‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The Boston Globe If you lived through the winter of 1971-1972 but have gotten hazy on the details over the past 50 years, or if you were born decades later and just want to do some time travel, Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant new novel, Crossroads, is the book for you. Soulful, funny, and so sharply observed it hurts ... Crossroads becomes a variety pack of secret aspirations and betrayals ... There’s nothing reductive in Franzen’s portrait of this agitated, complicated family, and Crossroads is both agonizing and hilarious as it probes each character’s dilemma. There’s nothing amiss, either, in Franzen’s period detail ... Franzen’s prose, as always, is sheer pleasure.

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The Seattle Times ...brilliant ... Soulful, funny and so sharply observed it hurts, it’s a portrait of a family coming apart on multiple fronts as they live through an era when all the rules — social, moral, sexual, political — seem to be in flux ... There’s nothing reductive in Franzen’s portrait of this agitated, complicated family, and Crossroads is both agonizing and hilarious as it probes each character’s dilemma. There’s nothing amiss, either, in Franzen’s period detail ... so richly entertaining that the ethical inquiries Franzen poses go down like cherry-flavored medicine. But they’re rigorous all the same ... These kaleidoscopic turns in filial dynamics leave you eager to see where Franzen takes his family saga next.

Colm Tóibín

Positive The Seattle Times Mixing domestic dramas with global convulsions, the novel creates a profound sense of instability that would likely dismantle even the most stolid character ... Tóibín...is at home in Mann’s contradictions, capturing the entire Mann family’s odd humors, conflicts and ordeals. While his timeline is straightforward as he moves from Mann’s childhood to his final illness, the way the ground keeps shifting beneath his characters’ feet is not ... Several chapters in The Magician have a thrillerlike intensity. There’s wry humor, too ... But his biggest triumph is in getting to the heart of Mann’s dilemma ... Those words hit home in our own era when democracy seems so much under threat.

Sabina Murray

Rave The Seattle Times ...fascinating ... maybe it’s a political thriller. Or it could be a love story. It’s definitely a social critique targeting the grotesque inequalities of an authoritarian regime in the contemporary Philippines ... Until her final chapter, Murray cannily keeps you guessing where her narrative is going and what kind of story it is. Meanwhile, in just over 250 pages, she delivers a remarkably wide-ranging portrait of a society under such pressure that feels as if it could blow up at any minute ... Murray’s present-day Philippines, it should be noted, differs slightly from the country of the headlines. Rather than give real-life Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte a place in her tale, Murray has created a fictional President Procopio Gumboc — perhaps to avoid trouble for the book with the repressive Duterte regime ... Some names may have been altered, but Murray’s sense of place is vigorously vivid ... Let me just say that instabilities — of tone, of content, of sympathies, of perspective — can be cardinal assets in provocative fiction. In The Human Zoo Murray wields those instabilities with a keen, riveting instinct.

Alaa Al Aswany, tr. S. R. Fellowes

Rave The Seattle Times ... occasionally creaky, with overly contrived cliffhanger chapter endings and a few overly sentimental touches. But it goes places that no nonfiction account could ... With its focus on family divisions, government intrigue and military abuses of power, it provides startling contexts for the struggles that made headlines 10 years ago. Its multiple points of view and I-am-a-camera techniques lend those events a wraparound immediacy. If over the past decade you’ve wondered why the pro-democracy movement in Egypt ultimately gained so little traction, Al Aswany gives you a sweeping, nuanced picture of why. He took part in the Tahrir Square protests, so his characters’ eyewitness accounts are rooted in his own firsthand experience ... takes readers from Cairo’s swankiest quarters to its grittiest slums ... While it’s clear which way Al Aswany’s sympathies lean, his sharp observations of ordinary human foibles and hypocrisies make the novel much more than a topical-events seminar or diatribe ... Al Aswany, in interviews, has been more sanguine about the prospects for freedom and human rights in Egypt — but not by much. This novel, in S.R. Fellows’ highly readable translation, gives you a comprehensive picture of what the challenges are.

Tim Parks

Positive The Seattle Times Trying to picture what the 1849 retreat was like was challenging, but Parks did his research and readers will learn a lot ... Parks is frank about his own trek, sharing such details as his gratitude to be wearing \'elasticated, anti-rash athlete’s underwear\' ... The Hero’s Way isn’t all smooth going. Tracking the names of all the military skirmishes and personnel involved can be challenging, as Parks acknowledges. Parks and Garritelli’s daily search for acceptable accommodation and food (they’re vegetarians) can get repetitive, too. But the central point of how a seeming military debacle gradually became viewed as \'a glorious act of resistance\' is powerfully made.

Jonathan Evison

Mixed Seattle Times Bold ambition doesn’t necessarily serve Jonathan Evison well in his latest novel ... often strains credulity as it alternates between an Iraq War veteran’s battlefield experiences and PTSD travails and a young, pregnant Ice Age woman’s brutal fight for survival ... Evison gives it his best shot, but how many ways are there to describe hunger, fatigue and ice? His rapid switches between present day and Ice Age scenarios also prevent either narrative from feeling as immersive as you might like ... In its final dramatic stretch, the novel starts feeling so improbable that it’s difficult to buy into its suspense. There’s some humor in precocious Bella’s attempts to grasp the confusing vocabulary of the world around her, but Evison’s intended magic with her visions of S’tka’s sufferings, which at one point involve a gang rape, requires a suspension of disbelief that’s sometimes hard to muster ... Still, the gist of the novel can feel right on the mark.

Lionel Shriver

Rave The Seattle Times Have patience with the first chapter of Lionel Shriver’s new novel ... As [the protagonists] go over the pros and cons, they sound less like characters than authorial mouthpieces. But their exchange is actually a canny setup for a wildly inventive and sometimes hilarious novel on a sober subject ... She also creates a composite portrait of a married couple and their three children that, for all its contradictions, hangs together with glorious plausibility. Indeed, by paying as much attention to what Kay or Cyril don’t do in some scenarios, she digs into corners of their characters that no single account of \'what happened\' could ever reveal. Twelve different stories unfold—and you need all 12 ... Shriver may be a contrarian—but she has a sense of humor about it. More to the point, she never lets her politics interfere with the sheer zest of her imagination. The fugue-like pleasures of the novel, as key passages and images recur in ever-shifting patterns with ever-differing outcomes, are intense ... a delight to read—even as it leaves you wondering if maybe now is the right time to get hold of a lethal cocktail.

Joan Silber

Rave The Seattle Times Silber’s knack for inhabiting far-flung realities is remarkable. She doesn’t use spelling tricks to evoke dialects or regional accents as her narrators reveal what it’s like to grow up half-Thai in Queens, do garment union work in Phnom Penh, or work on a textile industry documentary in London. Instead, her handling of her characters’ diverse manners of speech is self-effacingly spare ... The book’s narrative suspense increases with the arrival of each new narrator (there are six altogether) ... Silber’s prose is so efficiently distilled that it occasionally feels overly abrupt. Still, the swift way she moves through tricky states of mind can be exquisite ... Secrets of Happiness pays the best kind of attention to its characters’ desires, dilemmas and, of course, connections.

Rachel Cusk

Positive The Seattle Times The opening salvos in Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, by contrast, set up expectations the book doesn’t quite meet — at least for this reader. Others might have no problem with it at all ... Second Place itself is filled with ruses as its players seek to affirm or destroy one another’s agendas. These can sometimes be hilarious — for instance, when one character, abruptly deciding he wants to be a writer, thinks the first step is to don the right outfit ... a beguiling, sidewinding meditation on \'the possibility of dissolution of identity itself, of release, with all of its cosmic, ungraspable meanings.\'

David Laskin

Rave The Seattle Times Almost memoirlike in its portrait of its specific time and place, What Sammy Knew — the first work of fiction by Seattle writer David Laskin (The Children’s Blizzard) — is both a coming-of-age novel and an examination of how young people plunge into the historical moment in which they happen to find themselves ... Laskin’s prose can feel strained in the early parts of the novel. But as the conflicts and complications intensify, the writing gets more streamlined. Throughout the book, there are passages that hit the nail exactly on the head ... The period detail is mostly flawless ... The reverse mirror the novel holds up to our own troubled times is startling.

Paul Theroux

Rave The Seattle Times Its immersion in the physical essence and social divides of Hawaii feels profoundly experienced rather than merely observed ... Theroux’s conjuring of surfing’s allure to Joe is incantatory, ecstatic, hypnotic. Joe’s surf-centric travels over the world are another highlight of the book, with Theroux’s Trevor Noah-worthy gift for rendering accents and dialects on the page getting a good workout ... reads like lived sensation. It’s peopled with real surfing legends, many of them native Hawaiian, and includes a gleeful portrait of writer Hunter S. Thompson ... Some elements of the novel ask for more than the usual suspension of disbelief. But as in much of Theroux’s fiction, the bold symmetries and heightened language make it clear that he’s aiming for something beyond routine naturalism ... immerses you so elaborately in its watery world that you may start seeing surfing as just another guise for life itself. And as in life, it can leave you feeling uncertain of where you’re headed ... one of Theroux’s best novels.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

Rave The Boston Globe [A] definitive life ... Stevens and Swan furnish an exhaustive account, painting by painting, exhibition by exhibition, of how Bacon’s wild innovations in figurative art countered the mid-20th-century fashions for both abstract expressionism and pop art. They have great fun, too, as they chronicle Bacon’s wit, charm, extravagance, and cruelty ... Stevens and Swan are vivid scene setters. They’re also shrewd evaluators of the people in Bacon’s life, including painter Lucian Freud and Bacon’s doomed lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer ... does justice to the contradictions of both the man and the art.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mixed The Seattle Times ... contains brilliant writing, perverse insights and Tarantino-esque action sequences. Its wit is bitter; its pain is palpable. But it’s also less fluid in feel than The Sympathizer, as though its narrator — rather than being a fully animated and unpredictable character — is now a useful construct on which Nguyen can hang intellectual concepts ... Nguyen leavens his narrator’s grim outlook some scathing humor ... There’s a mordant appeal to these proceedings, and the writing can be brilliant. Still, gangsters, drug deals, femmes fatales and shootouts aren’t always as interesting as the divided sympathies and warring convictions that powered Nguyen’s remarkable debut ... a worthy read, even it falls short of the impact of its predecessor. Newcomers to Nguyen should also be aware that, as hard as Nguyen works to backfill details, they’ll need to read the first book to grasp what’s at stake in the second.

Chang-Rae Lee

Pan The Seattle Times ... seems at first as though it’s going to be a rowdy rollick. Its prose is jazzy and jokey. Its plot immediately takes preposterous twists and turns ... Unfortunately, My Year Abroad grows simultaneously sillier and duller the longer it goes on. Extravagant flights of fancy outstay their welcome, and irrelevant flashbacks sometimes stop the narrative in its tracks. The novel has its moments, especially in its first 100 pages. But it’s never a good sign when you finish a book wondering what on earth the author was trying to accomplish ... Tossed in with this over-the-top lampooning of racial stereotypes are brothel visits, some profuse vomiting, a near-lethal surfing escapade in Hawaii and an interminable karaoke scene in which Tiller discovers, to his amazement, that he’s a marvelous singer. There’s also a sober flashback to Pong’s Chinese childhood during the Cultural Revolution that feels as if it comes from a totally different book ... Food is central to both the Stagno and Shenzhen narratives, but it’s hard see what point Lee is making with it ... The prose, exhilarating at first, becomes more and more of a liability as the book progresses. At times it feels as if Lee is vying for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award ... Lee does excel at scene-setting ... Passages like that, with their giddily piled-up clauses, are good satirical fun. But there’s way too much nonsense and detritus to wade through in My Year Abroad to make it worth seeking them out.

Daniel Loedel

Rave The Seattle Times \"...a debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike ... What makes Loedel’s tale so unusual is the fluid way it shifts back and forth between the real and the spectral ... the tangles of action, intention and self-deception he evokes are spellbinding in ways that will hit home in any society where democracy, the rule of law and the very concept of the truth are in peril.\

Jane Smiley

Rave The Seattle Times If ever there were a year when we could use some light relief, 2020 is it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley (“A Thousand Acres”) surely didn’t know what kind of world she’d be sending her new book into — but Perestroika in Paris couldn’t have come at a better time. Fanciful, smart and atmospheric, it has just enough thematic weight to make it more than merely silly ... Perestroika in Paris isn’t being marketed as children’s fiction, but it would be a perfect gift for any horse-crazy, Paris-crazy or, for that matter, rat/dog/bird-crazy 12-year-old reader. That said, Smiley’s wit and her lyrical prose make the book a sparkling screwball-comedy treat for adults as well.

William Boyd

Rave The Boston Globe Talbot readily admits that in the movie world \'ordinary norms of behaviour did not apply.\' Still, the surprises he faces on his latest project are beyond anything he has encountered before. To say more about them would give too much away. But it’s a ton of fun to see Talbot navigate the mayhem. Boyd can also be trusted to get his atmospherics right ... Where some writers come at the 1960s too reverently...Boyd brings a lighter skepticism to the era and reminds us that not everyone was tuned into the turbulence of the times ... Trio, with its wickedly accurate period detail and darkly wayward farce, is Boyd at his most entertaining.

Nicole Krauss

Positive The Seattle Times Krauss’ tales sometimes echo the fanciful-acerbic early work of Cynthia Ozick. She has a fine eye for conflicted identities and problematic legacies. She also has a knack for ending most of her stories on an oblique yet deeply satisfying note ... Switzerland, like the title story, is one of Krauss’ most recent efforts and suggests a new direction she may be taking, as it examines the influence that reckless and possibly damaged figures can exert over the impressionable souls around them ... The collection isn’t flawless. The editor in me itches to delete the overly explanatory final paragraph in The Husband when Krauss has the perfect understated closer in the lines just before it. Still, each tale in the book bends the formal possibilities of the short story in a pleasurably elastic way. Krauss’ ability to tackle novel-worthy subjects at compact length is particularly bracing.

Phil Klay

Rave The Boston Globe Brutal, subtle, and witheringly savvy, Phil Klay’s first novel, Missionaries, casts a scathing light on American military ventures overseas, while also immersing readers in the tumult of Colombia as it struggled toward peace and democracy in the first decades of the 21st century ... Klay, through archival and on-the-ground research, delivers what feels remarkably like a genuine South American novel built from lived experience of his numerous Colombian characters. His take on his increasingly skeptical American characters is persuasive too ... Klay employs a touch of gallows humor in his accounts of Colombia’s worst self-inflicted wounds ... Still, the book’s violence may be stronger than some readers can take. Klay, a US Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, pulls no punches in exposing the nature of both Colombian factional atrocities and America’s bloody interventions overseas ... Klay has something urgent to say here about the way his country operates in the 21st-century world. It isn’t simple, and it sure isn’t pretty.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave The Seattle Times ... a short novel, but it doesn’t leave you feeling shortchanged. In fact, quite the opposite — especially if you’re an older reader facing the questions of what life, mortality and human connection all add up to ... The book’s stark truths, silkily captured, touch on everything from \'[t]he boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion\' to the way young people view old age as \'a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature\' ... Nunez is more interested in the tensions that animate the fabric of life than in narrative pyrotechnics. She’s fascinated by the foibles of memory, the difficulty of establishing the facts of people’s personal histories and the rich minefield that language can present ... Nunez is a kind of Scheherazade in reverse, gathering stories instead of dispensing them ... The key notes of the novel are its stoicism and its humor. Farce keeps intruding on desperation. Nunez’s narrator may be a no-frills realist, but that doesn’t automatically make her a pragmatist. And her friend’s behavior follows a similar pattern. Mishaps, panic and deepening affection ensue ... Nunez lends her narrator a cultural sensibility as eclectic as her own ... The bewildering thing about the novel — and the source of its greatest pleasure — is that it’s far more bracing than depressing. Its frank confrontation of bleak realities is exactly what energizes it ... The result is a book as luminous as it is deep and as slippery as it is firmly grounded ... as beautifully told as they come.

Steve Olson

Rave The Seattle Times Olson writes lucidly, making even the most recondite details of the science involved clear to a nonscientist. And he’s eloquent in his chronicling of the lives affected — and sometimes destroyed — by the invention and use of the world’s most deadly weapon ... [a] deft, informative, sometimes terrifying book.

Nicholson Baker

Positive The Seattle Times ... a genre-transforming blend of history and memoir, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of Baker’s research efforts, his home life and his worst fears about his own country. That makes Baseless essential reading for anyone trying to grapple with the role of the U.S. in global affairs since the end of World War II ... scrupulously sourced, as are all the other documents that Baker cites in his 50-page bibliography ... Baker will probably get grief from some quarters for seeing our nation — especially the CIA — in such a bad light. But as he points out, opening the records could put many conspiracy theories to rest.

David Mitchell

Mixed The Seattle Times A shaggy, sprawling, picaresque tale, with one brief detour into time-traveling fantasy fiction, it certainly has its moments. But it’s also a bit of a letdown ... cameo appearances...feel as though Mitchell expects their names alone to do his character-portrayal work for him. The book is also strewn with allusions to Mitchell’s earlier fiction in ways that feel more gimmicky than meaningful. Mitchell, who was born in 1969, is better when evoking the general texture of the period. And he almost convinces you that this band he’s dreamt up...could have enjoyed minor chart success in the winter of 1967-1968 ... Mitchell’s portraits of Jasper, Dean and Elf are the book’s strongest component ... Levon, alas, is one of the book’s disappointments. Mitchell never really takes us inside his story ... Mitchell festoons the book with philosophical asides that don’t amount to much...and he plays games that may not work for readers not already steeped in the period ... One early passage in the book, where Dean crosses paths with painter Francis Bacon and his boozy circle at the Colony Club, is such a blast that it almost makes you wish Mitchell had focused more narrowly on the plight of an attractive, young, straight would-be rock star navigating Bacon’s world. As it stands, Utopia Avenue feels both overstuffed and incomplete.

James Gardner

Positive The Boston Globe Gardner’s book will be an eye-opener to some readers (I’m one of them) who take the Louvre for granted as a semi-eternal and unchanging part of Paris’s cultural furniture. Just the fact that it first opened its doors as a public art museum smack in the middle of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror may be news to you. But the surprises don’t stop there ... In recounting this history, Gardner makes every phase and transformation vivid ... Gardner’s minutiae on architectural detail can be dense going at times, but the human stories and accounts of art acquisitions he digs up are fascinating ... Gardner helps readers keep France’s tangled royal and republican lines of succession clear by always contextualizing key figures as needed, and his daunting cultural erudition is equally user-friendly. His writing is shrewd and witty, and even catty when it comes to architectural \'improvements\' that draw his displeasure. Anyone curious about how the Louvre evolved into its present configuration will find this diligent book richly informative.

Andrés Barba, Trans. by Lisa Dillman

Positive The Boston Globe His story, set in the fictional northern Argentinian city of San Cristóbal, blends the fairytale elements of a Pied-Piper-like fable with the clinical clarity of a crime dossier ... The narrator’s portrayal of himself is just as unusual as his take on the character of his surroundings ... One pleasure of the novel derives from the way its eerie events are addressed in such a matter-of-fact tone ... Statistics are served up; documents are cited; academic studies and an overly sensational film documentary on the thirty-two are referenced. At the same time, allusions to fairy tales and folklore are an essential part of the picture, making the book something much more otherworldly than an issues-centric social critique. Translator Lisa Dillman captures both the docudrama tones and anarchic threats of the story with perfect facility ... a captivating piece of storytelling ... a primer on the manner in which we perceive and create our own realities. Barba is especially beguiling as he ponders the way that playfulness, performance, and social conformity create our sense of who and what we are.

Romesh Gunesekera

Rave The Boston Globe ... captures this identity-altering brand of infatuation brilliantly ... Gunesekera’s prose is lush yet luminously clear, and Kairo — as he deciphers the world around him and his place in that world — is the perfect guide to the book’s turbulent setting. Kairo’s sense of cultural stirrings beyond Colombo is vivid, too ... Even the post-colonial politics of the book are couched in fanciful terms ... fresh ... wonderful.

Augustine Sedgewick

Positive The Boston Globe ... not relentlessly grim. In its last lap, it strikes some positive notes ... Meticulously researched, vivid in its scene-setting, fine-toothed in its sociopolitical analysis and, admittedly, sometimes dense going in its tackling of economic and physiological theories, Coffeeland lays bare the history and reality behind that cup of joe you’re drinking.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The Seattle Times ... a strange blend of tour de force and dead-end narrative ... Death in Her Hands continues the exploration of extreme interiority that Moshfegh pursued in her previous novel ... fiction premised on an absence of experience, constrained by a character who has no pastimes or human connections to occupy her—at least in the present ... Moshfegh’s powers of invention, as Vesta careers from one supposition to the next, seem inexhaustible ... For readers who can tolerate that much unresolved unreality in their fiction, Death in Her Hands may be just the ticket. And even if you have your doubts about the novel, it’s an odd enough enterprise to make you glad that it exists.

Michael Christie

Positive The New York Times Book Review The author broaches every kind of human valor, villainy and vulnerability: drug addiction, forbidden desires and laudable do-gooding, among others. He commands attention not through conservationist pieties but with the way his forest-killers and tree-loving zealots are equally off-kilter and contradiction-filled ... Christie’s description can be superb, whether he’s conjuring clear-cut devastation ... His look ahead to the late 2030s is gloomily wry ... Christie can be over-obvious in setting up his end-of-chapter cliffhangers or drawing human/arboreal parallels ... But there are plenty of visionary moments laced into his shape-shifting narrative.

Ginger Gaffney

Positive The Seattle Times ... often extraordinary ... From its first page, Half Broke grabs your attention ... Gaffney’s focus on human/equine body language is fascinating, especially in the way it helps her discern the weaknesses riddling some of the hard cases she’s dealing with ... The book loses some focus in its last stretch as Gaffney again revisits her \'lonely, reclusive childhood\' and recalls one more horse from her young adulthood that helped her find her place in the world. Oddly, she doesn’t reveal why she apparently stopped going to the ranch after 18 months ... Still, for most of its length, Half Broke — with its painful candor and spare, incisive prose — is captivating.

Arthur Phillips

Rave The Seattle Times Author Arthur Phillips, who seems to invent himself afresh with every novel he writes, is always delightfully playful in his storytelling ... The result, in Phillips’ agile hands, is a wily fish-out-of-water tale that turns our usual concepts about the glories of the Elizabethan age upside down ... This wise, tricky novel, in which every character is \'performing\' in some guise or other while trying to get at some solid kernel of truth, whisks you into guessing games of the very best kind.

Gish Jen

Rave The Seattle Times If you’re going to write a dystopian novel in our increasingly dystopian world (climate change! creeping fascism! coronavirus!), you may as well have some fun with it. Gish Jen certainly does ... a rabble-rousing tale with an ominous edge to it ... The winning, suspenseful heart of the book is Gwen’s resourceful action on the field (and I’m saying that as a total baseball illiterate). Jen’s jauntily sinister AutoAmerican argot is a continual pleasure as well ... Best of all is her take on why even the ultimate surveillance society can’t quite muffle the human spirit.

Emily St. John Mandel

Rave The Seattle Times ... brilliant ... Mandel’s exquisite narratorial juggling is her way of casting light on how we see our lives and attempt to shape them — in retrospect, in anticipation, in our imaginations ... fascinating ... Mandel is ingenious at evoking how deceptions take hold ... Mandel is a marvelous writer...But the keenest pleasure of The Glass Hotel is simply in the magic with which it immerses you in the calm, disorienting way that Mandel and her stubborn, enigmatic heroine see the world.

Julian Barnes

Positive The Boston Globe Barnes’s allusions to...historical events sometimes assume a knowledge of the players and \'-isms\' of the period that not every reader will have. Still, his take on Pozzi’s tumultuous times hits home. The most captivating moments in the book come when Barnes addresses the ways that we view figures from the past ... He’s also shrewd on how a biography—anyone’s biography—\'can only be a public version of a public life, and a partial version of a private life\' ... In the end, The Man in a Red Coat pinpoints the paradox of Pozzi’s life even if it can’t retrieve all his secrets.

Jonathan Waldman

Positive The Boston Globe Waldman is clearly exhilarated by the story he’s telling, and his zest comes through in the book’s best turns of phrase ... That said, SAM poses some stumbling blocks for the lay reader. An index and glossary would have come in handy to help keep track of all the acronyms and specialized vocabulary Waldman uses ... to fully understand the book’s details requires constant Googling. Elsewhere, Waldman’s word choice can seem off ... The book’s incidental pleasures include Waldman’s visit to the annual \'World of Concrete\' trade show where Construction Robotics introduced SAM. Details on the U.S. Brick Olympics and International Brick Collectors Association offer quirky surprises, too. All in all, SAM reveals a world that surrounds us but mostly eludes our notice – and that’s quite a feat.

Sayed Kashua

Positive The Seattle Times If you’re game for a novel about just how sad, fractured and tricky cultural identity can get, Arab-Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes is the book for you ... [a] mournfully shape-shifting novel, deftly translated by Mitch Ginsburg.

Giles Whittell

Positive The Boston Globe ... a fact-packed volume that’s downright giddy with enthusiasm for its subject ... Whittell’s writing is sometimes undisciplined. Twice in three pages, he cites the same quote...and his own enthusiasm for ski-jumping feats produces some pretty extraordinary claims ... Though his prose occasionally is hackneyed (\'Nature can be cruel\'), it can also be lithely on the mark ... He’s also consistently good-humored, offering readers helpful hints where needed ... Even as Whittell plays himself up as a zany snow fanatic, he has a serious message to convey.

Garth Greenwell

Rave The Boston Globe The way [Greenwell] parses an awkward conversation or a drunken night on the town or the most intimate erotic encounters is absolutely spellbinding. Even when his candor on carnal matters — specifically, homosexual matters — plunges deep into sadomasochistic territory, his interpretation of what’s going on between his characters is so savvy and precise that you can’t help admiring its elegance ... exquisite in its handling of what for many readers will be taboo territory ... [the narrator\'s] urge toward self-obliteration is unnerving (HIV contagion is an active possibility), but for readers willing to accompany him on his dive into abandon, the payoff is an intense suspense as to where he’ll draw a line ... Greenwell is a marvelous outward observer, too, and his narrator’s portrait of his Bulgarian surroundings is remarkably vivid. His students’ debate over whether to stay in Bulgaria or flee their country for better opportunities abroad has a poignant urgency ... If Greenwell continues in this vein, it will be fascinating to see how he tackles his alter ego’s experiences on the home front.

Aravind Adiga

Positive The Seattle Times The action in Amnesty...encompasses worlds within worlds ... it’s a quirky immersion in the sights and sounds of Sydney as viewed by a house cleaner who sees the city from a covert interloper’s point of view ... a near-hallucinatory guided tour of Australia\'s largest city ... Adiga...persuasively conveys the realities of Danny\'s refugee existence ... In fresh and playful prose that’s sometimes eccentrically paragraphed and punctuated, Adiga places you smack in the middle of Danny’s buzzing mind ... Some threads of the novel feel undeveloped ... With its pleasurably off-kilter sympathies and style, Amnesty compellingly captures Danny\'s tricky plight.

David J. Silverman

Rave The Boston Globe David J. Silverman delivers [the story] in astonishing detail in This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, recovering the nuances of Wampanoag personalities and power-plays to a greater degree than most lay readers of American history would believe possible ... His pointed, lucid prose makes his book as deeply engaging as it is sobering. He also provides helpful maps and an indispensable glossary to help keep track of the many Native American figures in the story, especially those known by multiple names.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Positive The Seattle Times Sightseeing is a promising debut — a book that works better when it’s tougher than when it strays toward sentiment, even if it sometimes goes for easy targets (crass Western tourists, small-town thugs). At its best, it does justice to the complications and ironies that arise when cultures collide ... The one real failure here, strangely, is the book’s title story.

Zadie Smith

Mixed The Boston Globe ... particularly bewildering. There are several masterpieces among its 19 entries — but there are also experimental doodles and duds that might better have been left in [Smith\'s] desk drawer ... Smith always hints more than she spells out, and where race is concerned, she’ll deliberately delay revealing ethnic identities until you’re well into the story. Identity politics interest her far less than people do. It’s no surprise that she does better with a bigger canvas – 20 or 30 pages versus 4 to 10 – given the rich, symphonic scope of her novels ... At times Smith is so cleverly oblique that she’s seems to skirt taking on any subject matter at all ... isn’t a good place to start with Smith if you aren’t familiar with her.

Salman Rushdie

Positive The Boston Globe While it’s more doomsday-driven than character-driven, it does have moments when Rushdie, now 72, seems to reckon with personal losses and failures as urgently as he handles the loss of all common sense and civility in our 21st-century world ... It would be a stretch to call Quichotte a masterpiece, but it’s certainly a novel for our times—a flailing, despair-fueled picaresque in which few of the usual rules of fiction apply ... a lot to chew on, and Rushdie masticates it with his usual maximalist exuberance ... There’s no such thing as overkill in a Rushdie novel, and sometimes he simply swamps readers with the contents of his pop-culture-packed mind. (Do we really need a contestant-by-contestant recap of 13 seasons of The Bachelorette?) The racist attacks that Quichotte and company face would feel like heavy-handed plot ploys, if they didn’t so accurately reflect the racist violence that engulfs our nation with greater intensity every week ... Rushdie doesn’t offer much hope for our dispiriting times. But in a frayed and feverish way, he captures their flavor exactly.

Amitav Ghosh

Mixed The Seattle Times Gun Island attempts to bring a collective, cosmopolitan consciousness to a literary form more often focused on personal quests and conflicts ... Ghosh throws California wildfires, Venetian-lagoon tornadoes, wild coincidences and a ghost or two into his narrative. As he ponders the threats to our planet, he gives us vivid setpieces...and food for thought ... Ghosh clearly wants to deliver fiction that awakens his readers to climate-change perils ... But in focusing so heavily on well-intentioned characters keenly aware of the crisis our planet faces, Gun Island gives short shrift to key players in this downward global spiral.

Cecelia Watson

Positive The Star Tribune According to Cecelia Watson, semicolons aren’t just punctuation marks. They’re also \'a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated.\' That may seem a heavy burden for one little grammatical tool to shoulder. But in Watson’s witty, wily account, it doesn’t feel like an overstatement ... For those who enjoy spending their time in these grammatical weeds as much as I do, Watson raises plenty of diverting style-related questions ... Semicolon left me hankering for what Watson might have to say about the punctuation circus of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or the energizing use of ellipses in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. In the meantime, there’s plenty to savor in this delectable nugget of a book.

Catherine Chung

Mixed The Boston Globe ... works best in its first half, when Katherine is still operating in the dark. As the explanations of her past come to light, Chung sometimes grows clumsy or cursory in the way she uses Nazi-era horrors to illuminate Katherine’s personal odyssey. She does better with the bracing input Katherine gets from women in her field ... At its best, The Tenth Muse astutely parses those layers of overt and covert narrative that shape its narrator’s life.

John Waters

Rave The Seattle Times [Waters] is an indefatigable coiner of droll one-liners ... At the same time, in Mr. Know-It-All — more than in his earlier books — Waters seriously reckons with his personal history: his loves and losses, his successes and failures, and his strange metamorphosis from social subversive to national treasure, as he shares his thoughts on sex, architecture, music, travel and death ... He’s generous with his advice (“Always join the unions!”), and he’s surprisingly full of wisdom, especially when it comes to career setbacks ... goes into bountiful detail on what’s involved in pitching, financing, casting, shooting and publicizing a movie ... He can still shock you ... Waters, whether he likes it or not, is a Great American Institution. Or maybe he belongs in an institution. Either way, we wouldn’t want to be without him.

Ocean Vuong

Positive The Boston Globe ...the UMass-Amherst professor’s poetic, experimental novel...bristles with feeling and demonstrates plenty of writing talent, as he places readers in a corner of urban America — Hartford, Conn., Vuong’s hometown — where almost all social contracts lie in tatters ...This is a novel propelled by the rhythms of its prose and the associative logic of its narrator’s memories rather than any plot machinations ... Vuong’s descriptive gifts can be impressive .... Elsewhere, an overly exuberant Vuong presses too hard ... Likewise Vuong’s observational about the nature of a difficult life at times could benefit from more restraint ... Vuong delivers an overall striking portrait of a boy growing up in a world in ruins, before making an escape from it that leaves him profoundly uneasy.

Mitchell Zuckoff

Rave The Boston Globe Utter disbelief is the dominant note of Mitchell Zuckoff’s impressively reported and riveting Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 ... Zuckoff...delivers a taut moment-by-moment account ... Zuckoff’s necessary account differs from its predecessors in taking the widest possible real-time view of the day ... Zuckoff excels at quick-sketch summaries of dozens of ordinary personal dramas about to be shattered by the attacks ... Transcripts of anguished exchanges between 911 operators and ill-fated victims trapped on the upper floors of the Twin Towers are, inevitably, harrowing reading. Zuckoff doesn’t spare you, either, on accounts of the desperate souls who jumped from the towers ... Written 18 years after the events, Fall and Rise is able to take measure of the human fallout in ways that earlier books could not. (The book also serves as a gripping introduction to those in their 20s and younger, who have little, if any, direct memory of the tragedy.)

Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Rave The Boston Globe Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That’s the case with Mrs. Janina Duszejko, narrator of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead ... In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s beguiling translation, Janina’s passions and pet peeves come through loud and clear ... may don the outward form of a seriocomic murder mystery. But deep down it’s a barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.

Nell Freudenberger

Rave The Seattle Times Sometimes a novel guarantees you a pleasurably mind-bending time just with its opening paragraph. That’s the case with Nell Freudenberger’s Lost and Wanted ... [Lost and Wanted] has all the venturesome verve of her debut ... The book also slyly weighs the way we use intuition and intellect to parse our realities ... For most readers, their esoteric vocabulary (\'spooky action,\' \'globular cluster models\') will work more like verbal color than intelligible content. But that doesn’t make the book’s artful parallels between emotional questions and scientific inquiry feel any less urgent ... Freudenberger handles the mystery of where noise fades and pattern emerges brilliantly.

Christina Thompson

Rave The Boston Globe \"... magnificent ... Sea People does a marvelous job of covering every line of inquiry into [the phenomenon of how a single culture spread across a 10-million-square-mile area]. It’s a grand, symphonic, beautifully written book, drawing on findings in anthropology, archaeology, oceanography, linguistics, DNA research, radiocarbon dating, and Polynesian myth and folklore as it examines a reality that, when first apprehended by Westerners, seemed to defy explanation.\

Simon Garfield

Positive The Seattle Times \"... eccentric ... Garfield spices up his book with humor ... Some inquiries deliver more fascinating results than others, depending on your tastes ... Still, there’s lots to take away from this charmer of a book, both anecdotally and philosophically.\

Janet Malcolm

Positive The Seattle Times ...ruthlessly artful ... For readers safely on the sidelines, however, her magazine profiles of noted personalities are peerless when it comes to unraveling what makes people tick. She’ll deliver the factual goods with brisk efficiency, while happily leaving mysteries in place ... That candor has its comic side — but it also means the essays are as much about the strategies Malcolm employs as the information she extracts from her subjects ... Nobody’s Looking at You includes more general reportage...and some savvy literary think pieces.

Thomas Mallon

Positive The Seattle Times \"Landfall is a big, minutiae-crammed novel, driven by the ambivalence and agonies of its main characters and leavened with the catty wit of its supporting cast ... Still, it’s the characters’ experiences in Baghdad and New Orleans during Katrina that anchor the book ... The flow of Mallon’s prose is sometimes tripped up by clumsy but necessary forays into who’s who and what’s what (a glossary of government-agency acronyms would help). But even in moments that start off feeling over-explanatory, closing phrases deliver genuine, shocking twists, especially where Allie is concerned ... Mallon’s slippery take on the Bush era may speak to readers, too.\

John Lanchester

Mixed The Seattle Times \"The Wall, in its way, is impeccably crafted. Its prose is spare. Its plot is unadorned. Its dystopian atmospheric touches are effective. It moves along at a good pace, and its set pieces — nighttime battles, uneasy encounters between active military personnel and ordinary citizens — feel movie-script ready. At the same time, the book is too abstract to deliver the full-fledged cautionary nightmare Lanchester seems to have intended ... Compared to the panoramic splendor of [Lanchester\'s] recent masterpiece, Capital... The Wall feels like thin stuff. Readable stuff, even page-turning stuff — but not fully satisfying ... The Wall succeeds as a novel about military camaraderie and the pain of betrayal when it occurs. It vividly evokes the all-in-the-same-boat spirit that develops when young men and women are stuck in the middle of nowhere with tedium as big a problem as an invisible threat ... [The book] has action. It has surprises. But it doesn’t dive as fully into its speculative world as one might wish.\

Eric Rutkow

Positive The Boston Globe Rutkow takes you through every intricate permutation of the planning, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. At times The Longest Line on the Map resembles a relay race, with smart, young, hardy engineers and diplomats thinking they can tame this infrastructural beast, only to cede their ground decades later as death, disease, or sheer weariness overcome them ... It’s a testament to Rutkow’s skills at distilling information that he keeps the dozens of players clear in your mind as his narrative proceeds. He even delivers some droll quick-sketch portraits of the variously ornery, perverse, or valiant characters involved.

Thomas Kohnstamm

Positive The Seattle Times It’s not often that you encounter a fictional character who could have served you cold cuts at your neighborhood Fred Meyer. But if you live near Lake City, as I do, Thomas Kohnstamm’s debut novel tells a tale so local...that you may want to look over your shoulder the next time you go grocery shopping to see if the book’s ne’er-do-well narrator is lurking there ... It’s easy to see that Lane’s attempts to redeem himself will not go as planned. Less predictable are the complications Kohnstamm throws his way, which turn Lake City into a caustic satire on class privilege and deprivation ... The novel loses a little of its edge in its later stretches ... But the portrait Kohnstamm offers of a Seattle backwater trailing in the wake of the Emerald City’s rising glamour is indelible.

Christopher Castellani

Positive The Boston Globe \"Castellani’s quiet portrait of Merlo has a deep, aching appeal, and while his invented story of Anja’s legendary career and reclusive later years has its moments, it doesn’t match the passages where he plunges directly into the give-and-take of Merlo and Williams’s loving if volatile relationship. Castellani’s prose has a beguiling lilt and color, whether he’s evoking his characters’ evasive or erratic emotions, or conjuring the far-flung locales where these globe-hoppers touch down ... Leading Men doesn’t deliver answers — but it’s seductive in the way it raises its questions.\

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Rave The Seattle Times Offers plentiful reasons to celebrate [Jhabvala\'s] brilliance ... Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature as she distills to their essence broad expanses of geography, personal history and time. She has a sharp eye for how helplessness can become a weapon in personal relations. She’s also astute on how subtle the shifts in power dynamics between two people can be, and how irrational situations can take on a life and logic of their own ... [Jhabvala] has a healthy respect for the riddles of human behavior. She doesn’t explain contradictions or self-destructive impulses away. She simply presents them as they are: strange, real and troublesome.

Tessa Hadley

Rave The Seattle Review \"British writer Tessa Hadley... covers [abrupt change in one\'s middle age] with freshness, subtlety and a deep, shifting empathy in her new novel, Late in the Day. Her prose has the penetrating quality of Henry James at his most accessible (Hadley has written a book-length study of James) and is alert, as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen were, to how time sculpts, warps or casually destroys us ... The novel itself is beautifully contoured ... [Hadley\'s] complex shading, that illuminating ambiguity, makes Late in the Day a quiet triumph.\

Mark Dery

Rave The Seattle Times \"Gorey has found a superb biographer in Mark Dery ... But the mystery of what made [Gorey] tick, Dery says, isn’t likely to be solved. Instead, it’s best to focus on his work itself, which Dery presents with considerable panache ... Some enigmas aren’t meant to be solved — but they can be usefully illuminated. That’s just what Dery does in this excellent book.\

Jonathan Franzen

Positive The Seattle Times \"Franzen loves birds – obsessively, rhapsodically, methodically — and for some years now, he’s been on a list-keeping crusade, recording all the far-flung avian specimens he’s sighted ... Why should we care? Franzen presents one reason. He believes that birds \'usefully indicate the health of … our ethical values\' ... As he swings from disdain for others to cringing at his own shortcomings, [Franzen] makes a gift of his foibles — at least on the page. The End of the End of the Earth makes the most of them.\

Joyce Carol Oates

Positive The Boston Globe Some of the inconsistencies, unfortunately, feel like copy-editing gaffes ... In a novel this tricky, the accuracy of the smallest detail counts ... Hazards of Time Travel can be labeled science fiction, but it’s also a memory-book on the sly. Oates earned her MA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1961, and her vivid recollections of the place come in handy for evoking Adriane’s profound culture shock in fictional Wainscotia ... Hazards of Time Travel is, among other things, an artful meditation on the gulf between subjective experience and clinically observable behavior. It’s also a wily, shape-shifting tale that only reveals its true colors in its final pages.

Eric Idle

Positive The Seattle Times \"In Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography, Monty Python’s Eric Idle opens his heart in a somewhat rushed, one-thing-after-another fashion. But if Monty Python’s Flying Circus is as much a cultural touchstone to you as it is to me, the book will be indispensable ... [Idle\'s] portraits of his fellow Pythons are both affectionate and pointed.\

Jonathan Lethem

Mixed The Boston Globe \"Jonathan Lethem’s new book is described by his publisher as his \'first detective novel\' since Motherless Brooklyn, his 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award winner. But attempts to pass off either book as genre fiction seem off the mark ... The Feral Detective tries just as hard [as Motherless Brooklyn] for offbeat scenarios and effects, but it doesn’t feel as meticulously engineered ... The voice of the book’s narrator, however, is engaging, and Lethem’s conjurations of the obscure California locales his heroine digs into couldn’t be more vivid.\

Barbara Kingsolver

Positive The Boston Globe \"Kingsolver, clearly, has an agenda in the book, which includes shock at Donald Trump emerging as an increasingly viable presidential candidate in early 2016. But her contemporary narrative is laced with wry, genial humor... and the 1870s half of her tale is a gripping study of how battling schools of thought can destroy personal lives ... There’s hard-won wisdom here, and profound doubt as to where our future is taking us. Kingsolver’s voice is urgent, eloquent, wily... For some readers, that may not feel like uplift. But it could, Kingsolver hints, be one way to stay sane.\

Elliot Ackerman

Positive The Boston Globe What Ackerman gives us is a tight-knit, inward-looking reckoning with the costs of military sacrifice—in emphatic flesh-and-blood terms ... In Waiting for Eden, the outward action is minimal ... Ackerman’s ghostly narrator informs us, \'and they’ve cut all of him off up to the torso.\' He can’t move; he can’t speak. Communication with his wife, Mary, and the nursing staff is nearly impossible. That may sound like an impossibly grim scenario. But as Eden reaches back into the past, its story of betrayals and odd bargains made between the three begins to lend it intrigue and suspense. The clues to where it’s going are in its opening lines ... Ackerman’s spare but vivid prose conveys everything it needs to convey ... As daring as it is, Waiting for Eden sticks closer to home with its entirely American cast of characters. But it makes you wonder what challenge Ackerman will take on next.

Esi Edugyan

Rave The Seattle Times ...extraordinary ... Edugyan is unsparing about how grim life is for human \'property\' on Erasmus’ plantation, and Wash is a child who fully grasps his plight ... Edugyan is a marvelous writer — lyrical, fanciful, subtle, fond of paradox — and Washington Black reads like a picaresque epic laced with persistent threat ... a powerful, twisting work of historical fiction.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Positive The Boston Globe This may not be what readers expected for the tough, determined girl who narrated Nervous Conditions, and it makes Body a difficult read, not just because of the downward spiral Tambu is on, but because of the challenging, fractured, hallucinatory prose Dangarembga uses to reflect the imbalance of her mind ... This Mournable Body can be read on its own, although readers may have more patience with Tambu if they’ve read Nervous Conditions first ... Dangarembga’s evocation of Harare’s social geography... immerses you fully in the city’s stressed fabric ... thanks to Dangarembga’s canniness and empathy as a writer, [the narrator] nevertheless bares the soul of the country that formed her.

Amitava Kumar

Rave The Boston Globe ...while Immigrant, Montana can be described as an academic novel, its eccentricities and erotic obsessions take it on unpredictable tangents ... Over the course of the book, Kailash muddles his way through several love affairs with women whom he portrays vividly without having much understanding of either them or himself (a neat trick on Kumar’s part). The tensions he feels between the land he left behind and the country he has adopted are considerable, too ... Immigrant, Montana is intelligent, melancholy, quirky. At a time when feelings run high over which immigrants get to call themselves American, Kailash’s idiosyncratic voice adds a welcome tonic note to the debate.

Maria Dahvana Headley

Rave The New York Times Book Review The action is gory and the monsters colorful, especially the dragon ... The Mere Wife brings the story into the 21st century in a curious way ... Headley’s jabs at suburban smugness are fun ... Headley’s prose can be stark, lacerating, insightful (\'If events don’t make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion\'), but it also has its over-the-top lapses ... But the role reversals Headley devises — and the way she adapts an ancient tale into a 21st-century struggle between haves and have-nots, brown-skinned and white, damaged and intact — are largely effective. Genuine wisdom sometimes emerges.

Keith Gessen

Rave The Seattle Times A Terrible Country brilliantly captures the daily rhythms, allures and challenges of Moscow life in 2008-2009. It’s as personable a book as it is political ... Gessen’s portrayal of her islands of lucidity — the way she consistently beats her grandson at anagrams, for instance — and the areas where the whole scaffolding of her mind is dissolving is all too believable ... The poignant glory of the novel is in its details ... Gessen immerses you so intimately in the fabric of Andrei’s life with her that when History with a capital \'H\' comes knocking at the door ... It’s a measure of Gessen’s subtlety and empathy as a writer that the tight bond between the brothers never comes into question, despite their chasm-wide differences ... A Terrible Country is wily, seductive and deeply affecting. Its hybrid narrator — half insider, half outsider — sheds light on a society ... It’s a great book with a great heart — and a whole heap of rueful regret — at the core of it.

Edmund White

Rave The Chicago Tribune White...is back with a new book-crazy memoir ... the delightful thing about it is the way White’s personal adventures and omnivorous reading habits intersect. Vice is funny, sexy and continually informed by White’s eagerness to drink down physical and cultural worlds in their entirety ... As Vice jumps from person to person and topic to topic, White keeps returning to the question of what makes fiction masterpieces work ... \'People interested in putting together a very restricted canon of great books don’t really like reading,\' he advises us.

Rebecca Makkai

Rave The Chicago Tribune The Great Believers brings a whole era back into view...with the the book\'s 1985 narrative..offering a grand fusion of the past and the present ... Makkai is a wily, seductive writer...who brings sympathy to these vivid and varied personalities ... it\'s remarkably alive despite all the loss it encompasses.

Christopher Bonanos

Rave The Seattle Times Christopher Bonanos’ superb biography ... reveals how the man born in an eastern European shtetl as Usher Fellig in 1899 reinvented himself as a chronicler of the seedier sides of nocturnal Manhattan in the 1930s. The book is a zesty read, steeped in the history of photography...while creating an indelible portrait of his subject.

Michael Chabon

Positive The Boston Globe If Father’s Day included yuletide characteristics, you could accurately describe Pops, with its modest page count, as a stocking stuffer. Yet each of its eight essays constructs a telling world, as Chabon trains his keen eye on small family moments that open onto larger issues ... The introduction to Pops calls into question whether an ambitious writer should even have a traditional family. Just before his first novel was published, Chabon was cautioned by an author he admired, \'Don’t have children.\' You lose a book for every child born, this older writer declared. Pops makes you glad Chabon ignored his advice.

Brock Clarke

Mixed The Boston Globe \"Why does the Bowdoin English professor find bad ideas so inviting? Because he’s a cockeyed moralist drawn to hot-button American social issues — racial tensions, domestic abuse, military quagmires — the way a tongue is drawn to a canker sore. His default mode is absurdism because, as he wrote in a recent author’s statement, \'absurdity is often the best way to fully appreciate how very bad our very bad ideas really are\' ... A similar twisted logic informs most of the other stories in the book. It works best in Clarke’s longer tales where he has room to spin persuasive variations on self-defeating behavioral patterns ... Some of the shorter tales in the book — \'The Grand Canyon,\' \'Cartoons\' — are dry to the point of being arid, no matter how clever they are. But at his cynical best, Clarke taps deep into the way we sabotage or delude ourselves, simply as a way to go on living.\

William Trevor

Rave The Boston Globe ...his tales are full of quiet ambiguity and subtle nuance. They don’t shout their subject matter. They take sidelong glances at it ... Last Stories, a slender collection of 10 tales, serves a modest capstone to the Anglo-Irish writer’s long and acclaimed career ... There seems to be no walk of life that’s unfamiliar to him. He’s at home with both the provincial and the urbane. His eye for strength of character is as sharp and sympathetic as his eye for folly ... Most of the narratives in this collection rank with the finest tales of this master of the form and remind us of why he will be missed.

Jonathan Evison

Rave Cascadia Magazine Lawn Boy is more tough-minded than Evison’s earlier novels (All About Lulu, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!). It’s a swift, engaging read, with an alternately wry and wistful sense of humor. But it also addresses painful territory head-on, especially when it comes to American economic and cultural inequality ... In Lawn Boy, he pulls it off. The setting and characters couldn’t be more vivid. Mike, a self-described 'tenth-generation peasant with a Mexican last name,' lives with his family in Suquamish. But most of his jobs are across Agate Passage on Bainbridge Island ... It’s a sign of how well-drawn Mike’s struggles are that you want to jump into the book and help point him in the right direction. Evison eventually gives Mike a happy ending on two thoroughly unexpected fronts. If they feel a little rigged, that’s forgivable.

Richard Flanagan

Positive The Seattle Times Flanagan places you vividly in Kif’s mind as he deals with Ziggy’s nonstop flow of evasions, paranoia, boasts and rages. Kif’s own backstory — he was raised in a rural Tasmanian backwater, married a kindhearted woman he clearly doesn’t love and is probably deluding himself about his writing-career prospects — suggests he’s a likely Siegfried Heidl victim in the making. Still, when Ziggy makes a shocking demand of him, it’s as confounding to the reader as it is to Kif ... First Person becomes a sinister fable of identity exchange ... Ziggy and Kif, though, in the wizardly hands of Flanagan, take deliciously menacing surprise turns.

Richard Powers

Rave The Boston Globe \"By turns visionary, exhortatory, and doom-stricken, The Overstory is a big, ambitious epic, spanning the last half of the 20th century and asking what we’re doing to our planet. It’s too heady, too rhapsodic, too strange to be characterized as agitprop fiction. But it does have a sobering message ... Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book — the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure — are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species.\

Alan Hollinghurst

Positive The Seattle Times Hollinghurst wants you to have an all-encompassing sense of your surroundings: the light, the furnishings, the ambient chatter, the furtive eye contact and body language of everyone partaking in the scene. But while his surfaces are elaborate, he keeps you guessing at what’s happening beneath them ... The novel’s study of how a single sensational event reverberates across the decades has slightly less depth than Hollinghurst’s brilliant tracking of how an extravagant and carnal creature becomes mere archival material in The Stranger’s Child. Still, Hollinghurst’s mellifluous prose is as fine and subtly shaded as ever, and his full, persuasive immersion of the reader in the book’s far-flung eras is impeccable.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Mixed The Chicago Tribune The way Urrea delivers it on the page is colorful, confusing and in urgent need of a family tree to help you keep the characters straight ... his narrative flirts with soap opera. And he doesn’t always have as firm a hand on his narrative as one might like...With so many characters in play, it also feels as if some get shortchanged ... Still, Urrea spins some wonderful phrases as he leads us through his throng of characters.

Peter Carey

Rave The Seattle Times ..the trio’s odyssey, in addition to being a rollicking adventure, leads to a startling exchange of worlds. Bigotries are confronted. Hidden histories are revealed. Carey colors his antic, sidewinding prose with place names, slang and fauna that use the fabric of language itself to evoke this 1950s Australia. His take on his characters is both tart and affectionate ... A Long Way from Home is a frolic with depth, a flight of fancy with tough resonance.

Amy Bloom

Positive The Boston Globe \"White Houses examines the way that a public life can intrude upon and damage a private life. It addresses the unreliable nature of memory: \'We think we’ll remember it all and we remember hardly anything.\' It acknowledges the sobering gaps that can arise between expectations and reality: \'It is not true that if you can imagine it, you can have it.\' Bloom’s fresh, feisty portrait of FDR is another big attraction of the book ... White Houses, by seeing the Roosevelt era through the most unlikely of outsiders-turned-insider, brings a hidden chapter of East Wing history to life.\

Zadie Smith

Positive The Seattle Times \"Smith’s cultural commentary encompasses every medium. Sometimes she stumbles — for instance when she looks to philosopher Martin Buber to shed some light on pop singer Justin Bieber. And sometimes, especially in her essays on visual art, things get tangled or muddy. But in everything to do with books, language and family experiences, she’s funny, intuitive, spry and sharp ... Long may Smith’s delectable uncertainties reign.\

Hanif Kureishi

Positive The Boston Globe The Nothing is a mere 167 pages long, but it cooks up complications, intrigues, and tangled personal histories worthy of a much longer book. It also manages to capture the last gasp of a generation that doesn’t exactly have a reputation for aging gracefully … The women in the picture, Zee and Anita, serve more as plot conveniences, although Zee’s weariness at being Waldo’s caretaker is certainly persuasive. The biggest draw in The Nothing (the title alludes both to Eddie’s character and Waldo’s impending death) is the comic hyperbole of its crazed, manipulative, self-deprecating narrator. Add to that several Roget’s-worthy one-liners (‘a saint is only someone who has been under-researched’), and you have one wickedly seductive gut-punch of a book.

Dave Eggers

Positive The Boston Globe ...however they’re identified, [Eggers' books] work brilliantly as narratives that reveal worlds that otherwise would be well off the radar of most readers. In The Monk of Mokha, Eggers does it again ... The Monk of Mokha resembles a political thriller with an insanely optimistic Horatio Alger type skedaddling through it.

Ahmed Saadawi, Trans. by Jonathan Wright

Rave The Seattle Times \"Saadawi strikes a feverish balance between fantasy and hard realism in Frankenstein in Baghdad. The fabric of the city’s neighborhoods couldn’t be more sharply etched … As Saadawi moves among their different points of view, all the characters have their say — including the Whatsitsname which, like Victor Frankenstein’s creation in Shelley’s novel, is given an opportunity to relate its own version of events (into a digital recorder, this being the 21st century) … [Saadawi] delivers a vision of his war-mangled city that’s hard to forget.\

Andrea Levy

Positive The Seattle Times ...a sizable epic spanning three hemispheres and several decades — a revealing and accomplished novel … Queenie is a wonderful, warm creation — a good-hearted gal whose upbeat naiveté during wartime and after turns to tender-tough pragmatism. Levy captures her essence on the book's first page...Gilbert is just as winning, if a sadder case: a man of big dreams who quickly learns to scale them down as he takes in the racial and economic realities of postwar Britain … Levy deftly and generously captures the moment when the arrival of immigrants from far-flung parts of the Empire was shockingly fresh to all involved.

Joshua Ferris

Rave The Seattle Times Set in a Chicago-based ad agency reeling from the 2000-2001 dot-com crash, it's a satire narrated by a corporate ‘we’ who are having a hard time coping with impending job loss and the revelation that ‘employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves’ … As for the wild card that keeps the book from being a one-note joke, it's human experience in forms both sobering (marital breakup, serious illness) and farcical (an office love affair, a bizarre inheritance) … There's a terrific payoff to the book, which isn't just a barbed take on its chosen era but a truly affecting novel about work, trust, love and loneliness.

Maya Jasanoff

Positive The Boston Globe The Dawn Watch delivers only minimal detail on Conrad’s literary friendships and writing career. Instead, it takes a deep look at the way his unsettled childhood and maritime travels shaped four of his masterpieces... Jasanoff takes some fiction-like liberties with her scene-setting, although she carefully sources the basis for these colorful touches ...prose can be splendidly agile, as in this turn-on-a-dime summary of the workings of Conrad’s mind... Above all, she renders Conrad as a proto-citizen of our time, ever alert to the spirit of violation that’s inherent to so many cross-cultural contacts and clashes.

Kevin Young

Mixed The Boston Globe The number and range of his examples are both impressive but sometimes difficult to follow ... Another shortcoming involves the way Young tries to make one word, 'hoax,' carry more weight than it can comfortably bear ... Young’s study does touch on Trump (about 10 pages, plus three on Melania Trump plagiarizing Michelle Obama), although the president gets far less treatment than the subtitle might suggest (or than many readers might want) ... Bunk provides some insights into why we’re too often plagued these days by torchlight processions of blind bigotry that defy explanation.

Alice Munro

Positive The Seattle Times Whether Munro's women — and the protagonists in this collection are all women — are whip smart or slow on the uptake, their lives rarely proceed smoothly or logically from Point A to Point B. Their plans for themselves are repeatedly tampered with by Fate (so active a character that the capital ‘F’ is definitely needed). And the truth behind their lives may not reveal itself until decades after the story's supposed main event … Throughout the book there is, as always in Munro, an illuminating, unsparing insight into human motive and behavior. Again and again, small moments — closely observed — expand into revelations of the thorny dynamics or buoyant contradictions of the characters at hand.

John Banville

Rave The Seattle Times Banville comes up with plenty of twists, turns and sinister revelations as Isabel goes into action. At pivotal moments, he leaves you wondering if she has what it takes to get the better of those who wronged her. He also introduces new characters into her life who steer her in unforeseen directions. He has great fun approximating James’ analytical prose, with its mellifluous and sometimes convoluted cadences … Overall he pulls off his elaborate stunt with vigor and style. It’s hard to say no to a second helping of Isabel Archer, especially when she’s as full of surprises as she was in Portrait.

Andrew O'Hagan

Rave The Chicago Tribune The chapter that’s bound to cause the greatest stir is 'Ghosting,' his stinging account of being a ghostwriter for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the two other episodes, in which O’Hagan tries to pin down who exactly invented Bitcoin or sees how far he can go in creating an online life for a fabricated character, are just as dizzying and gripping ... Throughout the book, O’Hagan suggests that the digital era has brought 'a change not just in the technological basis of our lives but in the narrative strategies now available to us.' The Secret Life cunningly alights on ways that cyber-deceptions and flawed personalities can collide and combust.

Armistead Maupin

Rave The Seattle Times ...[a] wonderful memoir ... Maupin’s parents were taken aback by the goings-on at 28 Barbary Lane. But his portrayal of them — especially of his mother, always trying to avoid conflict — is touching. Maupin expresses pride in his accomplishments, but is also self-deprecating. Sharp portraits of Rock Hudson, Christopher Isherwood and Laura Linney appear toward the end of the book. But the most startling character is 'Teddy' himself (as his parents nicknamed him), starting his life as a deeply closeted son of the South, before winding up as a Left Coast champion of personal liberties and a genial gay raconteur-uncle to us all.

Julie Otsuka

Rave The Seattle Times [The Buddha in the Attic] is a fascinating paradox: brief in span yet symphonic in scope, all-encompassing yet vivid in its specifics. Like a pointillist painting, it's composed of bright spots of color: vignettes that bring whole lives to light in a line or two, adding up to a vibrant group portrait … In prose that's as close to music as prose can be, Otsuka captures the fears and anticipations of young women leaving behind everything that's familiar to them on the chance that they'll find something better in America … For parents and children alike, the outbreak of war followed by ‘evacuation’ to internment camps far from the coast is a shocker. Otsuka is needle-precise in showing how the smallest logistics of dismantling your life in response to government decree can be devastating and disorienting.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Mixed The Seattle Times How you respond to Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel may depend on how well you handle sentences like 'We hear the she-dragon Querig roams that country, and only fools would be abroad there in the dark' ... The Buried Giant is set in Britain not long after the death of King Arthur — and along with the dragon, it features ogres, 'savage pixies,' a cranky and elderly Sir Gawain and a strange memory-erasing mist ... One monk they encounter raises an issue that seems to be at the heart of the book: 'Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?' By the time that question is asked, readers may be wondering what on Earth Ishiguro is up to ... The trouble with his use of fantasy in The Buried Giant is that it dissolves the whole moral compass of the book.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Rave The Boston Globe It’s remarkable to see how consistently pointed Eugenides’s prose, humor and observational acuity have been over the years. Throw in his willingness to tackle sticky issues at every opportunity, and you have a heady treat ... 'Baster' [is] a comic masterpiece ... Eugenides is always venturesome in the subjects he takes on, nowhere more so than in 'Fresh Complaint,' where an Indian-American teenage girl’s resistance to an arranged marriage to a boy from Kolkata is one of the starting points. Prakrti’s scheme for foiling her parents’ plan draws an unsuspecting middle-aged university lecturer into scandal and marital disarray. The story has parallels with David Mamet’s 'Oleanna' but with cultural divides complicating the sexual politics in fascinating ways. Where Mamet’s play verges on misogynistic, Eugenides’ tale has a deeper, aching sympathy for both parties. Eugenides publishes sparingly: just three novels and these 10 stories over 28 years. But he makes each one count.

James McBride

Mixed The Boston Globe Five-Carat Soul opens with such a masterpiece that it can’t help but create impossible expectations for the rest of the book. The tales certainly deliver variety as McBride alternates historical narratives with fantasy, parable, and Vietnam-era memory pieces. But the results are mixed.

Joanna Scott

Positive The Seattle Times ...a stylish jigsaw puzzle of a book, coming at its subject matter from multiple points of view and expanding the very notion of what historical fiction can be. Ranging in tone from faux documentary to jaunty Mad Men-like melodrama/psychodrama, it’s simultaneously a murder mystery, a good-humored feminist parable and a cautionary tale of ecological devastation. It’s also deliciously aware of its own narrative antics ... Taking a sly excursion into the recent past, Scott delivers a twisting tale that, as it ends, 'invites you to go back to the beginning and read again, with new attention.'”

Kurt Andersen

Positive The Boston Globe Andersen’s chronicle sweeps us from the delusions and fantasies inspired by the New World to the prejudices and manipulations of the modern media state. He has great fun tracing myriad ecstatic and demonic chapters of all-American lunacy. But he’s also deeply worried … His aim in Fantasyland is to ‘define and pin down our condition, to portray its scale and scope, to offer some fresh explanations of how our national journey deposited us here.’ He succeeds to an extraordinary degree … Andersen argues that all these threads, abetted by a spirit of ‘epic individualism,’ make up a distinctly American tapestry we inhabit today ‘where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.’’

Ian McEwan

Rave The Seattle Times On Chesil Beach has a quiet precision and a depth of sympathy that make it unlike anything else I’ve read by McEwan. He isn’t out to shock here (as he was in his earliest fiction) or to astonish readers with his storytelling wizardry (as he did in Atonement). Instead, he’s intent on analyzing the desires and inhibitions — down to the smallest look, breath and hair — of two decent would-be lovers who have no idea how to bridge the gulf in appetites that separates them … The period detail is astonishingly good, especially when Edward is entering the unfamiliarly upscale world that Florence’s family inhabits. But it is McEwan’s close, blameless psychological reading of Florence and Edward themselves that makes this book a masterpiece.

Brendan Mathews

Positive The Chicago Tribune Mathews is a wonderful scene-setter, whether he's describing the streets of Manhattan in the wee hours or conjuring the glories of then brand-new Rockefeller Center ... The gusto of Mathew's prose and vividness of his characters keeps the novel gyrating with zany energy for its first several hundred pages ... The book loses some of its luster in its last stretch, as plot mechanics and action sequences take over. The final scenes are cinematic, but not as beguiling as the preposterously complicated setup. Still, Mathews has a big, rambunctious talent that promises great things.

Donna M. Lucey

Positive The Boston Globe Lucey’s prose can be breathless, even gossipy. But for the most part she delivers the goods, disclosing the unhappy or colorful lives that Sargent sometimes hinted at but didn’t spell out ... Sargent’s Women is a good read, but does contain a few errors, especially concerning British geography. Bournemouth was a bustling seaside resort in the 1890s, not a 'village' as Lucey has it, and the Isle of Wight is not 'across the English Channel' from England. That sows some distrust about other specifics, but doesn’t diminish the book’s chatty pleasures, which are considerable.

Karen Joy Fowler

Rave The Seattle Times Cagey, feisty, funny and philosophical, Karen Joy Fowler’s sixth novel slyly establishes much of its inner essence — to do with the damaged dynamics of its narrator’s family — before it spells out certain crucial details of its plot … Opening the action in 1996 means starting ‘in the middle of my story,’ according to Rosemary, and the deeper she goes into her tale, the more fluidly the book becomes a juggling of flashbacks, flash-forwards and careful avoidances of germane information … The heart of the novel — and it has a big, warm, loudly beating heart throughout — is in its gradually pieced-together tale of family togetherness, disruption and reconciliation.

Rave The Seattle Times ...a tender-tough story of headlong love and awkward timing that reads a little like a highbrow cosmopolitan variation on Brokeback Mountain … Within the highly eroticized compartment Elio and Oliver explore together, identities are shattered and connection is complete. But there are always other compartments to return to, at least in Oliver's mind, each with its own demands. And therein lies the problem. With its radiant yet shadowed air of nostalgia, Call Me By Your Name is reminiscent of — though far more sexually overt than — L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between. It pays conscious homage, with its identity-melding passions, to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. It's a great love story, whether you're gay or straight...Like Brokeback, it's about having happiness in hand yet somehow being powerless to hang onto it.

Howard Markel

Positive The Chicago Tribune ...vividly recounts the contentious story of two men behind the early 20th century's revolution in ready-to-eat foods ... Markel's tale is a mix of a Horatio Alger success story and a cautionary fable about blind egos sabotaging their own best efforts ... Markel's writing can occasionally be shaky. But the book is lively throughout as it delivers a tale both personal in its intensity and grand in its scope.

Jonathan Dee

Rave The Boston Globe ...[a] magnificent new novel ... Dee has always trained a sharp eye on the tricky intersections between private and public life in his fiction. But in The Locals, he has outdone himself. The book is a transcendent look at the battered state of the American psyche in the interim between two key years in our recent history: 2001 and 2008 ... Dee circles all around his players, bringing alive their inner lives and interconnections ... With rueful sympathy and acuity, The Locals conjures all the cares and quandaries of flawed characters coping in a faith-corrosive world.

Aravind Adiga

Rave The Seattle Times We know at the start of the book that Balram is an ‘entrepreneur’ in Bangalore, the hub of ‘all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.’ We also learn early on of the brutal act that helped get him there. But the particulars of his progress are a mystery. And the motives behind his actions take some time to unfold. His story, significantly, is addressed to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, due to visit Bangalore, to whom Balram feels a special link … perhaps because the Chinese are the ones supplying arms to India’s revolutionary Naxal movement. Balram, clawing his way up from the bottom, has no objection to someone upsetting the whole apple cart.

Anne Enright

Pan The Seattle Times ...the clunkiest exercise in unreliable narration imaginable … Alcoholism, child molestation and casual beatings figure in the picture, with Enright's simplistic take on human psychology echoing the clumsiness of her narrative. Apart from some lip service in the book's final pages, Veronica speaks as if there's no such thing as love, or even fond feeling. There is some occasional felicitous phrasing in the book (‘London was all flow, it had no edges, it was everywhere’). But that's not enough to save this sloppy, unaffecting dirge of a novel.

Valerie Martin

Rave The Chicago Tribune Martin's narrator, Manon Gaudet, is a malcontent, acutely conscious of her second-class status as a woman and a wife in 1820s Louisiana. That doesn't stop her from holding a bedrock belief in the slave-owning caste society she grew up in. It also doesn't stop her from wielding her manipulative abilities against her domineering husband with considerable finesse … Manon's efforts are gratuitous, vindictive, irrational – and yet, in terms of the novel, entirely persuasive. With them, Martin immerses us in the dehumanizing/dehumanized core of a character whose other traits – a desire for independence from her husband, a yearning for the amenities of the city – are readily understandable … Martin's prose moves swiftly, riddled with troubling currents, as abuse, suspicion and sexual frustration work their corrosive effects on Manon and her intimates.

Edwidge Danticat

Positive The Boston Globe The strongest thread in The Art of Death is her account of her mother’s reaction to being diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer...Danticat’s portrait of her is kind and loving. It also is, inevitably, anguished in its sense of loss ... Danticat’s attempts to order her thoughts on suicide, bereavement, and death-row prisoners’ experience can be unwieldy. She’s less assured when analyzing someone else’s text than she is when evoking her own experience. Her extensive commentary on Morrison’s novels, for instance, can’t compete with Danticat’s direct dealings with death ... Far from being morbid, this small book is a bracingly clear-eyed take on its subject.

Alan Hollinghurst

Rave The Seattle Times Privilege and parasitism, bluster and bigotry, cocaine bingeing and stock-market finagling ... they're all here. And it sure doesn't hurt that Hollinghurst is one of the best writers of party scenes since F. Scott Fitzgerald … Hollinghurst is a dab hand at weaving these multiple strands of Nick's life together, and he knows exactly how to build tension through incisive character portrayal. Catherine and Wani are temperamental time-bombs, in constant danger of detonation. Thatcher is an éminence grise who might just make an appearance in the book. AIDS is a threat about to hit Nick's circle. Tory eagerness to ‘get public services back into private hands’ as quickly as possible seems bound to produce some fallout of its own.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Pan The Seattle Times Foer is going for some kind of magic realism here, but he's failed to register that magic realism works best when it cuts to the quick of a hard reality … Another move — Oskar giving a brutally graphic schoolroom presentation on the 1945 Hiroshima bombing — brings the novel perilously close to atrocity-hopping. All through the book, as if to temper the effect of the horrors he mentions, Foer throws in illustrations and typographical tricks (red-ink circlings of deliberate typos, a gradual reduction of text-leading until the page is solid black). The result, too often, is reader bafflement and indifference … The general impression one gets here is of a young writer who wants desperately to have something important to say, and wants to say it in the most unusual way possible.

Zadie Smith

Positive The Seattle Times Such naked homage seems a little risky at first. Yet On Beauty, a nominee for this year's Man Booker Prize, turns out to be as sly and inventive a recasting of E.M. Forster's masterpiece as one could wish. British writer Smith (White Teeth) takes liberties with the older book's plot about a disputed legacy ... Both her families are black or of mixed race. The action, instead of being confined to England, plays out on both sides of the Atlantic. And the legacy in dispute doesn't concern a piece of real estate ... Smith has a grand time hooking up the players in her big cast of characters in every combination possible ... At different points, many of the characters in On Beauty behave deplorably — yet Smith always sees them in the round, never letting you lose sight of what demons or delusions might be spurring them on, making their behavior make sense to them ... a novel that savvily illuminates the times we're living in.

Percival Everett

Rave The Boston Globe \"Three stories, scattered across time, fuse into one stunning tale in Percival Everett’s latest novel. Each individual strand of So Much Blue has a page-turning urgency of its own — but taken together they add up to a masterpiece ... The pleasures of the novel stem in part from the way Kevin second guesses his own actions every step of the way. They also derive from his dry wit ... The book is steeped with violent encounters and violations of trust. What unifies it is Kevin’s painterly eye, which comes into play at the most unexpected moments ... As its narrative threads combine, So Much Blue becomes a taut meditation on the costs of keeping vital or traumatic experiences to yourself. In the process, the book serves up a brilliant portrait of a contradiction-filled character whose artwork is both his retreat and his attempt to reach out.\

Paul Theroux

Rave The Boston Globe Yet Mother Land isn’t just a hatchet job. It’s too antic and unpredictable in its sympathies to be that. Jay’s portrait of the verbally extravagant Floyd is a treat, whether they’re feuding or in cahoots. His take on his progenitor reveals as much about Jay as it does about her. When he writes, 'Mother wanted praise, needed attention, craved to be noticed and marveled at, and like a tantrum-prone two-year-old, she wanted independence,' he could be describing himself. If this is a self-portrait, it’s a scathing one ... Theroux, fusing anguish and glee as he picks at the same raw scabs for 500-plus pages, evokes something truly memorable: a realm many come from, to which some of us have no desire to return.

Mary Gaitskill

Positive The Boston Globe Somebody With a Little Hammer, may be uneven. But it’s also indispensable. Its strongest entries — a mini-memoir about a lost cat, a meditation on the troubled life of porn star Linda Lovelace — match the prowess of Gaitskill’s best fiction by paying intelligent attention to every stubborn strand in her wayward subjects’ existences ... Where Gaitskill doesn’t shine so brightly is in the numerous book reviews included. The writing isn’t at fault, even if Gaitskill’s close focus on complexities of tone can sometimes lead her to omit any mention of what a book is actually trying to do. But reviews, especially of titles with topical concerns, are intrinsically ephemeral ... Still, the more substantial essays, where Gaitskill draws on her personal experience to crack the veneers of the social codes and sexual ambiguities we all navigate, are the gold here.

Hari Kunzru

Mixed The Seattle Times Charlie Shaw becomes a full-blown occult presence. Possible murders and instances of zombielike possession ensue. Kunzru has a message here about the inescapable effects of past injustices and deceptions. But he skates into mumbo-jumbo while delivering it ... As White Tears grows more ambitious, it loses sight of its best asset: the tensions stirred in Seth by his genuine audiophile connection with Carter, whose money and privilege make him feel like nothing. The bravura technique of the novel’s finale, by contrast, isn’t nearly as engaging.

Elif Batuman

Pan The Seattle Times Batuman tries to pull off a balancing act in The Idiot. Selin, unplugged from her own emotions and uncertain of her own likes and dislikes, is supposed to hold our attention for 400-plus pages as she attempts to address her own formlessness. Batuman allows her some unexpected screwball-comedy moments. But by novel’s end, Selin is still coming up blank. She is, as she puts it, 'living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me closer to anything.' It may be brave of Batuman to give us a character so stumped by herself and her surroundings. But it’s not entirely satisfying.

Paul La Farge

Rave The Seattle Times Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean, about an elusive chapter in the life of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, is just such a tale. In La Farge’s hands, revelation becomes hoax, suicide becomes 'pseuicide' and, in an ever-expanding series of narrative curveballs, gay becomes straight becomes gay again ...with its stories within stories, each contradicting the next, is like a Russian nesting doll on steroids. All of its characters are tantalizing presences on the page despite, or maybe because of, the uncertainties that plague them ... At the heart of the book is the enigma of Lovecraft, a 'problematic person' who, while presenting the image of New England propriety, was also the worst kind of bigot ... Its dazzling intricacies add up to a heady masterpiece.

Dan Chaon

Positive The Boston Globe With some of its twists and turns, Ill Will even seems to have anticipated our current world of fake news and 'alternative facts' ... The novel also taps into the toxic legacies of American class divisions. Dustin’s late wife, a lawyer, believed his 'white trash' background had consequences for him that went even deeper than he realized ... A few of Chaon’s tactics — his occasional use of double or triple columns of narrative, and his odd word spacing, both within paragraphs and vertically on the page — don’t always work. His knack for leaving sentences tellingly unfinished and thoughts menacingly incomplete, however, is perfect. If you’re up for being caught in a seamy heartland underbelly of fear, superstition, and paranoia, with side excursions through urban legend and recovered-memory hysteria, Ill Will is your book. But it may not be for everyone.

Mohsin Hamid

Mixed The Chicago Tribune With Exit West, Hamid has entered the realm of speculative fiction. It would be a pleasure to report that he has mastered the genre with the same biting prowess that he brought to his satire, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and to his Man Booker Prize-nominated masterpiece, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But that's not quite the case. Exit West works best in its first half, as it describes the deteriorating conditions that its characters endure ... In his earlier books, Hamid was a master of streamlining and distillation. But as Exit West winds down, his narrative is sometimes more perfunctory than artfully spare.

Jim Shepard

Positive The Boston Globe The best stories in his new collection, The World to Come, bring a slight shift in tone to his work. There’s less sense than usual of looking at small, crushable specimens under a magnifying lens, and more heart and feeling racketing around in his characters. Like Alice Munro, he has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages. If there’s a distance in these new tales, it’s the distance of long perspective ... It all adds up to a peculiar yet arresting vision, as Shepard lets you see a startling variety of dangers and condundrums through the eyes of characters who, poignantly or even despairingly, can’t quite summon the humanity that’s hidden away in them.

Rachel Cusk

Rave The Seattle Times All these tales have a stranger-than-fiction twist to them. They also, while grounded in humble quotidian details, lead to larger questions concerning freedom and fate, appearance and reality, choice and passivity. This sounds a bit solemn, but plenty of dry humor spices the book ... Cusk’s story-invention powers are so rich that the format feels as fresh the second time around as it did the first. It also hints at Cusk’s extraordinarily precise orchestration of narrative effects.

André Aciman

Positive The Boston Globe \"Is there any writer out there who can conjure the seismic swings and loop-the-loop giddiness of sexual infatuation the way that André Aciman can? ... Each chapter comes with a closing twist, and the very last sentence in the book unveils a cunning plot turn that alters the whole perspective of the novel. Aciman is a heady, maximalist writer, and occasionally his writing can be over-the-top. More often, his fanciful turns of phrase are on the mark ... The allure of Enigma Variations rests in its agile sense of the heart’s paradoxes and might-have-beens.\

Aravind Adiga

Positive The Chicago Tribune Adiga writes a prose of crazed energy, bright color and acrobatic logic. He sometimes leaves you wondering what, exactly, is transpiring between characters. But you're never in doubt of its vitality. His detail on 21st-century Mumbai — with its opulent high-rises cheek by jowl with its squalid slums, and its garbage-strewn creeks a short stroll from its emerald cricket grounds — couldn't be more vivid, while his portrait of the broken family Kumar is both comical and searing ... A few minor characters feel too much like mouthpieces for the author, but Adiga has so many tricks up his sleeve that his lecture-mode never lasts for long.

Jeanette Winterson

Mixed The Seattle Times ...it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. But there are some gems in it, along with some rueful reflection ... These stories are well-turned, and Winterson unashamedly embraces tried-and-true ghost-story formulas, as eerie occult occurrences are explained by tragic events from the past ... Winterson in essayistic mode, especially when sharing her Christmas research findings, is an undiluted treat.

Alex Beam

Positive The Boston Globe The considerable pleasure of The Feud derives from the agile way Beam shows how those differences manifested themselves in the first two decades of the friendship and then erupted into enmity in the third. Beam wears his learning lightly. He has a keen sense of the absurd and is mischievous but not malicious in exposing the foibles of these frenemies ... Beam addresses all these issues and has great fun with them. But his book mostly leaves you asking yourself how prideful and pig headed even the smartest men can be.

Esther Schor

Mixed The Chicago Tribune While the memoir/travelogue vein of the book is relaxed and anecdotal, the hardcore facts surrounding Esperanto are dense and gnarly. Utopian dreams, genocidal regimes, liberation movements and cultural tumult all figure in it ... Schor's account of these controversies can get pretty tangled, but it's enlivened by crusaders' over-the-top rhetoric and detractors' withering put-downs ... Bridge of Words takes you inside that identity — which turns out to be, in all its hopes and permutations and divisions, a reflection of the world at large.

Michael Chabon

Rave The Boston Globe [Chabon's] most probing and substantial book yet ... Chabon’s maximalist prose style occasionally feels like overkill (not to mention a Yiddish vocabulary tutorial), but more often is integral to the rich fabric of the book ... Chabon nails the essence of how memory and denial can be intimately interwoven.

Ward Just

Positive The Seattle Times ...a fascinating, ambivalent look at a trade that has both its noble and troublesome sides ... In Just’s hands, the ambiguous motives behind the paper’s pursuit of the story are riveting ... The novel stands on Just’s memorable study of Ned. Your heart goes out to this kindly, complex man.

Trevor Noah

Rave The Seattle Times Noah’s memoir is extraordinary in its observations of South Africa in the years when apartheid crumbled. It’s equally unusual in the troubling personal story it tells. Throw in Noah’s sharp, droll prose style, and you have a book that feels like essential reading on every level.

Sabina Murray

Rave The Washington Post ...a big, ambitious book guided by the same intelligence and sly prose that distinguished her portrait of [Mary] Kingsley ... Murray’s parsing of these escalating risks is superb. She has a knack for alluding to the era’s public events and concerns in a manner that lets us understand their impact and influence without her laboring over their details — an indispensable gift for a historical novelist ... [a] wise, illuminating novel.

Robert Olen Butler

Rave The New York Times Book Review Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity ... Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing ... Perfume River captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens.

Marina Abramovic

Positive The Seattle Times While you’d have a hard time finding an artist so deadly serious about her work’s tremendous personal, communal and cosmic consequences, she also has a born raconteur’s way with an anecdote ... While her take on her girlhood is rife with self-pity, her accounts of her breakthrough into transgressive-subversive performance can be exhilarating ... You don’t necessarily have to be in tune with her aesthetic to enjoy this hectic account of her torturous adventures.

T.C. Boyle

Mixed The Boston Globe Boyle has clearly done his research, and many of the book’s furnishings are entirely convincing. Where he goes awry, oddly, is in his choice of a starting point for his characters. Even before they enter E2, they’re all so prone to thoughtless actions and petty squabbles that there’s not much of a pedestal for them to fall from ... The Terranauts touches on fascinating issues. It’s just that Boyle, with the characters he has cooked up, stacks the odds too heavily against E2’s success from the outset.

Nicholson Baker

Positive The Seattle Times Baker makes English’s idiosyncrasies dizzyingly fresh. His wacky descriptive gifts are also on brilliant display ... The book is a sobering reminder of the minefield mentality that dominates our schools.

John le Carre

Positive The Boston Globe ...with beguilingly barbed wit and seductive self-deprecation, throws light on the life that shaped that fiction ... The Pigeon Tunnel is packed with perfectly crafted vignettes that bring Cold War tensions, movie-business absurdities, and gnarly Third World politics to life ... Keep the slippery nature of le Carré’s 'facts' in mind as you read, and you’ll come away from the book deeply informed on both the man and his era.

Sebastian Smee

Rave The Boston Globe Thanks are due to Sebastian Smee, the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, who with novella-like detail and incisiveness opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists ... Each of his portraits is a biographical gem, deftly taking social milieus, family backgrounds, and the art controversies of the day into account ... Smee’s vivid, agile prose is especially good at evoking the temperaments of the personalities involved ... his chapter on Freud and Bacon is a marvel.

Imbolo Mbue

Positive The Seattle Times ...a fast-paced, character-driven read that, while not always entirely credible, is certainly unpredictable in the way it moves toward its outcome. It also vividly evokes a period — the crash of 2008 and the start of Obama’s presidency in 2009 — that feels more distant than a mere eight years ago ... Mbue’s outsider’s perceptions of American life — its stresses, its excesses — are sharp. Her humor can be tasty, too ... Mbue sometimes strays into melodrama or over-explanation, but she also keeps crucial plot-points slyly ambiguous.

Anu Partanen

Positive The Seattle Times Though laced with anecdotes from Partanen’s own story, Nordic Theory is meticulously researched. It offers a clear, informative, fact-filled survey of the differences between American and Nordic child care, health care, education, eldercare and taxation arrangements. It could be a game-changer in national conversations about the roles that governments should play in their citizens’ lives.

Patrick Ryan

Positive The Seattle Times In the best of [the stories], Ryan’s transparent prose and seemingly casual tone sneakily ensnare you in tough moments and wryly rueful deflations of the heart and spirit ... The title story is a comic masterpiece ... Ryan has written three young-adult novels, and occasionally in Astronauts the youth-centric emphasis can feel repetitive ... [the final story] is an indisputable instant classic.

Ian Frazier

Positive The Seattle Times In Hogs Wild Frazier is in chameleon mode. He’s a science writer. No, wait, he’s a New York City historian — or a muckraker, or a cultural critic. His essays range from whimsical to wisecracking to withering. The shortest of them — probably 'Talk of the Town' items for The New Yorker — sometimes feel disposable. But the longer ones, where he really digs in, feel indispensable ... Read Hogs Wild, and you won’t just be entertained. You’ll feel smarter.

Alain De Botton

Rave The Seattle Times Instead of dissecting a romance of the short-term variety, this narrative extends over 15 years, probing the institution of marriage and its many predictable corollaries and how the love of this particular couple endures and matures over time ... Largely told in an omniscient third-person voice, the narration takes on a stereophonic quality, with both husband and wife commenting on the ever-shifting allegiances of their love, commitment and struggles. The author deftly delivers both sides of the marriage, exploring the incompatible interplay of romantic love and practical love ... At times, the philosophical overlay informs the characters and their actions, and during other moments, the italicized interjections read more like interruptions of heated scenes of conflict and ardor ... Part literary novel, part self-help handbook, The Course of Love certainly illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle fissures of one modern marriage and what it takes for two people to stay together through the years. Despite some of the narrative contrivances, this nontraditional novel is generous in its spirit and message.

Bob Shacochis

Positive The Boston Globe In Kingdoms in the Air Shacochis is intent on nailing down what it means to be an American on the global stage of the late-20th and early-21st centuries ... Serious travel, he says in the new book, helps you find out, 'to your everlasting surprise, how American you are.' To drive that point home, Shacochis uses every weapon in his writer’s arsenal. Comic hyperbole and copious high dudgeon lead the way. Capsule national histories and sharp contemporary observations fill out the picture. Whether he’s in Cuba, Mozambique, or attempting to climb Mount Ararat, he vividly places you in both the past and present of his destinations ... Not everything works. 'Wartime Interlude: America’s Marriage to the Far Away' — about the US entanglement in former Yugoslavia — feels like a dated and overlong op-ed piece. An introduction to the book, to let readers know how these pieces were selected, would be a big help. Still, Shacochis’s restlessness and recklessness, all couched in a headlong maximalist prose, are impossible to resist.

Louise Erdrich

Positive The Seattle Times Instead of sticking closely with these [main] events, however, Erdrich increasingly piles on peripheral characters and incidents, expanding the novel’s scope at the expense of digging deeper into its central story. Her storytelling instincts, so fine and sharp in her short fiction, succumb to sprawl. To be sure, there are some fine moments in LaRose. The book nails the essence of Nola’s grief for her dead son ... Too many passages, though, seem like filler...By its end, LaRose feels more scattered than symphonic.

Adam Haslett

Rave The Boston Globe With its fugue of voices, each contributing a vital slant to the action, Imagine Me Gone offers rigorous formal pleasures. Yet while flirting with narrative artifice, Haslett stays keenly aware that in this family there is no explanation 'sufficient to account for the events . . . [L]ives weren’t works of art.' In acknowledging that, Imagine Me Gone respects the mystery of how things happen the way they happen, while brilliantly conjuring the tide-like pull with which dreaded possibilities become harsh inevitability.

Mia Alvar

Rave The Seattle Times Debut story collections don’t come much better than this. In the eight complex tales and one ambitious novella of In the Country, Filipina-American author Mia Alvar proves herself a tough, sophisticated writer with a canny empathy for the quandaries that confront her intricately layered characters.

Laura Claridge

Pan The Chicago Tribune Claridge often seems more interested in Blanche's clothes, perfume and makeup than her editorial practices...By book's end, you may feel as frustrated as fascinated by the story Claridge is trying to tell.

Edmund White

Positive The New York Times Book Review The book itself has a manic chanting rhythm as Guy keeps up the charade of being years younger than he is. Just when Our Young Man seems about to drown in its own superficiality — a heady mix of name-dropping, dieting strategies and drug binges — it becomes an oddly poignant contemplation of what it’s like to live 'way past' your shelf life and make choices that don’t quite match your insouciant appearance.

Mischa Berlinski

Positive The Chicago Tribune If Berlinski takes a misstep anywhere, it's in fluctuating so uncertainly between first-person and third-person narration. At times, his nameless novelist seems a well-deployed Conradian figure...At other times, when we're made privy to scenes that Berlinski's novelist couldn't possibly have witnessed or heard about, the narrative strategies don't feel fully under control. Still, in his chillier comments, Berlinski's narrator hits revealingly discomfiting notes...

Karan Mahajan

Mixed The Chicago Tribune While the plot's twists and turns sometimes feel more author-imposed than character-derived, Mahajan's small touches — especially his insight into how people react to trauma and loss — are succinct and persuasive ... Majahan has a lot on his mind in The Association of Small Bombs and is sometimes more blunt than canny in the way he explores it. Still, his is a voice well worth heeding.

Steve Olson

Rave The Oregonian ...fascinating...[Eruption] gives a gripping moment-by-moment account of what happened on the day the volcano blew. But its main purpose is to place the eruption of May 18, 1980, in long perspective.

Sarah Bakewell

Positive The Seattle Times The resulting book is a heady brew of biography, World War II/Cold War history and constantly mutating philosophical/political teapot tempests.

Tom Bissell

Positive The Seattle Times [Bissell] favors a zesty maximalist prose when describing the places where the apostles’ remains may rest. Some maps would be helpful, as would an overview of how the various manuscripts and archives he cites were preserved or destroyed. But you don’t have to be a career theologian to sense that Bissell has mastered his source materials in a meticulous and open-minded manner.

Henry Petroski

Positive The Washington Post [Petroski] has a clear eye, a mellifluous prose style and a knack for spicing deep research with personal anecdotes ... While Petroski sounds Cassandra-like alarms, he also offers informative pleasures. He gives a terrific account of a cross-country road trip young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower made with the military in 1919.

Mark Molesky

Rave The Oregonian It’s a sign of what kind of historian Molesky is that, after opening with a brief glimpse of the quake and its yearslong aftermath, he captivates your interest with a 40-page chapter devoted to the pre-quake city. He covers its religious leanings, sexual practices, food habits, physical layout, class hierarchies and more, providing a vivid picture of what was about to be destroyed when the first tremor hit at 9:45 a.m.

Darryl Pinckney

Mixed The Seattle Times Timeline and setting can be elusive from paragraph to paragraph, and some of Pinckney’s sentences, functioning a bit like abstract drips on an already-eccentric figurative canvas, seem to come out of nowhere ... What’s never in doubt is how deeply you’re immersed in Jed’s impulsive, insightful, if occasionally deluded mind.

Rick Moody

Positive San Francisco Chronicle If you like your thoughts methodically organized and your prose neatly combed, Hotels of North America may not be for you. But the wastrel waywardness of the novel is energizing, and its wrestling with the irresolvable loose ends of personality has a wry and powerful melancholy to it.

Jessa Crispin

Positive The Chicago Tribune Dead Ladies sometimes falls down the rabbit hole of Crispin's own frantic introspection. (There's a reason she worries about 'retreating so far into myself I'll never see daylight again.') And it's all over the place in terms of subject matter: sex, politics, history, philosophy, existential dread, gender dictates, difficult travel logistics, etc. But that's exactly what it needs to be: a rambling polymorphous beast, as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense.

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

December 16 – 20, 2024