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All Literary Fiction Coverage

All Sally Horner wanted was to fit in with the cool girls at school. What she got instead was two years of harrowing captivity at the hands of a sexual predator.

Author T. Greenwood recounts Sally’s real-life plight in Rust & Stardust, a shocking crime novel about the famous real-life 1948 abduction that inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the film that followed.

Eleven-year-old Sally’s effort to make friends goes awry when the other girls tell her she must steal something from a local pharmacy. When she does, she’s immediately caught by Frank LaSalle, a man who purports to be an FBI agent and threatens to arrest her if she doesn’t do as he says. Sally believes LaSalle intends to take her before a judge, and LaSalle in turn poses as the father of one of the other girls and convinces Sally’s mother to allow her to accompany his family to Atlantic City for a weeklong vacation. So begins nearly two years of lies and torment as LaSalle absconds with Sally, traveling from state to state in an effort to elude the law.

As the novel is told in large part through Sally’s youthful perspective, it is easy to see how she is so easily duped by an adult who professes to be first an officer of the law and later her long-lost father. Readers will sympathize with Sally’s tragic plight while being revolted by LaSalle’s predatory instinct as he sexually exploits her.

Greenwood reportedly spent more than two years researching Sally’s abduction and years drafting Rust & Stardust. The result is an unflinching portrait of a vile criminal and his helpless victim. What is perhaps just as vivid is how sexual predators today continue to mirror the exact methods LaSalle used to usurp Sally’s will—and body—with empty promises, gifts and eventually threats.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

All Sally Horner wanted was to fit in with the cool girls at school. What she got instead was two years of harrowing captivity at the hands of a sexual predator.

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How well can one know oneself? Laura van den Berg’s eerie yet compelling second novel, The Third Hotel, explores this question with a clanging loneliness, like a wrench falling down an elevator shaft.

Clare, troubled and newly widowed, travels to Havana, Cuba, for a horror film festival that her late husband had planned to attend. From the onset, everything is strange, creating a bleak space between Clare and the reader. Just when the reader starts to question Clare’s reliability as a narrator, Clare spots Richard, her dead husband, in the streets of Havana. She follows him and spies on him for several days, but she’s less like a devastated lover who can’t believe her eyes and more like a cool and distant voyeur. She follows him to a resort (or is it a mental health facility?), where they have a literal post-mortem on their relationship that leaves Clare grappling with the reality of her role in their marriage.

A major theme of this slim novel is mystery: the nature of Richard’s hit-and-run death; the contents of a simple package he left behind; the actuality of the man Clare is following in Havana. Did she find Richard, or someone who looks like Richard, or is she just imagining him altogether? All the alternatives seem equally plausible through van den Berg’s adeptly disorienting storytelling. An equally important theme is the undead, whether it be Richard, zombies in the festival’s films or inescapable memories that dig their way to the surface.

Clare is so aloof that it’s hard to picture her ever connecting with Richard in the past, though van den Berg supplies occasional flashbacks that reveal their somewhat joyous union. A little slow to start, the pace picks up in the second half as clues planted by the author come full circle.

The Third Hotel is a chilly, thought-provoking study of loss, loneliness and life after death.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How well can one know oneself? Laura van den Berg’s eerie yet compelling second novel, The Third Hotel, explores this question with a clanging loneliness, like a wrench falling down an elevator shaft.

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Writing an entire novel in the second person is quite an undertaking and often results in a claustrophobic read. But the construct works well in This Mournable Body with the reintroduction of Tambudzai Sigauke, a character who first appeared in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988).

It’s clear that Tambudzai’s life has unraveled in the intervening years. She’s now middle-aged, single, living in a hostel without much money and desperately scheming ways to move up the social ladder. At one point she considers trying to date one of her landlady’s sons. She views every other woman around her disparagingly and as competition.

But it’s not just Tambudzai who gives women a hard time in this novel—it’s Zimbabwe itself. An attractive woman is sexually harassed by the passengers on a bus. A man who lives in Tambudzai’s hostel is a serial philanderer. And many of the female characters desire validation from men.

In the midst of this, Tambudzai emerges as an unreliable narrator struggling with deeply entrenched issues. She goes to a club, where she mistakes a white woman for an ex-boss and verbally abuses her. She gets drunk and ends up unconscious in the street. After securing a job as a biology teacher (a position for which she is not qualified), she is fired after she beats a student.

But Tambudzai rallies two-thirds of the way through her story, as she is taken in by her family and given a job at a glamorous ecotourism business by her former boss. But when she is outshone by the receptionist, Tambudzai teeters once again on the brink of self-destruction.

At times This Mournable Body is a difficult read. Tambudzai is a complex character, bitter and not particularly likable, with inner demons that threaten to derail her. But this is what makes the novel compelling—it’s unpredictable, and you can’t help but feel that Tambudzai is always about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Couple this with the complexity of Zimbabwe—political uncertainty, economic instability and a society that seems ready to attack itself—and Dangarembga has written an unflinching account of one woman’s struggles in a country that is rife with them.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Writing an entire novel in the second person is quite an undertaking and often results in a claustrophobic read. But the construct works well in This Mournable Body with the reintroduction of Tambudzai Sigauke, a character who first appeared in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988).

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The Russian émigré is not uncommon in modern fiction. Generally, said immigrant comes to the states and cultural misunderstandings abound—plus feelings of displacement, pathos, yada yada—until a reckoning in which America and the émigré come to terms with each other and are both better for it. But what do you get when more than two decades after arrival in America, the young immigrant has to go back? You get Keith Gessen’s sad, funny and altogether winning novel, A Terrible Country.

Thirty-three-year-old Andrei Kaplan is stuck in a rut. His life is small, his New York City sublet is smaller, and he was just dumped by his girlfriend at a Starbucks. So when Andrei’s shady older brother, an aspiring kleptocrat living in Moscow, asks Andrei to return to the land of his birth and take care of their ailing grandmother, he agrees.

But Andrei, who left Russia when he was 8, is surprised to find himself in Putin’s Russia, where espressos are outrageously priced, the KGB has merely changed initials, and everyone is grasping for riches with both hands.

So Andrei cares for his grandmother, plays pickup hockey games and teaches online courses while waiting to go back to the U.S. It’s a lonely, hermetic existence—his lone attempt to experience the Moscow nightlife ends with a pistol whipping—until he meets Yulia, who is attractive, mysterious and a communist. Drawn into Yulia’s world of clandestine meetings and anti-government protests, Andrei grows closer to both her and Russia, and decides he will stay in the country. But taking on Putin’s government becomes all too real, and Andrei discovers the hard way that his choices affect not just his life but also those of his new friends.

Gessen is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men and an editor of popular literary magazine n+1. Like his protagonist, he moved to the United States from Russia as a child. His first novel in 10 years is a compassionate, soulful read that avoids dourness by being surprisingly funny. A Terrible Country shows us that while you certainly can go home again, it often turns out to be a lousy idea.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What do you get when more than two decades after arrival in America, the young immigrant has to go back? You get Keith Gessen’s sad, funny and altogether winning novel, A Terrible Country.
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Kate Christensen’s novels hit that sweet spot between beach read and literary fiction. With unsparing wit and an eye for sensuous detail, she’s tackled subjects that range from the inhabitants of a singular Brooklyn apartment building (The Astral) to the emotional repercussions of the death of a family’s patriarch (The Great Man). Her sixth novel, The Last Cruise, is set during the final voyage of a vintage ocean liner on a two-week cruise to Hawaii.

Before heading off to the scrapyard, the Queen Isabella is making one last cruise that will emulate the bygone luxuries of the 1950s. Smoking is allowed on board, but internet and phone use are not. There are no children on board. For highbrow entertainment, the ship owners hired the Sabra Quartet, a notable Israeli string ensemble led by violinist Miriam Koslow, now well into her 70s. Below decks, Hungarian sous chef Mick Szabo toils away, lost in fantasies of vintage cocktails and lobster thermidor. Also on board are Christine Thorne, a journalist turned Maine farmer’s wife, and her writer friend Valerie.

Despite the rich food and evening entertainment, the effort to hearken back to an easier, sunnier decade (a decade, let’s remember, that wasn’t equally pleasant for everyone) can’t disguise the fact that the cruise is taking place in a fractured society on a disintegrating planet. Christine and Miriam become aware of the corners cut by the ship’s cynical owners, while Valerie begins to dig into the personal lives of the unhappy crew, hoping for an exclusive. Even Mick can’t help but notice the tensions rising among his staff as rumors begin to spread about layoffs planned by the cruise ship company. When a crisis hits—and boy, does it ever—the passengers find themselves facing the best and worst aspects of civilization.

The Last Cruise can be read as an analogy to our complex political present—the haves and have-nots divided on a floating world with a selfish wealthy owner that flies off as soon as disaster strikes. But it can also be enjoyed as a darkly humorous comedy of manners, with a diverse cast of characters and enough details about sex, food and drink to satisfy any reader.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kate Christensen’s novels hit that sweet spot between beach read and literary fiction. With unsparing wit and an eye for sensuous detail, she’s tackled subjects that range from the inhabitants of a singular Brooklyn apartment building (The Astral) to the emotional repercussions of the death of a family’s patriarch (The Great Man). Her sixth novel, The Last Cruise, is set during the final voyage of a vintage ocean liner on a two-week cruise to Hawaii.

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Sadness is relative, and this is the overwhelming theme in Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In the year 2000, a young woman has everything one might need to be happy. A recent Columbia graduate in her 20s, enviably thin and beautiful even at her worst, she lives in New York’s Upper East Side with enough inheritance to last a long time. But there is a hole in her heart that her youth, health and wealth can’t fill, and her answer to fix this mishap is to literally sleep it off.

With the help of a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs, prescribed by the world’s worst psychiatrist, the young heroine sinks into a type of hibernation, surfacing only to take us on a journey of her sad childhood and even more despairing adulthood. Each revelation supposedly unloads the baggage for good and cleans the slate for when the hibernation ends. Keeping her company through it all is her endlessly optimistic best friend, Reva, who has a dying mother, unfulfilling job, failed relationships and poor self-confidence, and at times seems more deserving of our sympathy than the narrator.

True to her style, Moshfegh’s dark sense of humor makes the reader laugh (perhaps guiltily) when it seems least appropriate. Melancholic, ominous and even uncomfortable, My Year of Rest and Relaxation traverses a labyrinth of emotions as a young New Yorker learns to define her sadness and hope in the days leading up to September 2011.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sadness is relative, and this is the overwhelming theme in Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In the year 2000, a young woman has everything one might need to be happy. A recent Columbia graduate in her 20s, enviably thin and beautiful even at her worst, she lives in New York’s Upper East Side with enough inheritance to last a long time. But there is a hole in her heart that her youth, health and wealth can’t fill, and her answer to fix this mishap is to literally sleep it off.

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Thrity Umrigar’s eighth novel follows the main character of her bestselling The Space Between Us (2006), the servant Bhima, over the course of a year. The life of Parvati, a minor character in that earlier novel, becomes intricately entwined with Bhima’s in this sequel.

Parvati has the sadder background of the two: Sold into prostitution as a young girl by her desperately poor father, she spent two decades in a brothel before one of her regulars asks her to marry him. She trades one horrific life for another, as she is regularly abused by him and is left penniless when he dies. Now Parvati exists by selling six cauliflowers a day from her spot at an outdoor market; she sleeps under the stairwell outside her nephew’s apartment and eats leftovers from a nearby restaurant.

Bhima has been forced to leave one of her servant jobs and is looking for a way to earn extra money to help send her granddaughter, Maya, to college. She meets Parvati at the market, and they form a working partnership. As the two lonely women grow closer, they gradually begin to share their stories, listening without judgment to the secrets they’ve hidden from others—poverty, illiteracy, sexual abuse, multiple abortions, offspring who died from AIDS. Nothing is left unsaid.

Umrigar places these two old women, steeped in the strict class distinctions of their upbringing, in the midst of modern-day Mumbai. Through the character of Maya, the author builds hope for classes to better themselves, for gender equality and for a decrease in homophobia and sexual assault in India’s future. Her emotional portrayal of these two strong women will be a popular choice for book clubs, and for readers who enjoy multicultural family sagas.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Thrity Umrigar’s eighth novel follows the main character of her bestselling The Space Between Us (2006), the servant Bhima, over the course of a year. The life of Parvati, a minor character in that earlier novel, becomes intricately entwined with Bhima’s in this sequel.

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Happiness is an amorphous thing, a kind of fog about which it is easier to speak peripherally—the pursuit of happiness, the idea of happiness, the absence of happiness. In Tell the Machine Goodnight, author Katie Williams considers a future in which the ingredients of happiness have not only been identified but also commodified.

Set a couple of decades from now, the novel centers on Pearl, a technician working for Apricity, the hot tech corporation of the day. Apricity designs oracles—machines that, given a sample of the user’s DNA, return a number of recommendations to improve the user’s life, to make them happier. The recommendations can be ambiguous or downright cryptic: “Eat tangerines”; “Wrap yourself in softest fabric”; “Tell someone.” More often than not, the connection between doing these things and experiencing greater happiness is unclear, but Pearl’s clients almost always follow the machine’s instructions. And they almost always report feeling satisfied with the results.

The Apricity construct is clever and flexible enough to support the weight of the narrative. Williams does an admirable job of weaving myriad characters’ stories together, with the Apricity machine as the intersection at which all the tales meet. Some of the characters treat the machine with unwavering reverence, others with outright disdain. Its recommendations are used as clues, divine prophecy and the basis for performance art.

But the novel is at its best when it pushes the technology to the background and turns instead to the emotional mechanics of happiness. Williams is a deft observer of small human details, and in moments when she pinpoints these details, the story shines.

For all its imaginative and speculative power, Tell the Machine Goodnight is not a particularly futuristic book. Its primary concern is something so fundamentally human that it transcends time—our insatiable need to feel better, to decipher whatever happiness means.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Happiness is an amorphous thing, a kind of fog about which it is easier to speak peripherally—the pursuit of happiness, the idea of happiness, the absence of happiness. In Tell the Machine Goodnight, author Katie Williams considers a future in which the ingredients of happiness have not only been identified but also commodified.

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Rebecca Makkai is a skilled and versatile writer whose work often contains a quietly comic edge. Her ambitious new novel, The Great Believers, is a change of pace, exploring the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community in Chicago.

The novel begins in 1985. Nico Marcus has died from AIDS-related illnesses, and his parents have banned his partner and friends from attending the funeral. His friends have organized an unofficial wake at the home of local photographer Richard Campo, where gatherers include Yale Tishman, a development director at a university art gallery, and his partner Charlie Keene, editor and owner of the local gay newspaper. Also present is Nico’s fiercely loyal sister, Fiona. Her attachment to Nico’s circle has repercussions that echo decades later, as explored in the novel’s second storyline, set in 2015, which finds Fiona searching for her estranged daughter and staying with Richard, now a world-famous photographer living in Paris.

As is true of many novels with parallel narratives, one storyline initially seems more compelling than the other. Yale’s pursuit of a career-making donation of French art from an unlikely donor and the slow passage of the virus through his circle of friends overshadow the bumpy path of Fiona’s frantic, unfulfilling life. But when Fiona realizes the toll that being a caregiver has taken on her own life, the two stories come together in a way that honors the different forms of suffering on both sides.

As Makkai notes in the afterword, when a heterosexual woman writes a novel about AIDS, some may feel she has crossed “the line between allyship and appropriation.” But The Great Believers reminds us of the powerful connection between fiction and empathic imagination. Makkai does a superb job re-creating the atmosphere of bigotry and moral finger-pointing that existed even in a big city like Chicago during the early years of the epidemic, as well as the enormous changes wrought by compassionate activists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, artists and social workers who did so much to improve the lives and deaths of so many people, especially gay men.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, July 2018

Almost 20 years ago I was smitten by The Broken Estate, an early collection of literary criticism by James Wood that memorably attuned and complicated my reading. So I was ready to be nothing if not critical when I picked up his second novel, Upstate. Fiction sharks can’t help smelling blood in the water when a distinguished critic writes a novel. Indeed, the Times Literary Supplement’s recent review of Upstate promises to judge the book “by its author’s own formidable standards.”

Wood’s critical writing stands upon the godforsaken ground of Romantic spiritual anxiety. What do we human beings do when religious certitudes get emptied out, leaving us with the stress of making our own way and constructing our own idiosyncratic belief systems? The predicament is always vivid and sometimes painful for Wood’s fictional characters. His first novel bears the militant title The Book Against God.

But in Upstate, existential anguish is modulated by loving relation. Englishman Alan Querry and his two daughters, Vanessa and Helen, give the story both a grain of tragedy and a leaven of transatlantic comedy. Alan and Helen rush over from England to upstate New York to “rescue” Vanessa from her relapse into clinical depression. Vanessa’s boyfriend, Josh, alerts her father and sister to the seriousness of the episode. Vanessa’s well-being precariously hinges on Josh’s actions, but the flourishing of both daughters ultimately depends on Alan. It’s the father on whom the moral gravity of this ingenious novel ultimately rests.

I can think of no other 21st-century novel that so unabashedly celebrates paternal love as the complex mainstay of its female characters. Without irony, the story certifies the power of old-fashioned, flawed, patriarchal authority as a redemptive principle. Boy, is James Wood in for it. Read this critically important novel, and have your literary scorecard ready.

Almost 20 years ago I was smitten by The Broken Estate, an early collection of literary criticism by James Wood that memorably attuned and complicated my reading. So I was ready to be nothing if not critical when I picked up his second novel, Upstate. Fiction sharks can’t help smelling blood in the water when a distinguished critic writes a novel.

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Adrienne Celt’s second novel follows a young Russian émigré as she is drawn into a complex love triangle with a brilliant novelist and his ambitious wife. Told via a collection of diary entries, letters and documents bequeathed to an elite private high school in memory of the famous Russian novelist who briefly taught there, Invitation to a Bonfire is a cleverly constructed novel about love, obsession and revenge.

Zoe (Zoya) Andropova, an orphaned refugee from the newly formed Soviet Union, is enrolled as a charity case at an boarding school in New Jersey, where she tries her best to fit in with her wealthy classmates. After graduation, with no real options, Zoe takes a job in the school’s newly constructed greenhouse where she is cruelly bullied and ostracized by the students. Desperately lonely, she is especially vulnerable to the attentions of visiting writer Leo Orlov, a Russian émigré like herself. Even his imperious and calculating wife, Vera, whom Zoe remembers meeting in a Soviet youth group, isn’t a deterrent, and Lev and Zoe begin a passionate affair. Before Leo leaves on a dangerous (and fruitless) trip to the USSR to locate an early manuscript, he begs Zoe to help free him from the marriage. As they plan a future together, Zoe realizes that the relationship between the Orlovs is far more complex than she ever realized.

Lev and Vera are very loosely based on Nabokov and his wife, Vera. Vera was well known as the translator and critic of her husband’s most famous works, and the novel pays homage to the great writer in Celt’s use of an unreliable narrator and a title that’s echoes one of Nabokov’s earlier novels. But the cunning plot and Celt’s singular, sparkling prose are very much her own.

Invitation to a Bonfire is part noir, part coming of age and a wholly enjoyable read.

Adrienne Celt’s second novel follows a young Russian émigré as she is drawn into a complex love triangle with a brilliant novelist and his ambitious wife. Told via a collection of diary entries, letters and documents bequeathed to an elite private high school in memory of the famous Russian novelist who briefly taught there, Invitation to a Bonfire is a cleverly constructed novel about love, obsession and revenge.

“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.”

Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory. Helen is a British journalist whose assignments carry her around the world and often lead to conversations with interesting and self-important people. Though she isn’t certain she fully grasped the idea, Helen leaves the interview and reflects on the meaning in her own life: “If you lived your life along parallel lines, it didn’t matter where you stood, things would always look the same. If, on the other hand, you lived your life along converging lines, it did matter where you stood because place determined perspective—standing in one place, things looked one way, in another—a different way. So the trick was to figure out where to stand.”

What does that mean for Helen’s relationship with her husband, financier Christopher Delavaux? The couple met on Mexico’s west coast. Their courtship, marriage and careers carry them to equally exotic and cosmopolitan locales: Saint-Tropez, Tangier, New York City. Their relationship plays out on stages accessible almost exclusively through power or wealth. Those factors, much like the romance of the locations themselves, can blur the distinction between what is and what you wish to be.

In A Theory of Love, novelist Margaret Bradham Thornton (Charleston) examines a single relationship and how it is affected by life events both mundane and dramatic. Thornton’s sophomore novel combines its protagonist’s rich inner world with her and her husband’s high-profile, high-stakes careers. Readers will be left, like Helen, contemplating how the parallel or converging lines of their lives affect their relationships.

“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.” Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory.

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Fredrik Backman’s engrossing fifth book is a sequel to Beartown, his 2017 novel set in a small town on the edge of a Swedish forest. As Us Against You opens, Beartown’s future is threatened: first by the possible closure of its only factory, and second by the bankruptcy faced by the town’s hockey club. Hockey isn’t merely a game to the town’s inhabitants—their whole lives revolve around the Bears’ wins and losses.

Beartown’s anxiety is further fueled by a major shift in the Bears’ team roster. After the rape of the general manager’s daughter, Maya, by a team member, as chronicled in Beartown, the team was torn apart. Some Bears abandoned the team and joined the Bulls from the neighboring town of Hed. Those who stayed in Beartown are some of the best players, but the remaining team lacks the size and experience of the Bulls.

Backman’s latest saga focuses on the first hockey season following the schism, brilliantly portraying the way each magnetic character copes with the hatred and violence that has engulfed these two small towns as their teams prepare to do battle. Maya struggles to move on from her traumatic experience, constantly aware that many blame her for the team’s demise. Her best friend, Ana, carelessly reveals that their friend Benji, one of the team’s best players, is gay. Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, constantly face backlash from a town that blames their report of Maya’s rape for the team’s problems. Vidar, the younger brother of one of the town bullies, is mysteriously released from a detention camp to be the Bears’ goalie. Ramona, a widow who runs the local bar, lovingly supports the pack of “hooligans” who resort to violence in support of their team. The new Bears coach is a woman, an ex-professional player who struggles to gain the acceptance of the town and her players. And lurking in the background is a Wizard of Oz-like figure—a politician trying to manipulate the team and factory to enrich his own pockets.

Backman stirs this volatile mélange of disparate characters until the inevitable explosion occurs, leaving Beartown sadder but perhaps wiser than before. His depiction of this small town will resonate especially with readers who struggle with the racism, homophobia and misogyny that exist in their own communities.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fredrik Backman’s engrossing fifth book is a sequel to Beartown, his 2017 novel set in a small town on the edge of a Swedish forest. As Us Against You opens, Beartown’s future is threatened: first by the possible closure of its only factory, and second by the bankruptcy faced by the town’s hockey club. Hockey isn’t merely a game to the town’s inhabitants—their whole lives revolve around the Bears’ wins and losses.

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