays with this dynamic in Someone Like Us, his subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets.

The book’s protagonist is Mamush, a novelist and journalist of Ethiopian heritage who was born and raised in the U.S. He has become well-known for writing articles about “struggling but ultimately tenacious immigrants in America” and other weighty topics such as border conflicts, refugee crises and a militia leader in eastern Congo. He now lives north of Paris with his photographer wife (the book includes some of her photographs) and their 2-year-old son.

Mamush returns to the U.S. for the first time in years when he receives word from his mother, now living in a northern Virginia community “popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her,” that Samuel, a man Mamush knew as a close family friend, has died. He learns that Samuel may, or may not, have been his father.

That’s only the start of the mysteries Mengestu explores. Always the journalist, Mamush travels to Chicago to investigate Samuel’s past, including time spent in jail and a scheme for “building a cab company for people trapped in the wrong place.” And Mengestu adds an additional, beguiling wrinkle: While Mamush conducts his inquiries, he has imagined conversations with the deceased Samuel, a fabulist touch that allows for philosophical discussions on the desire to belong and the power of storytelling.

That’s the great achievement of this book. Aside from being a wonderful read, it’s a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. A decade has passed since Mengestu’s last novel, the equally exceptional All Our Names. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

A decade after Dinaw Mengestu’s equally exceptional All Our Names, Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

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