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There is nothing predictable about Holly Wilson’s debut novel, Kittentits.

Relating the coming-of-age of a 10-year-old girl named Molly Sibly, Kittentits is set in 1992 on the outskirts of Chicago. Molly lives in a dilapidated Quaker co-op called House of Friends, with her once-blind puppeteer father who inexplicably regained his eyesight after a house fire; a community-gardening evangelist named Evelyn, who is also Molly’s home-school teacher; and the ghost of Sister Regina, a nun who perished in the same fire that gave Molly’s father his eyesight back. With a mother who died shortly after her birth and no friends beyond a pen pal named Demarcus who never writes back, Molly’s life is rather lacking for company.

Molly, however, seems blissfully unaware of the misfortune that surrounds her. What she’s focused on is the opening of the World’s Fair and a houseguest named Jeanie who is fresh out of prison and assigned to live in the House of Friends as her halfway house. Molly sets herself the following goal: befriend the thrillingly crass Jeanie, meet Demarcus in person and enjoy the opening day of the World’s Fair with her two new best friends. Then a second goal emerges: open a spiritual portal at the Fair and find the ghost of her mother. I’ll say it again—there’s nothing predictable about this novel. And for this precise reason, Kittentits is nearly impossible to put down.

Narrated by Molly in the first person, the story is a fast-paced, filthy-mouthed adventure, told with an exuberance that can only be expected from a 10-year-old. There is a surrealism to everything that happens that is best not to question (the World’s Fair taking place in 1992 being the least of our worries).

While Molly clearly steals the show as the protagonist, Wilson demonstrates exceptional artistry with the supporting characters, capturing the fundamental experiences of trust, friendship, love and loss. Their backstories, however improbable, will resonate with your personal yearnings.

A bit deranged, a lot unforgettable, Kittentits needs to be your next literary escape.

Kittentits, Holly Wilson’s debut novel, is a fast-paced, filthy-mouthed adventure—led by an exuberant 10-year-old narrator.
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Soccer, like life, may be a beautiful game, but as in life, part of the beauty relies upon a key ingredient: cooperation. Introduce disharmony and the luster is tarnished. Readers will find plenty of corrosion in Godwin, Joseph O’Neill’s intellectually challenging new novel centered, at least ostensibly, around the world of football.

Godwin shifts between two narrators. The first is Lakesha Williams, one of the co-founders of the Group, a Pittsburgh cooperative for science and medical writers who want to be self-employed without the insecurity of freelancing. She’s dealing with an HR issue regarding writer Mark Wolfe, who got into a scuffle with a security guard and gave too-honest feedback to a client who didn’t receive a grant. Mark is a misanthrope who fantasizes about a future “when our kind no longer roams Earth and we shall at last have some peace.”

Mark is also our other narrator. In his private life, he lives with his wife, Sushila, and has a half brother named Geoff, a slippery character and aspiring sports agent who lives overseas. Geoff contacts Mark with an unusual request: He wants Mark to come to England and help him find Godwin, a “special prospect” from somewhere in Africa whom Geoff wants to sign.

These two seemingly disparate stories converge in satisfying ways and include characters who may at first seem secondary but take on greater significance, among them a French scout who may know where Godwin is; Mark’s mother, who he feels robbed him of an inheritance; and a Group member who ingratiates herself into a position to affect the collective’s operations.

Netherland, O’Neill’s brilliant 2008 book, was not just a story about a Dutch expat protagonist’s incipient passion for cricket but, more than that, a commentary on postcolonialism. Similarly, while the search for a soccer player is the engine of Godwin’s plot, the book is really about power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it. O’Neill’s excellent novel builds to a cynical ending that may not comfort, but it’s an undeniably appropriate finish to a story of what can happen when idealism snags on the lure of capitalism.

The search for a soccer player is the engine of the plot, but what Godwin is really about is power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it.
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What can you say about Charles Lamosway, the protagonist of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit? He’s not a particularly happy man. Though he has a few friends and is devoted to his difficult mother, he’s essentially lonely. A white guy with ties to Maine’s Penobscot Nation, Charles lives right across the river from the reservation. From his side of the river, he can see the house of his ex-girlfriend Mary and their adult daughter, Elizabeth, across the water. Elizabeth, raised by Mary and Mary’s husband, Roger, doesn’t know that Charles is her father. Charles thinks it’s time for her to know, as he puts it, “that her blood is her blood.” Indeed, he’s desperate for her to know.

Charles’ mother, Louise, is elderly and racked with dementia. But she has never been well. Even when Charles was a child she’d be overwhelmed by periods of such intense depression that she’d spend days in bed, cut off from Charles and her husband, Fredrick. As with Elizabeth, Fredrick wasn’t Charles’ biological father. Yet he’s not as intent on finding out about his own bio-dad as he is determined to make Elizabeth find out about hers. Then he discovers something about his daughter that makes him more determined than ever.

Fire Exit is Talty’s first novel, following his 2022 short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. It is beautifully written, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds. This reviewer couldn’t help but think of the stories of Raymond Carver. Like Carver’s, Talty’s characters are working class, bedeviled by money troubles, drink, mental illness, lousy parents, estranged kids and difficult relationships. But in Talty’s writing, the particular history and context of the Penobscot Nation are always present. One reason Mary doesn’t want Elizabeth to know about Charles is that she wanted to raise her as a Native, supported by a community and traditions that Charles just couldn’t provide. As he puts it, “I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being.” This is a moving, humane book.

Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds.
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It has been 16 years since David Wroblewski published his bestselling first novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. An elemental tale of family strife in Wisconsin’s north woods, Edgar Sawtelle charmed readers with its depiction of the effort of multiple generations to create a magnificent breed of dog that was both companionable and wise. The novel garnered rave reviews in national publications, was an Oprah pick and has been called a modern day classic.

Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, shares many of the characteristics—positive and less so—of his first. The new novel leaps back two generations to tell the story of John Sawtelle, who, with his wife Mary and the men he manages to cajole into his enterprises, develops the first generations of the amazingly sensitive dogs.

We meet John in 1919 when he is about to get fired from his job at the Kissel Automotive Company in Hartford, Wisconsin (an actual manufacturer). Recently married to Mary, John has found a farm for sale near the town of Mellen on a puppy-related excursion north. John is a self-designated efficiency expert, with a love of detail he puts to use throughout his life as a dog breeder. After being fired in dramatic fashion, he convinces his pal Elbow, a master tinkerer and woodworker, and his frenemy Frank, an addicted, wounded veteran, to join Mary and him in pursuing his next big idea on the new farm.

The rest of Familiaris unfolds over 980 pages, sometimes with storm and thunder. There is, for example, an electrifying depiction of an epic forest fire in Wisconsin (an actual event) that involves the birth and survival of Ida, a magical sprite who intervenes at crucial points in the tale. In other passages, the story feels becalmed, drifting on a light jocular tone until the wind again rises. In the lulls, questions arise. Would Mary really be so jaunty as the lone woman amid all the angst and testosterone of the early years in Mellen? Why do the couples’ sons drop into the story from nowhere as fully formed high school graduates?

Though at times there seems to be something missing, prompting one to wonder if a future volume will reveal more, the energy Wroblewski draws from his love of the landscape and history of Wisconsin, his birth state, transmutes into enough high voltage narrative and inventiveness to keep readers with him through flatter moments.

David Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, leaps back two generations from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to follow John Sawtelle and his wife Mary as they develop the first generations of an amazingly sensitive breed of dogs.

Sarah Perry’s new novel, Enlightenment, opens on a late-winter Monday in 1997 in the office of the Essex Chronicle, a small newspaper in the English town of Aldleigh. Fifty-year-old Thomas Hart, who’s been quietly writing about literature and ghosts for 20 years, needs to write something new, his boss tells him, suggesting astronomy—the Hale-Bopp comet will soon be visible. That same day, Thomas receives a letter from the town museum with new information about the Lowlands ghost, who’s rumored to haunt the nearby Lowlands House, and who may be a 19th-century astronomer from Romania named Maria Vaduva. These two events will send Thomas on a quest to fill in the details of Maria Vaduva’s life and work.

Intertwined with Thomas’ story is that of 17-year-old Grace Macaulay, who’s linked to Thomas through their Baptist church; Thomas has also helped raise Grace after her mother died in childbirth. Grace stumbles into her first love, which sets off a series of complications that will rupture Thomas and Grace’s friendship. The story follows the two over the next 20 years, landing on pivotal moments for both.

But this plot description does little to give a real sense of Enlightenment. Despite its contemporary setting, the novel has a 19th-century feel, with an omniscient voice and a narrative peppered with letters, newspaper columns and (fictional) historical documents. And while it’s partly a ghost story, with an occasionally Gothic feel, Enlightenment is also a novel about the love of astronomy. There’s a feminist story, too—that of Maria Vaduva, the neglected 19th-century astronomer—woven around Thomas’ and Grace’s stories. But mostly, this is a novel about friendship and belonging, the grief after a friendship is lost and the difficult path to forgiveness.

Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character. If some of Enlightenment’s goings-on are a bit elliptical, and if some secondary characters feel a little wispy, not quite coming into focus, that too seems part of the novel’s aim and its charm. There’s a hint of the literary romance and mystery of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, though Enlightenment is more playful. Wide in its scope despite its narrow small-town setting, this gentle but insistent and inventive novel will tug on you in surprising ways.

Sarah Perry’s inventive, atmospheric novel Enlightenment has a 19th-century feel despite its contemporary setting, with a hint of the literary romance and mystery of A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
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Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel is a quiet but profoundly moving coming-of-age story about a young gay man in mid-2000s Nigeria. It’s an at first straightforward novel that deepens as it progresses, building toward an ending befitting its protagonist—a young man continually moving through different versions of himself.

Blessings opens in 2006 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. When Obiefuna’s father catches him in a moment of tenderness with another boy, he immediately sends him away to boarding school. Life at school is strictly regulated and often violent. Older boys abuse and terrorize the younger boys without consequence. Obiefuna, fearing that his sexuality may be discovered at any moment, does what he thinks he has to in order to survive.

Though the novel continues to follow Obiefuna through his early years at university, his time at the boarding school takes up the most space and carries a hefty emotional weight. At times it may feel as if the story drags, but the beautiful and complicated third act reveals that Ibeh knew exactly where he was going all along. He captures the uneven importance of memory and experience, the way certain events can haunt a life without our knowledge. Obiefuna’s relationships to himself, his family, his lovers and his country change dramatically over time, a shift that Ibeh weaves almost invisibly into the prose.

Interspersed between chapters from Obiefuna’s point of view are ones told from his mother Uzoamaka’s perspective. These feel less immediate and vivid, but do add a poignant narrative layer, giving readers a glimpse into what goes unspoken between mother and son.

Blessings is an excellent work of queer fiction, full of characters who are neither good nor bad, but simply human beings in constant flux. Ibeh writes cruelty onto the page alongside tenderness, crafting scenes of domestic gay love with the same attention and detail he gives to scenes of emotional and physical violence. He offers us a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy—but worth living in and telling stories about.

Blessings offers a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy, but worth living in.
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There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. You can sense tension lurking like a camouflaged animal in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of the worlds Williams builds.

In Beautiful Days, his first collection, Williams delivers intensity on page after page, but it’s how he uses the tension he creates that makes the work so remarkable. In stories that take the mundane to wondrous, frightening and deeply affecting places, Williams keeps finding new ways to remind us of the strangeness of being human, and the many ways our lives can transform in an unexpected instant.

There are no real limits to the subject matter of the 10 tales within this volume. The settings shift from skyscrapers to secluded cabins, seductive bedrooms to the quiet house next door. The characters are parents, roommates, neighbors, co-workers, even mice whose lives hang in the balance of another character’s quest for the right trap. In “Trial Run,” a man visits his office amid a snowstorm, only to find a storm of a different kind waiting inside. In “Red Light,” a sexually adventurous fitness buff finds himself in a particularly mysterious bedroom. And in “Wood Sorrel House,” which might be the most unsettling short story you read in all of 2024, new parents find themselves in a house outside of time, watching in horror as their baby refuses to age even as their own bodies fail.

Many of these stories push their subjects into the realm of the unreal, the supernatural and even the horrific, but genre conventions do not concern Williams any more than neat endings do. What’s most striking about Beautiful Days is not the premises of the stories, but the way in which the author lets them unfold at their own quirky pace, like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons. His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, dropping us into 10 distinct worlds that might all be part of the same dreamy landscape, or might be individual pocket universes. Either way, we can get lost, because Williams has a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.

Conceived as a tribute to Franz Kafka on the 100th anniversary of his death, A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories features short stories by 10 contemporary writers in the idiosyncratic style of the literary genius, a style Merriam-Webster defines as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Watching writers that include Ali Smith and Tommy Orange apply their considerable talent to this task makes for a mind-bending and consistently enjoyable reading experience.

One of the principal pleasures of this project is the range of subject matter and variety of styles the authors bring to their stories. In “God’s Doorbell,” for example, Naomi Alderman reimagines the biblical account of the Tower of Babel in a fashion that seems especially relevant to our current concerns with the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Yiyun Li’s “Apostrophe’s Dream” is a whimsical piece presented in the form of a dramatic work featuring squabbling punctuation marks as its characters.

But when one thinks of Kafka’s short stories, what most often surfaces is the image of an individual trapped in a bizarre, inexplicable situation. The volume features several works in that genre, among them Elif Batuman’s “The Board,” where the prospective purchaser of an apartment confronts the baffling commentary of the building’s implacable governing body. In “Headache,” by Leone Ross, the protagonist is drawn against her will into an increasingly problematic health care system.

Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman has acknowledged Kafka as an early influence, and so it’s fitting that the collection ends with his story, “This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing,” whose enigmatic title comes from an entry in Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks. In Kaufman’s story, a novelist identified only as “I.” descends, after a disastrous launch event for his latest novel, into an ever more complex and seemingly inescapable literary labyrinth as his identity shape-shifts, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird is a roller coaster ride that will delight the adventuresome reader, even if the twists and turns of some of its most daring stories may challenge those who enjoy more conventional short fiction. Somewhere, though, it’s easy to imagine Kafka paging through these varied and deeply imagined tales and nodding in admiration.

10 contemporary writers (Ali Smith! Tommy Orange!) apply their considerable talents to the signature style of Franz Kafka in this anthology.
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In The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud mesmerized readers with her psychologically astute character portrayals. This Strange Eventful History, her much anticipated sixth novel, draws from the stories of generations of Messud’s own French Algerian family and their reckoning with their position in colonial history.

“I’d been preparing all my life to write this book”: Read our starred review of This Strange Eventful History.

While This Strange Eventful History is a work of fiction, in the afterword, you note that your characters’ “movements hew closely to those of [your] own family.” Would you say more about the process of composing a novel inspired by your family history? Was your experience writing this book different from previous novels?

This novel is more ambitious in scale than anything I’d attempted previously—it spans seven decades and five continents. The places that the characters live at various times in the novel aren’t random—they’re the places where members of my family lived, at the times in which they lived there. The novel is shaped, then, by basic facts; and in some cases by historical incidents. I did a lot of research, in particular for the first half of the book—a good bit involving family documents, but also lots of plain old historical research.

The novel follows three generations of the Cassar family, beginning in Algeria as its colonizer France fell to the Nazis in 1940 and ending in Connecticut in 2010. What impelled you to explore this longer arc of family history?

In his retirement, my devoutly Catholic French grandfather wrote for my sister and me a family memoir about the years before and during the Second World War (covering 1928-1946). He called it “Everything that we believed in”—because he wanted to try to convey to us, his granddaughters, whose secular North American upbringing was so far from his own, what their lives had been like. I’ve realized, over the past decade or so, that the world in which I grew up—the world of the late 20th century, shaped by the postwar years that preceded it—has vanished. In order to explain to people of my kids’ age what it was like—what we believed in, and what our parents believed in—I needed to write a novel that began with the Second World War. Because that cataclysm, of course, determined everything that followed.

Would you tell us about your choice of the novel’s title?

The title is a line from near the end of Jaques’ famous soliloquy, “All the world’s a stage,” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion; / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The novel is framed around François’ life—from the age of almost 9 until his death, over seven decades (“and one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages”). I chose the title both because it refers to that speech (which is reflected in the novel’s form) and because the shape of François’ life, and of the lives of his family members, are, to me at least, strange and eventful, without being grand or important.

“In order to explain to people of my kids’ age what [the world in which I grew up] was like—what we believed in, and what our parents believed in—I needed to write a novel that began with the Second World War.”

The Cassars’ unhappiness seems to be linked both to a scandalous secret and to being out of sync with history writ large. In your view, what is the relationship of your characters’ lives to larger forces of history?

The Cassars’ unhappiness both is and isn’t linked to a scandalous secret; each member of the family has their own relation to that secret, and for some it’s not unhappy at all—quite the opposite, indeed! I hoped to convey that events are simply themselves, and how we understand them makes all the difference. If you’re devoutly religious, for example, something will look a certain way, and if you’re not, it looks different. The same of course goes for any of our beliefs.

The family is perhaps not so much out of sync with history as simply at the mercy of it. In this case, the family are French colonials in Algeria, and must make their lives elsewhere when Algerian independence comes. Again, each family member has a different reaction to that situation: Gaston and Lucienne put their faith in God, as he says, “like the birds on the breeze”; François creates a life far from France and never speaks of the past; while Denise shapes her life’s narrative around what she experiences as loss. This, I think, reflects the broader reality that each of us is always at the mercy of history’s great events—consider our lives just in the past few years, my goodness!—and that the only thing we have any control over (and sometimes precious little control at that) is how we understand and contend with our challenges.

Uprooted by war and the collapse of French colonialism, the Cassars move frequently, from Algeria to Massachusetts to Argentina, Australia, Canada and France. Your depictions of these places are vivid and precise. What kind of research did you do in composing the novel? How much arises from memory and how much from invention?

I did a lot of research—and I was fortunate to have a lot of help. This is the first time in my life that I’ve worked with research assistants. Over the many years that I worked on the novel, several amazing people helped me discover all kinds of things: political and military history about France, World War II and Algeria, but also what Amherst College was like in the early 1950s; what CEI, the business school outside Geneva, and its environs looked like; and about the man who ran it from the beginning—a great idealist. I’m very grateful to these brilliant helpers. I read lots of published books, of course, as well as my grandfather’s memoir (which is close to 1500 pages handwritten) and many family letters, spanning decades. For example, while I don’t have any letters my dad wrote when studying at Amherst, I have all the letters that his family wrote to him from Algeria. It was an amazing experience to unfold the onionskin sheets and know that nobody had read these pages since my dad tore open each letter, probably while walking out of the campus post office, back in 1953, and then stuffed them back in the envelope—reading them, time collapsed.

Chloe, the youngest Cassar, is the only character to narrate in the first person. From childhood, Chloe sees herself as a guardian to her family and a storyteller. She is curious, sometimes to the point of being nosy. She aspires to be a writer. Do you feel a particular kinship with Chloe?

Yes, I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to a certain kinship with the character of Chloe—of course, that’s partly why her sections are in the first person. But they’re also in the first person because the understanding is that she’s the speaker in the prologue, and that she’s writing the book, as it were. I wanted the novel to reflect in some way her evolution, along with the narrative’s, from more traditional third person storytelling to increasing interiority and subjectivity. Hopefully that’s something the reader can feel in the changing rhythms of the prose as well as in the voice.

“Events are simply themselves, and how we understand them makes all the difference.”

Your novel contains some of the most beautiful sentences I have recently read. They are long, elaborate, stately and often inward-dwelling in a way that feels deliberate. Could you tell us about your choice of sentence structure?

Thank you so much—I’m so glad you liked the sentences. I don’t know that it’s so much a choice as almost a sense that the sentences come through me—I hear them in my head, their rhythms, like music. I can feel when a word is off, or the syntax. I have an innate feeling of the shape of a sentence—of each sentence, and of how they sit together as well as each on its own. For me that’s a big part of what writing is—the music of the language, interwoven with meaning. They’re inseparable.

At what point do you share drafts of your work in progress, and with whom?

Historically I’ve shared work earlier, but this time around, I simply had my head down, mostly. I’d written about 100 pages over several years and couldn’t find the space to do it properly while teaching full time, so I took an unpaid leave to write the rest of the book. That meant I had a bit less than eight months and no time to loiter. I write by hand, on graph paper, pretty small, and nobody can really read my manuscripts, or not without effort. So I had to type it into the computer before anyone could read anything. My husband is my first reader, and eventually he read parts of it, and then ultimately the whole thing. Luckily for me, we know each other well at this point; he’s great at being a cheerleader at the right moments, and then offering real criticism when that’s what’s called for.

What were the biggest challenges and satisfactions of writing This Strange Eventful History?

That’s a good question—I think they are linked, in fact. As I mentioned, the scale of this novel is bigger than anything I’d written before; finding a form that would enable me to take on such a long stretch of history, while still exploring the characters’ interiority and while not having the book collapse under its own weight—that was for me a central challenge. I can honestly say that I’d been preparing all my life to write this book, and I couldn’t have managed it earlier, for all sorts of reasons. So there’s real satisfaction simply in having got the book written, at last!

Claire Messud author photo © Lucian Wood.

The acclaimed author's latest family saga follows the French Algerian Cassars, who find themselves bit players in the global shifts following WWII.
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A dead whale is a harbinger of transformation in this mesmerizing coming-of-age story.

It’s 1938. Eighteen-year-old Manod lives on a remote island in the British Isles that is situated five to 10 hours from the mainland by boat, depending on the weather. Here, nature dictates how bountiful or brutal life will be for the isolated island community that lives off the land and sea. Men’s desirability is based on their ability to forage seaweed and the value of their livestock, while girls are married by 16 and often left widows by 25, because the sea is dangerous and none of the fishermen can swim.

The dead whale’s appearance is followed, about a month later, by an English couple, Joan and Edward, ethnographers from the mainland who are keen to gather content for a book about the island. Manod, literate in English and Welsh, and hopeful for an escape from social expectations, becomes their eager assistant. But her interactions with the idealistic Joan and the handsome Edward make her reexamine her dreams and her understanding of island life.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the community’s transformation. Entrancing descriptions illuminate the raw beauty of the island through seasonal changes. Manod is a memorable protagonist; her ability to live this challenging life while entertaining aspirations for herself and her sister beyond getting married and staying on the island shows great complexity and strength. Manod’s interactions with Joan and Edward are profound in their subtlety, demonstrating the cultural divides possible within the Commonwealth. Debut author Elizabeth O’Connor’s metaphoric use of the decaying whale masterfully depicts the gradual erosion of the island way of life, picked apart by scavengers.

Poignant and poetic, Whale Fall is a compelling read for fans of M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, Tove Janssen’s The Summer Book and Claire Keegan’s Foster.

Whale Fall is a rich and quietly compelling novel that vividly captures the transformation of an isolated community in the British Isles.
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Kit, the protagonist of Kimberly King Parsons’ We Were the Universe, is in trouble. Her 3-year-old daughter, Gilda, is horribly spoiled. Kit’s mother, Tammy, is a hoarder. Her husband, Jad, seems saintly but is simply passive in the face of Gilda’s commandeering of their lives. Worst of all, Kit’s sister, Julie, is dead. 

Kit is the last person you’d think would break herself on the wheel of domesticity. Still quite young when the book begins, she was once a smart, snarky, adventurous girl from Wink, Texas, who lusted after men and women (and still does). She enjoyed her booze and drugs: She credits LSD trips for getting her through unmedicated childbirth. She played bass guitar in a band with Julie and their friend Yesenia. All of the girls liked altered states of consciousness, but unlike the other two, Julie became hooked. The band collapsed. Julie lived with their mother in squalor. Then, she died.

What’s puzzling for the reader and alarming for Kit’s friends and family is that, though Julie’s death occurred in the last days of Kit’s pregnancy, it’s only now that Kit’s grief is starting to drive her crazy. Parsons, author of the short story collection Black Light, gives us some clues as to why. Mothering Gilda has ground Kit down to a nub. Does she long for or dread the day when this tantrum-throwing, co-sleeping, still-nursing gremlin will stop needing her, when Gilda, like Julie, will leave? A brief scene near the end of the book throws a klieg light on the last days of the sisters’ relationship. Without revealing what happens, it becomes clear that Kit has been living life as penance: performing motherhood as an endless martyrdom, abjuring the things that gave her joy (even if they weren’t exactly good for her), eclipsing her once-vibrant self. If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, We Were the Universe might be it.

If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, Kimberly King Parsons’ We Were the Universe might be it.
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Claire Messud’s enthralling sixth work of fiction recounts the wanderings of three generations of the Cassar family over seven decades, from the Nazi occupation of France in June 1940 to the passing of François Cassar in Connecticut in 2010.

This Strange Eventful History opens with 8-year-old François wanting to write to his father in Salonica, Greece, to alert him about the French surrender. His father Gaston, a French naval attaché, has of course heard the sorry news and considers his options with a mixture of doubt, shame and defiance. He longs for his wife Lucienne, who has been and will be to the end of their days his “aIni,” his source. She and their children, François and Denise, have fled to their home in Algeria to wait out the conflict.

The Cassars are French Algerians, pieds-noirs, who have lived in Algeria since its colonization. They feel French, but they are regarded as outsiders in mainland France, especially after the Algerian revolution in 1954. François’ sense of not fitting in is one reason he leaves for America. Gaston, in a new career in the booming oil business, also learns he doesn’t fit in. A colleague tells him, “We lost the war, my friend. . . . To the victor go the spoils. The future is in oil, and the future is in English.” For this family, every success carries a germ of defeat.

But it isn’t only business and geopolitics that stymies the Cassars. Some whiff of family shame or dysfunction leaves François always feeling inadequate and warps his sister Denise into a delusional and increasingly alcoholic spinster, devoted to the care of their aging parents.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her descriptions of people and places are beautiful, precise and illuminating. Her understanding of the human soul is profound. This is reason enough to read the novel.

Yet the novel’s magic casts a wider spell. Chloe, a third-generation Cassar, is a novelist, like Messud. She wishes to write about and understand her family’s uncomfortable history. She observes, “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” In This Strange Eventful History, Messud has given us that richer thing. It is amazing.

Read our interview with Claire Messud for This Strange Eventful History.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound.
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Some writers have a gift for making ordinary lives as compelling as anything you’d find in an epic adventure. This ability to chart the human condition goes beyond technical proficiency or what we’d generally consider literary merit. Sunjeev Sahota has this gift, and his latest novel, The Spoiled Heart, wrings maximum emotional impact out of a seemingly unremarkable life. 

The Spoiled Heart centers on Nayan, a working-class man living in England who was devastated by a tragic loss two decades earlier. Ever since, Nayan has thrown himself into his union, and into caring for his aging father. He’s never wanted much of a romantic life, until the standoffish and oddly beguiling Helen Fletcher returns to town. Nayan finds himself drawn to Helen, even as she seems determined to push him away, and as a union election threatens to consume his world. What draws Nayan to Helen? What drives him to keep pushing, both for her and for success as a union leader? What makes a man like Nayan tick? 

These are the questions that Sahota’s narrator, an acquaintance and eventual friend of Nayan’s, sets out to answer, and it’s through this narrator’s eyes that the particular brilliance of The Spoiled Heart becomes clear. By framing Nayan’s story through the eyes of another storyteller, Sahota digs deep into the psyche of his protagonist, while asking provocative questions about whose story this really is and how much of it is true. There’s an element of voyeurism that lends something thrilling and incisive to the whole story.

Sahota’s prose is as precise, confident and startlingly wise when describing the depths of tragedy as the banalities of a transaction in a local shop. Nayan’s internal life, as a broken man who’d rather fix others than himself, is rendered in powerful, stealthily profound sentences, and all the while it’s accompanied by the sense that the author is building to something bigger, darker and more revelatory. When Sahota finally reaches that moment in The Spoiled Heart‘s final pages, it feels both shattering and strangely inevitable.

The Spoiled Heart is one of those books that will take root quickly and grow in your soul. It’s another powerful achievement for Sahota, and a novel that even readers who are leery of contemporary realism will enjoy.

Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart wrings maximum emotional impact out of a seemingly ordinary life, with an element of voyeurism that lends something thrilling and incisive to the narrative.

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