‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Pat Barker

Rave The Washington Post \"This is a novel about how women respond to unendurable trauma — the destruction of their homes, the murder of all their loved ones, the prospect of endless sexual violence. But what makes this so fresh and engaging is Barker’s ability to translate these ancient people into vernacular voices that dissolve the millennia separating us ... The tenor of Ritsa’s narration constantly scrapes away the patina of epic glory and forces us, with her humor and her candor, to consider the lived experience of these people who caused and endured constant tides of violence and degradation ... The gods have set down their inalterable decrees, and Aeschylus has spilled all the spoilers, but Barker still manages to make these bloody stories moan with dread and snap with surprise. The slaughter that Cassandra foresees and legends have retold for millennia splashes across these pages in all its shocking, slick gore.\

Ingvild Rishøi, trans. by Caroline Waight

Rave The Washington Post \"O, come, all ye faithful, to have your hearts broken again ... I can’t say that Brightly Shining does for the Christmas tree industry what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for the meat industry, but Rishoi’s novella will definitely make you think more compassionately about those raw-handed attendants freezing in parking lots till the angels sing. Working early in the morning and late at night, Melissa endures all the crushing labor uncomplainingly, even while trying to stay in school and keep an eye on her little sister ... But Rishoi deftly lets an adult’s awareness seep through pinholes in Ronja’s childhood faith. By the end, burned hope hangs over these pages like the scent of smoke after a candle’s been blown out.\

Nayantara Roy

Rave The Washington Post Engrossing ... Lila is an immensely engaging narrator, impressively confident but endearingly vulnerable ... Roy deftly outlines the stakes in an upcoming election that could bring a conservative party to power and crush the liberal spirit of tolerance in Kolkata. It’s a small world after all. Eight thousand miles doesn’t feel so far away when we’re traveling with a writer this inviting.

Richard Price

Rave The Washington Post The strangest of urban thrillers: a thoughtful, even peaceful story about stumbling into new life ... Grimly comic ... Macabre.

Charles Baxter

Rave The Washington Post Absurd ... The story charges along so boisterously that it’s easy to forget Baxter is batting around some of the weightiest concerns of human experience, from the nature of fate and the boundaries of free will to the power of unconditional love. Fortunately, he remembers the first rule of comic novels: Keep it short ... Baxter is still fearlessly embracing his own zaniness.

Kate Greathead

Rave The Washington Post Greathead knows a particular subset of these floundering young men very well, painfully well, hilariously well ... Acerbic ... Greathead attains a perfect balance among irritation, pathos and comedy.

Alan Hollinghurst

Rave The Washington Post Ruminative ... Impeccable restraint ... As the book moves away from adolescence, it grows less novelistic and more episodic. The early memories, which appear as though polished to a high sheen over the decades, give way to those sharply remembered experiences of adult life ... Funny ... The miracle of Our Evenings, though, is its elegance and transparency, its ability to capture in language both revelatory and natural exactly what Dave is thinking and feeling all the way into his 70s.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Washington Post Flexes through an emotional range that most writers would never dare attempt ... Humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing ... Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel’s margins ... As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I’m left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?

Richard Powers

Rave The Washington Post Leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence ... Any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment ... Compelling ... He writes without a drop of mawkishness about guilt and grief and the sorrow endemic to caring about the natural world ... Even with faith that its parts would at some point cohere, I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers.

Matt Haig

Pan The Washington Post The novel keeps evolving — from grief memoir to murder mystery to environmental battle, sliding along a slick surface of greasy New Age truisms ... My objection to the sentimentality sprinkled over The Life Impossible is not that it’s emotional excess; it’s that it’s emotional aspartame. Yes, of course, fantasy can be a comfort in times of despair, but prescribing a story as silly as this one in response to a heartfelt confession of grief and depression feels like recommending brighter wallpaper as a treatment for termite damage.

Rachel Kushner

Rave The Washington Post Bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring ... The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit ... The story, told in short chapters that feel punchy even when they’re highly cerebral, slides around the labyrinth of Sadie’s mind, which is equally deceptive and deceived ... Kushner inhabits the spy’s perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun she’s having ... Bore through this noir posing and wry satire of radical politics, and you feel something vital and profound prowling around in the darkness beneath.

Danzy Senna

Rave The Washington Post Sly ... It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it ... [A] shrewd comedy ... Pries open this self-referential premise to explore the quandary of being an artist of color in America, and it has a surprising amount of fun along the way.

Regina Porter

Rave The Washington Post Surprisingly delightful and challenging ... For a few beats, The Rich People Have Gone Away seems to move to the groove of a domestic thriller, but Porter almost immediately undercuts that element of suspense ... The most striking quality of this book is how aggressively it careens off the main drag and darts down blue highways. I’ve never read a novel that pinballs so confidently from character to character, story to story ... This is the covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch.

Bret Anthony Johnston

Positive The Washington Post As in Romeo and Juliet, the story slips on sweat and blood from comedy to tragedy ... Telling the story from the point of view of two love-struck teens on opposite sides of the compound’s walls injects a sharp dose of suspense into a catastrophe we think we know ... What’s disappointing, though, is Johnston’s effort to have it both ways — to veil the historical facts while also relying on them as the novel’s ballast.

Dinaw Mengestu

Rave The Washington Post Strikingly ruminative ... Be patient, and you’ll eventually settle into this book’s strange motion. The structure of the novel feels like a Möbius strip cut from sheets of grief.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Mixed The Washington Post Heavy-handed ... Begins to flag. The humor is more muted, the pace slower ... Unfortunately, these characters are easy to summarize because the novel presents them in the highly schematic framework of a TV sitcom or a Marxist revenge fantasy ... But as always, Brodesser-Akner is a genius with the chaotic flow of embittered family dialogue ... Often entertaining — after all, Brodesser-Akner is one of the most performative writers alive — but why isn’t it better? ... Neat, compromised.

Julia Phillips

Positive The Washington Post May remind readers of Alice Hoffman’s fantasy-flecked novels, and Phillips sprinkles around the fairy dust liberally in some sections ... All this is spun with an ever-tightening weave of dread. Wisely, Phillips keeps her book relatively short and uses the story’s narrow focus to emphasize the sisters’ physical isolation. Even the novel’s young-adult tone, which feels cloying at first, soon reveals itself as wholly intentional, a reflection of Sam’s arrested development exacerbated by those two years of covid stasis. Impoverished, alienated and desperately lonely, she’s retreated further than she realizes into a world of fragile hope. When that shatters, as it must, the situation becomes more erratic and dangerous than you know what.

Ramin Setoodeh

Positive The Washington Post Witty, dogged and often sobering analysis ... I can’t say I was always gripped by Setoodeh’s consideration of individual seasons of The Apprentice ... But what’s fascinating here is how effectively Setoodeh demonstrates that Trump is still drunk on celebrity nostalgia.

Claire Lombardo

Rave The Washington Post This is a big novel, engaging enough to entertain you through the summer and thoughtful enough to justify its considerable heft. While many novels are too long, Same as It Ever Was takes full advantage of its 500 pages to traverse the whole life of Julia Ames, a woman who makes peace with motherhood slowly and haphazardly ... Witty, sympathetic ... Carefully structured ... Lombardo has such a fine eye for the weft and warp of a family’s fabric. She understands the chemistry of that special epoxy of irritation and affection that keeps a marriage glued together. One finishes Same as It Ever Was with the satisfaction of knowing this complicated woman well — and the poignant disappointment of having to say goodbye.

Joseph O'Neill

Rave The Washington Post Nobody else’s fiction tears up the ground quite like O’Neill’s profoundly introspective novels ... In their careful braiding of anxiety and aspiration, his stories are marvels of narrative magic and stylistic panache ... As always, O’Neill is experimenting with how stories are spun within stories. There’s an absurdist quality to this quest ... This novelist is a player whose charges and feints will leave you amazed — and defeated.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Pan The Washington Post Overstuffed ... The real problem with this novel... is Hallberg’s relentless urge to digress, to lather moments with excess observations and observations with superfluous verbiage ... And for much of the book’s impressive length, the plot moves forward so slowly and with so little urgency that some of the more dispensable flashbacks struck me as almost vindictive ... Are there flashes of brilliance here? More than flashes; whole storms of genius. But my irritation is piqued by the fact that so many wonderful, witty, poignant sections are buried in this lumpy novel.

Claire Messud

Rave The Washington Post This monumental novel, which is a work of salvage and salvation ... Quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades ... Regardless of how much Messud may have drawn from biographical details, though, this novel grips our interest only because of how expertly she shapes these incidents for dramatic effect ... A novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe.

Miranda July

Positive The Washington Post Wildly sexual ... Although such a description may invoke the spirit of Anaïs Nin, July is too funny for that association. In these pages, she’s outrageous and outrageously hilarious ... July writes with a delightful sense of discontinuity — life as a series of absurd non sequiturs — but there are big themes controlling her work.

Kaliane Bradley

Rave The Washington Post [Bradley\'s] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre ... Gradually, as the novel’s carbonated humor fizzes away, sharper elements protrude ... Admittedly, Bradley is not a tidy writer. This plot eventually starts to shake like a Radio Flyer wagon traveling at DeLorean speeds. But by then nothing matters but the fate of this asynchronous couple brought together across cultures and eras.

Sunjeev Sahota

Rave The Washington Post Me again, banging on about Sunjeev Sahota. I won’t stop until you read him ... Finds a timeless imprint in the hot metal of the moment. The story explores identity politics, that complicated intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation that, depending on your point of view, promotes equity or sanctifies discrimination. It’s the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth might have written ... Sahota throws so many disparate parts into this story that it’s something of a miracle when they begin to coalesce ... [A] brilliant novel.

Karen Jennings

Rave The Washington Post It’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle so viscerally ... This novel couldn’t be any more overwhelming if it came in a scratch ’n’ sniff edition ... The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive ... Urgent.

Leif Enger

Positive The Washington Post Nobody describes profound joy or \'blazing love\' with such infectious abandon as Enger, and it’s a pleasure to be back under his influence ... About 80 pages into I Cheerfully Refuse, a grisly murder shatters Rainy’s equilibrium and veers the novel into much darker territory ... This is a book whose margins strain to corral marital bliss and executions, goofy optimism and torture, natural beauty and pedophilia, bonhomie and lynching ... Does the world need a sweet apocalyptic novel? Is such a thing even possible? This doomsday in daffodils will surely exasperate some readers, but for others — myself included — it offers an alluring itinerary toward hope.

Percival Everett

Rave The Washington Post \"...the horror gathers gently in James. First, Everett moves to reorient these characters in his own moral landscape ... leans in hard on its thriller elements and gathers speed and terror like a swelling storm. Its conclusion is equally shocking and exhilarating ... What’s most striking, ultimately, is the way James both honors and interrogates Huck Finn, along with the nation that reveres it.\

Vinson Cunningham

Rave The Washington Post Despite the novel’s steady drip of astute observations about Obama and his groundbreaking campaign, the excellent view David gives us is relentlessly introspective ... The result is a coming-of-age story that not only captures the soul of America but also feels the unquenchable thirst for meaning which passeth all understanding.

Colin Barrett

Rave The Washington Post Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face ... The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality ... Barrett cleverly constructs his novel ... Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life — even touches of humor — may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.

Tommy Orange

Rave The Washington Post \"Wandering Stars is not technically a sequel, but it wraps around There There. Readers unfamiliar with the earlier book will feel its gravitational influence as some invisible body of dark matter, but fans will find here a rich expansion of Orange’s universe ... As Wandering Stars sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is ... It’s not too early to say that Orange is building a body of literature that reshapes the Native American story in the United States. Book by book, he’s correcting the dearth of Indian stories even while depicting the tragic cost of that silence.\

Kelly Link

Mixed The Washington Post An outsize novel ... In her prose, matter becomes plastic, bodies melt, and the membrane separating reality from fantasy is beaten to airy thinness. This is a novel in which statues come to life and people become statues ... Surreal moments keep flying through this story as hypnotically as starlings at twilight, but such dazzlement proves difficult to maintain. Eventually, the novel’s most magical quality seemed to be that every time I picked it up, it had grown longer.

Téa Obreht

Mixed The Washington Post \"As in The Tiger’s Wife, there’s surely a touch of autobiography here from an author who, as a child, left Yugoslavia with her own mother. Obreht has a visceral sense of the saving power of stories for people propelled into a perilous world ... [an] erratically paced novel, which eventually reveals itself to be laced with feints and detours. I initially thought The Morningside would appeal to young adults, too—with its gothic Alice in Wonderland sensibility—but as I read on, I began to worry that readers of any age might find it frustrating ... one wishes that its ethical crisis had more room to breathe. The lush, semi-magical moments that serve as the heart of Obreht’s previous novels risk looking like asides in this new one, which delivers several storylines and a final flurry of dramatic events.\

Anne Michaels

Rave The Washington Post Gorgeous ... May be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read ... It’s also one of the most poetic — not just in sentiment but in form.

Kiley Reid

Rave The Washington Post Smart ... Complex ... Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone, which slips tantalizingly between sympathy and satire. She’s so good at capturing both the syrupy support and catty criticism these young women swap, and yet she also demonstrates a profound understanding of their fears and anxieties ... The tension in Come and Get It builds slowly ... You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics.

Andrew J. Graff

Rave The Washington Post Warmhearted ... Graff’s second novel offers just enough drama to be exciting and just enough reassurance that everybody will get home safe ... I was happy to run off for a spell in the Northwoods with Sam and his family. Given the paucity of hope and happiness in contemporary literary fiction, those feelings must be a lot harder to produce than irony and despair. If you’re looking for a story that lets grace finally wash over its characters, come on down. The water’s great ... Sparkles.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Rave The Washington Post Sounds grim, but there’s an indomitable spirit pushing back against despair in Campbell’s work ... A light touch of fantasy runs through this story ... She immediately peoples her pages with a large cast of eccentric characters and a thick backstory so casually laced with shocking violence that it’s tempting to think you must have misheard. But don’t be quick to drive by Whiteheart. You must succumb to the pace of The Waters ... It subtracts nothing from Campbell’s originality to suggest that she’s taken up the mantle of John Irving ... Astonishing.

Hisham Matar

Rave The Washington Post Meditative ... It’s gratifying to see this thoughtful writer take all the time he needs to wrestle until daybreak with the mysterious angel of his disquieted conscience ... Matar writes with cool solemnity in phrases that are often epigraphic but never contrived ... Sorrowful as this novel often is, it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy nor an elegy.

Kate Christensen

Rave The Washington Post \"If you’re facing a painful trip home this month...ttuck a copy of Kate Christensen’s tempestuous new novel in your suitcase. There’s a good chance your own travails will pale next to those faced in Welcome Home, Stranger. And if not, at least Christensen will serve as a wise captain to guide you through the family storm. Of course, novels about going home are as common as flight delays. And a certain degree of rigor mortis has crept into the plot of relatives gathering in the wake of a death. But Christensen’s narrator charges into that worn storyline with refreshing candor ... a deeply endearing story about confronting one’s past and constructing a new future — under extreme duress ... If Christensen didn’t have such a clever sense of humor, the situation she throws her narrator into — returning to help spread Mom’s ashes — could feel intolerably dreary. But everything about this initial homecoming has been designed to prick Rachel with comic humiliation ... The success of this novel, Christensen’s eighth, rests wholly on her ability to create the artful illusion of ricocheting events — sudden swerves of grief, chance encounters that spiral toward disaster and a series of setbacks that pile up Job-like at the worst possible time ... the most lovely ending of a novel I’ve read all year.\

Paul Lynch

Rave The Washington Post His story about the modern-day ascent of fascism is so contaminated with plausibility that it’s impossible not to feel poisoned by swelling panic ... Eilish is a carefully-drawn portrait of affection and grit ... [A] relentless novel. It’s written in the grammar of dread. The sentences cascade from one to the next without so much as a moment’s breath. And with no paragraph breaks to cling to, every page feels as slippery as the damp walls of a torture chamber. I have not read such a disturbing novel since Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Booker Prize almost 10 years ago.

Michael Cunningham

Rave The Washington Post \"The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America. Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page. That’s the aura of Cunningham’s pensive new novel, Day. He has developed a style calibrated to capture moments of ineffable longing ... In a novel as thinly plotted as Day, everything depends upon the exquisite flow of Cunningham’s language, but quotations don’t do his work justice. You have to read these sentences yourself in context ... Aging, along with its attendant separations and swelling sense of irrelevance, is the novel’s abiding preoccupation. I would accuse Cunningham of projecting his 71-year-old anxieties, but these characters, barely middle-aged, are wholly convincing exemplars of America’s new lost generation. At their backs they always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near.\

Jonathan Evison

Pan The Washington Post I have good news and bad news: No one will feel particularly excited to ban Again and Again. But, alas, no one will feel particularly excited to read it either. Despite the promise of its premise, the high-concept plot of Again and Again never manages to rise above its lax execution and clashing intentions ... Evison has a big heart for sad-sack characters, and his former experience as a personal-care attendant informs his writing about the special relationships that can develop with people whom society has written off. But moving erratically between several different times and settings puts enormous pressure on the quality of these various tales ... Eugene’s affection for Angel finally reaches a saccharine crescendo that reads like a bake-off between Mitch Albom and Nicholas Sparks.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave The Washington Post Little explosions of pathos detonate periodically through this story — their power even more impressive for the way Nunez repeatedly lulls us into the comfort of her wry, ruminative voice ... I can’t remember another novel that felt so stuffed with literary allusions, quotations and references.

Sandra Newman

Rave The Washington Post Subversive ... In addition to filling out the tragedy of Julia’s adolescence, Newman introduces several ingenious twists that let the plot proceed largely as expected but with curiously different implications ... While Julia depends on Orwell for its architecture, the novel’s ironic tone is Newman’s own. By switching the perspective from Winston, she has effectively expanded the story’s palette ... [A] lively heroine ... Although I wouldn’t presume to say that Newman’s novel is better than Orwell’s, I find Julia more humane than 1984, which, admittedly, may sound preposterous given Orwell’s intentions. But Newman presents a fuller consideration of the variety of lives under a murderous, humiliating political system.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave The Washington Post Overwhelming ... For all its boundless suffering, this is a novel of triumph ... Pained questions — no easier to answer now than then — greatly expand the scope and power of this perilous story told in richly poetic language. Running up against the limits of faith in the face of calamity, Annis eventually hammers out a relationship to the spirit world, complete with a rough-hewn existential philosophy that is both revolutionary and entirely consistent with the tools at her disposal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a young woman traumatized by enslavement has no interest in a divine presence that demands servitude, even ownership. Gratitude will have to suffice.

Teju Cole

Rave The Washington Post As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor ... t does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling ... Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident ... To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.

Ben Fountain

Rave The Washington Post It’s a big, deeply humane political thriller that proves the flame of Graham Greene and John le Carré is still burning ... If there’s any flaw in “Devil Makes Three,” it stems, I suspect, from Fountain’s fundamental decency, a generosity of spirit that limits, in some detrimental way, the moral spectrum of his novel. Yes, horrific things happen in Devil Makes Three — plenty of them — but they’re prosecuted offstage, in the dark, by shadowy figures. To realize the full potential of a story this ambitious, the author needs to stare straight into the eyes of that third figure, that devil ... Still, this is a novel of ideas in the best sense. Fountain’s trenchant analysis of the geopolitical situation is not only subordinated to an intricate plot, it’s deeply embedded in the conflicted minds of these characters, who know and love this besieged place. Nothing here captures the country’s dire plight and indomitable spirit.

C Pam Zhang

Mixed The Washington Post The haunting story of an ambitious chef desperate to keep cooking even as 98 percent of the commercial crops fail and the world’s store of food dwindles to gruel ... Zhang is such a cool writer that salmon steaks could stay fresh in her prose for weeks. But there’s something absurd about this narrator’s single-minded obsession with haute cuisine during what sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ... This novel should come with linen napkins ... The story remains tense, unnerving and creepy, but it can feel strangely static. That effect is exacerbated by Zhang’s aphoristic style and the sense that these scenes are being recalled after many decades. Also, the narrator has an aversion to action that places the emphasis on reflection while boiling away moments of real drama. The result is an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class.

Daniel Mason

Rave The Washington Post Haunting, haunted ... The literary gods are inscrutable — the book club overlords even more so — but I’m praying you’ll consider getting lost in North Woods this fall. Elegantly designed with photos and illustrations, this is a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic ... Mason isn’t just passively watching the evolution of this site in the forest. Each chapter germinates its own form while sending out tendrils that entwine beneath the surface of the novel ... Revelatory.

Lauren Groff

Pan The Washington Post The itinerant story is a challenge of pacing, literally and literarily ... With her new novel, Groff has made that trek more challenging for author and reader ... The clues are tantalizing, but they gather as slowly as moss on a tree. And the answer, when it does finally come, delivers little of the seismic shock generated by the revelations in Groff’s masterpiece, Fates and Furies ... There is constant movement but little momentum, as though the girl were on a woodland treadmill. Our compensation for this stasis is Groff’s lush prose ... Such gorgeous passages in The Vaster Wilds are frequently entrancing, but they can also evoke painting on velvet. Once detected, the performative aroma of this style is hard to shake ... What’s presented here as radical, even heretical for this brave, long-suffering girl is blandly acceptable to contemporary readers of literary fiction.

Zadie Smith

Positive The Washington Post The best and most poignant sections of The Fraud examine the highly prescribed space for a sharp, smart woman in a culture that has no interest in sharp, smart women, particularly a dependent one of a certain age with little money ... As ever, Smith continually works against expectations. Although The Fraud lacks the dazzling energy of her celebrated debut, White Teeth, it excels at sleight of hand.

Alice Hoffman

Pan The Washington Post This tribute to Hawthorne’s classic earns not a red A but a puce C-minus ... Here, when Hoffman draws very close to the strings of Hawthorne’s novel, we’re made aware of the grating dissonance between them as writers ... Through some unearthly witchcraft, every prick of Hawthorne’s sharp irony is rubbed away.

Paul Murray

Rave The Washington Post Murray has written a book that could remain one of [this century\'s] greatest novels ... Anyone who starts The Bee Sting will be immediately absorbed ... Extraordinary ... Although Murray is a fantastically witty writer, his empathy with these characters is so deep that he can convey the comedy of their foibles without the condescending bitterness of satire. His command of their lives is so detailed that he can strip away every pretense and lie without spoiling a surprise ... The great miracle of The Bee Sting is the way Murray propels this story forward while simultaneously looping back into the past.

James McBride

Rave The Washington Post Confirms the abiding strength of McBride’s vernacular narrative. With his eccentric, larger-than-life characters and outrageous scenes of spliced tragedy and comedy, “Dickensian” is not too grand a description for his novels, but the term is ultimately too condescending and too Anglican. The melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own ... If there’s a ramshackle quality to McBride’s plotting, it’s the artful precariousness of a genius. His expansive collection of ominous, preposterous and saintly characters twirls like loose sticks in a river, guided by a physics of chaos beyond all calculation except awe ... We all need — we all deserve — this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.

Brando Skyhorse

Rave The Washington Post Ominous ... Offers a sharp vision of how racism gets imbibed by its victims like a sweet poison ... As Skyhorse’s clever satire accelerates into a truly terrifying thriller, the most insidious functions of racism appear illuminated in an eerie new light.

Richard Russo

Positive The Washington Post This is optimism in print. Russo has become our national priest of masculine despair and redemption. The gruff grace that he traffics in might seem sentimental next to the merciless interrogation of John Updike’s Rabbit series or the philosophical musings of Richard Ford’s novels about Frank Bascombe. But Russo understands the appeal, even the necessity, of those absurd affections that exceed all reason and make the travails of human life endurable ... If you haven’t read the previous two novels, you’re likely to feel as though you’re tagging along to your spouse’s college reunion. In trilogies, as in life, you had to be there ... Russo’s bequest to us ... The list of folks we need to look after is never finished; if we’re living right, it keeps growing.

Daniel Hornsby

Positive The Washington Post As metaphors go, this is, admittedly, not too original ... But Hornsby brings a sharp wit to this worn crypt ... Silicon Valley’s shamans and charlatans regularly speak with such an astonishing blend of vanity, inanity and obliviousness that there isn’t much left for an enterprising satirist to add, but Hornsby’s descriptions frequently draw blood ... What really keeps Sucker airborne, though, is how it spreads its wings to embrace the whole nefarious network of super-rich fiends who hang in the shadows and drain ordinary people dry.

Patrick DeWitt

Mixed The Washington Post A somewhat artificial premise ... Amusing ... But the energy picks up considerably — and just in time — in the novel’s second section, which jumps back half a century ... The quick progress and fraught terms of their relationship, which can be both funny and poignant, are the heart of the novel. And there’s some outlandish drama here, too ... A novel about quiet decency in an age short on quietude and decency is nothing to complain about, of course. But simple, decent lives are what most of us lead, so we know that tone well ... The Librarianist never gives us an urgent reason to check it out.

Caroline O'Donoghue

Rave The Washington Post For all its cringing at the narcissism of youth, The Rachel Incident offers a tender reflection on those 20-something friendships that leave a permanent imprint ... One of the many lovable things about this novel is O’Donoghue’s kindhearted perspective on the awkwardness of the college years ... O’Donoghue has found a way to tell this story in scenes both heartbreaking and funny. She may not have Binchy’s sweetness, but she illuminates these Irish lives with a light all her own.

Tania James

Rave The Washington Post \"James moves within the historical record while freely exploiting its considerable gaps and silences ... At 300 pages, this isn’t a particularly long novel, but James is a master miniaturist who can create the illusion of a saga in a chapter. And she’s not afraid to radically reset the novel’s place and tone. Her pages feel as full as a 19th-century bildungsroman, with collapsing kingdoms, sailing ships and elaborate schemes. Her plot is crisscrossed with coincidences and near misses, acts of great villainy and stunning kindness, and, of course, a long-simmering romance that’s doomed — until it isn’t! ... Abbas doesn’t hear the household servant who insists that it’s \'never too late to reinvent yourself,\' but he knows that’s true better than anyone else in this captivating story. He just wants to create something that will outlast its creator. James surely has.\

Lorrie Moore

Positive The Washington Post Mournful ... This slender book is haunting and cursed ... Finn is a classic Moore character, clinging to witty lines about the wallpaper in a world so dark he can barely see the walls ... Moore is writing in a treacherous emotional realm here, and her story moves with no more predictability than a wraith ... For all the novel’s rumination on mourning, the plot’s physical motion is incessant ... Gothic...perplexing.

Henry Hoke

Rave The Washington Post Give this sinewy prose poem a chance and you’ll fall under the spell of a forlorn voice trapped in the hellscape of modern America ... [It\'s] the purr of a classic perspective in American literature that stretches back to Huckleberry Finn, an outcast naif whose bewildered commentary plumbs our strange behavior, our extravagant passions, our senseless cruelty ... Hoke coughs up these little hairballs of comic misunderstanding throughout Open Throat, but it’s the pathos that sustains his novel ... Wisely, Hoke keeps this story short, but it’s more than just a series of doleful observations. There is an actual arc to this plot, though it’s so fragile I won’t say more than that it’s sparked by a horrendous crime against a group of people ... Untamed.

James Comey

Mixed The Washington Post The former FBI director is no monster, nor is he a great writer. But clearly his new thriller and its attendant publicity exist because of the author’s actions outside the realm of literature ... Central Park West starts promisingly enough ... That’s a sharp plot: We’ve got two intertwined high-stakes cases, one in state court, one in federal, and Comey knows enough about those separate legal systems to whip up some turf war over jurisdiction. But for an author who worked so long to imprison horrible criminals and to serve obnoxious politicians, his novel has no stomach for evil ... Central Park West is a thriller that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty, doesn’t even want to take off its tie.

Tom Hanks

Rave The Washington Post Charming...spiritually revealing ... So far as I can tell, Hanks’s book is not a roman à clef or a camouflaged tell-all or a sly act of disguised payback. Instead, it’s a novel shot in pastel tones ... Except for a few nods to entrenched sexism, the industry’s well-documented abuses are elided in favor of concentrating on the better angels of its nature ... A thoroughly engaging tale.

Ore Agbaje-Williams

Rave The Washington Post Agbaje-Williams writes in a fluid, conversational style that dissolves paper and ink into sound waves. Arranged in three acts — I mean, chapters — the novel is so theatrical in its structure and immediacy that the moment you finish reading it, you’ll imagine you actually heard it ... [A] crafty novel ... This comédie à trois moves along so briskly and with such sly wit that it’s easy to overlook how the novel teases issues of class and race.

Justin Cronin

Pan The Washington Post To get through this chaotic story, you’ll need the red pill and the blue pill and some Adderall ... The eerie first half — by far the better — is set on Prospera, an island paradise ... Although Cronin made his reputation by destroying the world, he’s actually better at building it, with all its attendant faults ... All the elements are here for a spectacular sci-fi thriller full of piercing implications for our own class-bound society, with its paralyzing fear of aging. But Cronin has something far more ambitious and metaphysical in mind, which throws The Ferryman off its tracks ... The creepy utopia Proctor depended on vanishes, and he finds himself in a hallucinatory realm of baffling experiences ... This is clearly meant to be a stunning development, ripe with provocative reflections on the nature of consciousness and the creative power of perception. But unfortunately, those deeper issues dissolve in a vat of melodrama ... The Ferryman wants to explore what’s real and what’s illusion, and I’m as eager as the next Platonist to be enlightened by the true nature of reality, but this late in the philosophical game, authors have got to bring something special to the cave wall. Unfortunately, Cronin’s topsy-turvy thriller is torn apart by the unsustainable imbalance between its profound intentions and its ultimately silly execution.

Emma Cline

Rave The Washington Post A quintessentially American tale, a smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception from the point of view of an escort named Alex ... The plot is stretched tight over a single week, which feels, to Alex, alternately fleeting and endless. We follow her with a mixture of thrill and dread as she lurks around the island ... Cline writes in a sleek, cool style that conveys both Alex’s naivete and her mirthless irony ... Cline stays outside but very close to Alex’s point of view, catching the syncopated rhythms of her poise and panic. In these precise sentences, we see a young woman always looking simultaneously outward and inward.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Rave The Washington Post Could Adjei-Brenyah push a story past its weird \'what if\' premise to sustain such a singular blend of wit and fury in a longer format? ... Chain-Gang All-Stars answers that question with a searing affirmation. It’s a devastating indictment of our penal system and our attendant enthusiasm for violence ... Adjei-Brenyah’s book presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing ... Adjei-Brenyah pushes the blade of his satire hard against the capitalist system that’s transformed 19th-century slavery into a modern-day profit center.

Ramona Ausubel

Rave The Washington Post From a taxonomic point of view, The Last Animal is a sweet, poignant descendant of Jurassic Park ... Such a strange literary creation sounds unlikely to survive in the wild, but in Ausubel’s laboratory, it springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and of the heart ... The quirky comedy of this novel constantly pushes back against the story’s abiding gloom. The whole book is glazed with a thin layer of absurdity ... The animal is a painful reminder of the loved one they can’t bring back. Every family, after all, goes extinct eventually. The paradox that this novel confronts with such tender sympathy and humor is how to love the time we have left.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Positive The Washington Post Has a lot going for it, starting with truth in advertising ... The story’s romance is appropriately spring-loaded with improbability. What really energizes the story, though, is its setting in America’s most venerable comedy factory: Saturday Night Live ... In Sittenfeld’s quick-paced prose, the work becomes terrifically exciting and reminds us how rarely we get to see what people actually do at the office ... What makes all this particularly delightful is that the woman narrating Romantic Comedy is hyper-aware of the conventions of romantic comedy, and she knows full well that real life is no fairy tale.

Elizabeth McKenzie

Rave The Washington Post I’m in love with a grieving misfit driving around with a donkey-shaped piñata in an old van held together by duct tape. Her name is Penny Rush. She’s the hapless heroine of Elizabeth McKenzie’s new novel, and she’s something of a piñata herself ... The great miracle of McKenzie’s writing, like Kevin Wilson’s, is how she manages to transform misery into gentle humor. After all, The Dog of the North isn’t social satire or cringe-comedy. McKenzie displays no interest in mocking her hapless characters. Instead, she swaddles their sorrows in zaniness ... A hum of erratic absurdity runs beneath these pages like a loose wire behind the walls, continually shorting out and making the lights flicker. The irresistible sound of The Dog of the North is Penny’s voice, composed of mingled strains of good cheer and naked lament ... It\'s all darkly hilarious ... But anyone reading this novel will be happy to endure the bewilderment with her.

Eleanor Catton

Rave The Washington Post A sleek contemporary thriller ... Catton writes with a satiric edge that leaves no survivors. In fact, she’s most incisive when it comes to the members of the Birnam Wood co-op ... Catton has somewhat less success bringing that level of verisimilitude to Lemoine ... But that feels like a minor distraction in a novel that dramatizes political, technical and environmental crises with such delicious wit.

Donal Ryan

Rave The Washington Post Exquisite ... Ryan...finds everything he needs to traverse the universe of the human heart ... The paradoxical smallness of this place is aptly reflected in the form Ryan uses for The Queen of Dirt Island. The entire novel is presented as a series of two-page chapters — each about 500 words long. That constraint makes heavy demands on the narrative, but the effect for readers is a series of emerald moments. We encounter Saoirse’s life in finely cut anecdotes polished in the tumbler of her little home. Everything here feels utterly surprising and yet entirely inevitable ... These stories could get precious if Ryan weren’t so attentive to the strains of violence and heartache running under the surface of the village ... Ryan captures the despair that sometimes opens up under a young person with no more warning or explanation than a sinkhole ... As the novel progresses, the act of recording and shaping family tales becomes central to the plot. Indeed, there’s as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write.

Rebecca Makkai

Rave The Washington Post \"Prep-school novels—a surprisingly large genre given the smallness of private-school attendance—are usually cloistered in sweaty isolation. But this is a story that constantly casts our attention to the outer world ... Through this complicated story of historical reclamation and present-day reckoning, Makkai explores the way the mistreatment of women and girls is repressed, mythologized and transmuted into lurid gossip and entertainment ... All of this makes I Have Some Questions for You a kind of meta murder mystery that deconstructs its own tropes. Bodie’s voice, so nakedly candid and bravely confessional, is absolutely convincing. I felt as captivated as though someone were whispering this whole novel just to me. By the end, it’s not the brutality of Thalia’s case that’s so terrifying, it’s the commonness of it.\

Zadie Smith

Rave The Washington Post Alvita struts and laughs her way across these pages like she owns them ... The Wife of Willesden has arrived at an opportune time. These days, many teachers are reaching for diverse, modern texts, and debates about the value of works by Dead White Men have pushed old classics into a literary graveyard. The increasing difficulty of Chaucer’s Middle English is another mark against it ... Then here comes this feisty revision of the most memorable character in medieval literature from a beloved Jamaican-British writer.

Marion Turner

Rave The Washington Post Turner’s immensely entertaining \'biography\' will make you fall in love with the Wife of Bath, whom she crowns \'the first ordinary woman in English literature\' ... Turner’s greatest skill is her ability to present years of arcane research in chapters that are always wonderfully accessible and briskly entertaining ... Turner’s most audacious claim is that Chaucer created what we now think of as real people with interior minds in fiction.

De'Shawn Charles Winslow

Positive The Washington Post Watching Winslow subvert the conventions of an old literary form is half the thrill of this novel. After all, the shelf of mystery detectives is hardly crowded with 60-year-old Black women. And that’s not the only cozy convention Winslow toys with. There are corny cliffhangers, yes, and Winslow is liable to toss off bits of pastel fluff ... But Josephine’s amateur sleuthing draws her deep into the tangled racial history of West Mills ... Winslow further complicates that history by exploring the way racism is entwined with homophobia ... The larger social context that Winslow explores is what moves this story beyond one crime into a reflection on the myriad unacknowledged crimes committed across decades.

Salman Rushdie

Rave The Washington Post It’s impossible not to read parts of this grand fantasy as an allegory of the author’s struggles against sectarian hatred and ignorance. Indeed, given the physical and emotional sacrifices he’s made, some coincidences between this story and his life are almost too poignant to bear ...[An] ambitious reclamation of the imagination ... Despite its grand design, Victory City remains surprisingly modest in tone. The bombastic quality that sometimes burdened Rushdie’s recent novels is here tamed, replaced by a gentler humor, a subtler satire.

Aleksandar Hemon

Rave The Washington Post The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God — or Aleksandar Hemon. But this Bosnian American author will make you a believer ... Charismatic ... Sounds awfully grim, I know, and there’s plenty of horror in these fiery pages, but the irrepressible voice of The World and All That It Holds glides along a cushion of poignancy buoyed by wry humor. From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love ... [An] epic ... The plot’s inexhaustible invention is just one of this novel’s wonders. The other is Hemon’s mysterious narrator. He speaks from the future but resides incarnate in these characters ... The real miracle of The World and All That It Holds is that despite holding so much, we come to know the fragile joys of this one melancholy man so well that he feels written into our own past.

Matthew Salesses

Rave The Washington Post Insightful ... Despite its precise analysis of the myriad manifestations of racism, this is a terrifically physical novel, as quick and compact as any NBA game ... Salesses’s greatest risk is the way he draws the eclectic elements of this dynamic novel together. It’s not just a matter of interlocking plot points — we’ve seen that many times before. No, what Salesses does here is a remarkable feat of artistic prowess that somehow blends the themes of K-drama with the spectacle of sports drama in a way that resets our frame of reference for the Korean American experience. Indeed, it’s a move that doesn’t seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself.

Deepti Kapoor

Rave The Washington Post Forget the fireworks in New York, London and Dubai. The most dazzling explosions to herald 2023 come from Deepti Kapoor’s novel Age of Vice ... Swinging from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India, this hypnotic story poses a horrible dilemma: For days, I was torn between gorging on Age of Vice or rationing out the chapters to make them last. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked ... This is a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype ... Kapoor moves back and forth through time and up and down the social ladder. It’s a complicated but never confusing structure that unravels some mysteries while spinning new ones. Good as she is at ripping up the pages with acts of violence, she’s even more sly about pulling us into these characters’ lives ... Kapoor situates her story in the broiling nexus of India’s economic and political development ... Central to Kapoor’s success is her agile style. In long, winding backstories, her voice grows rich and evocative. But she is the master of broken sentences. Phrases sparking as fast as synapses ... Age of Vice is too well choreographed to be called sprawling. No, this is pure cunning.

Allegra Goodman

Mixed The Washington Post Sympathetic ... That achingly sincere voice is the heart and soul of Sam. And anyone who has ever been the focus of a child’s impossibly inflated regard will feel alternately charmed and gutted by Sam’s devotion. Although Goodman writes in the third person, she never strays from the girl’s table-high view, an angle that shrouds adults’ thoughts but illuminates the child’s realm of rules and wonders ... One ventures across these pages like a winter skater lured by fragile beauty onto thin ice ... Goodman has always been a sensitive and illuminating chronicler of ordinary people’s lives ... It sounds churlish to raise reservations about a novel as tender as Sam, but there’s something increasingly restrained about this book that’s out of style with its modern plot. What feels adorable and raw in the early chapters grows merely moody as Sam comes of age ... The story gradually relinquishes its intimacy, its attention to the messy interior of a real young person’s mind. Moments of self-pitying despair fade beautifully into thoughtful realizations, like flowers tossed with faux casualness into a wicker basket for a glossy photo shoot ... If only the author would take as many risks on the page as Sam does on the boulders. This is, after all, a story that involves exploitation, divorce, addiction, death and guilt, but Sam never free solos. We know the novel’s prettiness will always be there to belay this heroine to a gentle landing.

Dunya Mikhail

Rave The Washington Post It’s a striking act of imagination that recasts her earlier research with new emotional power ... It’s impossible not to recoil from such a story ... One of the many things I admire about this novel is the way Mikhail refuses to let these murderers and rapists frame their atrocities in religious terms ... These opening 30 pages of sexual abuse are challenging to read, but hang on. Mikhail has a poet’s sensitivity to what her audience needs and can endure ... The Bird Tattoo metamorphoses yet again into a terrifying thriller. It’s a complicated but stunningly effective structure, made all the more so by Mikhail’s deceptively simple, declarative style ... Suddenly, this novel feels not just heartbreaking but terrifyingly relevant.

Russell Banks

Rave The Washington Post ... by setting his story among these outwardly peaceful, inwardly passionate believers, Banks has created another fascinating volume in his exploration of the American experience ... Impatient readers will be tempted to regard this foreword as a bit of extraneous throat-clearing, but, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s introduction to The Scarlet Letter, these opening pages establish the haunting relevance of the story we’re about to read. While making a show of establishing the provenance of these abandoned tapes, Banks sets the tone for a tragedy the narrator has been stewing over for more than 60 years. In other words, The Magic Kingdom is not the experience as it happened but as it’s been distilled for decades in the crucible of a guilty conscience ... dramatically backloaded, as though, having committed to a full confession, he remains reluctant to reveal what happened, even more than 60 years later...Harley asks as his tape recorder spins. He spends a long time setting down the social, theological and legal forces that will eventually collide, but that investment — by author and reader — is amply rewarded by this masterfully crafted story ... Our literature is thick with skepticism, condescension and downright derision directed at anyone who takes their faith more seriously than an Instagram poem. But Banks has something more complex in mind than the hypocrisy of a religious leader or the predictable impurities of a pious community. He’s interested in the way grand schemes intended to perfect human nature produce instead a combination of secrecy and shame that can spark wildly unpredictable results.

Kevin Wilson

Rave The Washington Post ... obsessively nostalgic ... Frankie and Zeke exult in their profundity, but the real triumph here is Wilson’s. With what pure awe Now Is Not the Time to Panic captures the adolescent thrill of creation — a thrill beyond all reason, but no less powerful and transformative. Although Wilson never mocks these young artists, he doesn’t obscure their naivete either ... This story is much more likely to break your heart than your funny bone. Wilson is witty, to be sure, and he has a firm grip on the absurdity of domestic life, particularly families and their strange, terrarium-like realms. But if there’s comedy here, it’s steeped in melancholy ... plumbs both the intensity of an early creative experience and the strange way such experiences get preserved in the amber of our minds. The result is another tender, moving novel by an author who understands how truly bizarre ordinary life is.

Percival Everett

Mixed The Washington Post Most of Dr. No is a goofy anti-thriller that revolves around Sill’s evil schemes and Wala’s halting efforts to thwart them. Yes, there are gorgeous robots, a devastating space laser, a pool of man-eating sharks under the dining room and lots of diabolical chuckling. But needless to say, Wala is no Sean Connery. He knows nothing. He’s never touched a woman. And forget the Sunbeam Alpine Series II. Wala doesn’t even know how to drive. All of which Everett exploits to parody both the Bond films and the bizarro world of physics and mathematics in the outer limits of reality ... This is all amusing. But having recently read “The Trees,” which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, I wish that Dr. No zeroed in on America’s racial environment with the same comic intensity. Defanged by its own silliness, this new novel merely hints and feints. The racially motivated murders that sparked Sill’s revenge fantasy quickly feel irrelevant ... risks feeling flip, almost like nothing. The result is a story unlikely to leave you shaken or stirred.

Shehan Karunatilaka

Rave The Washington Post For months, I’d been hearing tantalizing, impossibly incongruous details about this novel, which is only now being published in the United States. It’s all true: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities ... Weird and weirdly moving ... There’s nothing merely aspirational or derivative about The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Karunatilaka’s story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own ... The novel’s deeper themes reach beyond politics to the problem of evil that threads through every theology and moral code.

Cormac McCarthy

Mixed The Washington Post Prepare to be baffled ... A different species than we’ve spotted before ... McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form ... The style — a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution — is pure McCarthy. But so is the irritating tendency toward grandiosity ... It risks sounding comically overwrought ... Throughout the novel, we’re subjected to intercalary chapters about Alice and a menagerie of Vaudeville freaks who inhabit her psychotic hallucinations. Chief among these figures is the Thalidomide Kid, who torments her in conversations so bizarre and relentless ... When McCarthy descends from Mount Olympus and writes in his close, precise voice about Western carving out the ordinary activities of his day, the novel suddenly hums with genuine profundity. But many pages strain self-consciously to explore Big Ideas about the Nature of Reality. The explanations are so cursory that we never get to see the light.

John Irving

Mixed The Washington Post An imposing brick of paper ... I have no objection to long books. My favorite novel last year was The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, which also clocks in at more than 800 pages. But Jeffers has a lot to say. Irving has a lot to say again ... Fans of the author’s work may appreciate the invitation to survey this vast rearrangement of his cherished tropes ... At his best he’s a visualizer. The most arresting sections of The Last Chairlift are powerfully cinematic scenes — either comic or violent ... Whenever The Last Chairlift is actively expanding the boundaries of what a family can be — the story feels vital and exciting ... Despite their autobiographical elements, the sections about Adam’s success as an author and his move to Canada feel perfunctory and devoid of life. And far too many chapters sound self-indulgent and redundant.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave The Washington Post I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love ... In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country ... Kingsolver has reconceived the story in the fabric of contemporary life. Demon Copperhead is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth ... There’s the saving grace. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism ... With Demon Copperhead, she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.

James Patterson & Brendan DuBois

Mixed The Washington Post \"...if Blowback is feedback on Donald Trump’s raging years in office, it’s only a glancing shot. That figures. After all, Patterson has long maintained an indulgent detente with his friend and fellow Floridian. Unlike Stephen King, who regularly unleashes the hounds of hell upon Trump, Patterson has largely restricted himself to sighs of disappointment. Even in his two immensely popular presidential thrillers written with Bill Clinton, Patterson has avoided any harsh criticism of the Very Stable Genius ... One hesitates to attribute too educational a motive to Patterson, but this is essentially a lesson in the dangers of abrogating all those encrusted diplomatic rules and international laws that, some claim, let other nations walk all over us ... DuBois may not have the marketing glamour of Bill Clinton, but at least he doesn’t gunk up Patterson’s presidential plots with boring lectures about How Government Works ... In fact, Blowback rarely tolerates any unnecessary diversions at all. This is narrative stripped down to the studs, in every sense. The scenes are so short they could be written on napkins ... But we didn’t wander in here expecting Proust. We want gee-whiz technology and bloodless mayhem. Check, check.\

Lydia Millet

Mixed The Washington Post The story is so gentle that it’s a safe choice for any reader with a heightened startle reflex ... Dinosaurs...is a story about an extraordinarily wealthy White man struggling to make his way in the modern world. You may be under the impression that there are more urgent stories being told these days. This novel will confirm that suspicion. I kept expecting to feel the deadly edge of Millet’s satirical wit, but Gil is allowed to luxuriate in his gold-plated self-pity largely unscathed ... Dinosaurs is not without some emotional tension, but that tension is tempered, almost subterranean ... In...passages, Millet confirms that she’s a master of poignant moments. These scenes are charming, often witty, sometimes moving. And I have no doubt that fabulously wealthy folks in the prime of their lives with nothing to do endure the dark of the soul along with the rest of us — just on better sheets. But do you want to read about how woeful that is?

Ian McEwan

Rave The Washington Post ... a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill. While the story shares a few tantalizing similarities with the author’s life, it’s no roman à clef ... Here, finally, McEwan luxuriates in all the space he needs to record the mysterious interplay of will and chance, time and memory ... an extraordinarily deft portrayal of the way a too-early sexual experience permanently stains Roland’s romantic expectations ... progresses in time the way a rising tide takes the beach: a cycle of forward surges and seeping retreats, giving us a clearer and fuller sense of Roland’s life ... Indeed, even more than McEwan’s previous novels, Lessons is a story that so fully embraces its historical context that it calls into question the synthetic timelessness of much contemporary fiction. Roland may be imaginary, but he’s thickly woven into the social and political developments that shaped all our lives ... Some readers may feel Lessons is too stingy with drama, particularly given the book’s length, but I think it demonstrates the peculiar power of the novel form. There’s something close to divine in this process of creating the entire span of a person’s life embroidered with threads trailing off in every direction. Here is a narrative that moves with such patient dedication into the circuitous details of an ordinary man’s experience that by the end I knew Roland better than I know most of my actual friends.

A. M. Homes

Rave Washington Post A sharp new satire ... Homes captures the flora and fauna of America’s aristocracy with exquisite precision. Her descriptions of these shiny people, so casual and friendly in their tightly choreographed habitats, reminded me of when I moved to Washington ... There can sometimes be a Franzenesque quality to Homes’s family satire — a bitter skewering of parents’ pathetic pomposity and melodrama ... Jane Mayer and other journalists have exposed in alarming detail how the Koch brothers and their ilk have stealthily pulled the country to their private advantage. Homes is working in the same dark territory, but The Unfolding provides a different kind of insight into this privileged species — and a lot more comedy ... The dialogue in these cringingly hilarious scenes sparks off the page with such vibrancy that I felt as if I were in the room where it happened. As funny as it is, though, there’s an unsettling quality to the comedy in The Unfolding ... The Unfolding suggests no solutions to this plight, but it offers irresistible reflection on how the audacity of hope got pushed off the rails and fell into the slough of despond.

Maggie O'Farrell

Rave The Washington Post O’Farrell creeps into this gloomy realm of intrigue with an inkwell full of blood and a stiletto for her pen ... O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station ... O’Farrell’s manipulation of time and point of view keeps us vacillating between sympathy and skepticism ... You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure. O’Farrell and Lucrezia, with her \'crystalline, righteous anger,\' will always be one step ahead of you.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Rave Washington Post Afterlives demonstrates how gracefully Gurnah works in two registers simultaneously. The story is at once a globe-spanning epic of European colonialism and an intimate look at village life in one of the many overlooked corners of the Earth. Both parts...are equally revelatory ... Atrocities committed by Germany in the mid-20th century have tended to obscure the horror of its earlier colonial ambitions ... Indeed, just detailing such crimes would risk dissolving the victims in slush pools of suffering. But Gurnah avoids that misstep by gently vivifying the lives of a few African characters in all their rich humanity and even their comedy, without sentimentality or condescension ... Afterlives deftly inverts the old Western narrative, rendering the Europeans as background characters, while placing East Africans in the forefront ... Afterlives makes strong demands on readers. Gurnah moves fluidly between the complicated lives of his characters and the reckless actions of old empires. Unless you know early 20th-century African history well, you’ll be googling as you go. But the investment of attention will be fully rewarded.

Emma Donoghue

Positive Washington Post ... very few readers have been praying for a novel like this. But Haven creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause ... The drama of this novel accumulates slowly, like the fresh water in their cistern. The challenges — what to eat, where to sleep — are exacerbated by Artt’s fanatical insistence that they immediately build a stone church and begin copying Bibles. The result is a story of survival trapped in a very small space, completely cut off from the world: Room with a view ... Donoghue works subtly in the margins, letting these three men evolve into their distinct roles. Their foolish destruction of the island’s resources will resonate with contemporary readers, but she refuses to reduce these characters to symbols of modern exigencies. Her narration stays close to their minds, which are about as free of sin as this story is of irony ... The effect is transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking. Trian’s affection for his companions, the birds, the island — everything — is so sweet and vulnerable that tragedy starts to haunt these pages like the coming winter ... My only substantial criticism of Haven sounds more harsh than I mean it to: This novel could have been a classic short story. Donoghue’s prose is too attentive to the craggy beauty of the island and the flutterings of Trian’s heart to suggest the book is padded. But the story’s tight focus; its single, steadily rising arc; and especially its walloping conclusion would have ensured a short-story version Haven the kind of immortality that Artt can only dream about.

Mohsin Hamid

Rave Washington Post One feels the fierce sting of Hamid’s insight, his ability to articulate the cherished premises of White superiority ... The novel’s existential absurdity quickly gives way to a parable of what might be called racial mourning ... The Last White Man is a discomfiting little book, which I suspect resists what some readers would like it to be. It’s too sincere for dystopian satire, too earnest for cultural parody ... Even the book’s style reflects the agility of its racial reflection. Hamid’s extravagantly extended sentences feel driven by an indefatigable impulse to refine and qualify his thoughts as they surge across the page. To quote a passage from this novel is to do violence to its tightly laced phrases of reconsideration. In an age aflame with strident tweets, Hamid offers swelling remorse and expansive empathy ... The tone of The Last White Man echoes...complicated, shameful grief ... For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, The Last White Man is a peculiarly hopeful story. Its method may be fantastical speculation, but its faith eventually leads to the inevitability of social enlightenment.

Julian Barnes

Pan The Washington Post Here is one of those reviews — all too common lately — in which I struggle to delay as long as possible the sad news that you should skip this novel...Such contortions feel especially awkward, given that the novelist, Julian Barnes, is one of the world’s finest English writers ... now comes Elizabeth Finch, whose magic involves making a short book feel like a long one. It isn’t so much a story as a late-night hagiography drunk on distilled irony. Indeed, the only motion through most of these pages is generated by Barnes aggressively winking at us ... Barnes captures the language of adoration with exquisite poise, the devoted student’s endless cycle of qualifications and special pleading ... when Neil inherits his teacher’s journals, well, you’ll want to catch up on your favorite podcasts ... Throughout this slavish accumulation of her too-clever aphorisms, her sweeping historical generalities and her arch cultural observations, Neil remains wholly devoted to polishing his devotion ... what nobody needs now is the 48-page student essay about Julian that sits at the center of Elizabeth Finch like a lump of undigested potato in the throat.

Anthony Marra

Rave Washington Post The author’s fans...will recognize his elegant resolution of tangled disasters, his heartbreaking poignancy, his eye for historical curiosities that exceed the parameters of fiction. But the emotional range here is narrower, the record of human cruelty more subtle. And if Mercury Pictures Presents doesn’t generate the impact of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, well, that’s an impossibly high standard ... A complicated novel ... Marra unspools this period comedy with so much old-time snappy wit that Mercury Pictures Presents should come with popcorn and a 78-ounce Coke. But then, suddenly, the scene shifts to a far darker era — the first in a series of maneuvers indicating the thin membrane separating humor and horror in this novel ... With these tangled events, Marra demonstrates his remarkable ability to capture the intricate cruelties of political and social collapse ... The novel’s most fascinating move is the way it teases out the complications of realism ... This novel isn’t sustained merely by its surreal images, its archival discoveries or even its sharp critique of American hypocrisy. What matters, ultimately, is Marra’s ear for catching the subtle grace notes in ordinary people’s lives. If reading Mercury Pictures Presents sometimes feels like watching several movies simultaneously, you can trust that the novel will eventually resolve into focus with a moment of radical compassion that emits no more noise than a sigh.

Gabrielle Zevin

Rave Washington Post Moral complexity is a hallmark of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which takes its title from Shakespeare, not Nintendo...But even while alluding to that anguished soliloquy about the brevity and meaninglessness of life, Zevin has her hand on the joystick...In a moment, she flips Macbeth’s lament into a countervailing celebration of the endless possibilities of rebirth and renewal, the chance to play again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...In the story that develops, Sam and Sadie become legendary founders of a company called Unfair Games, and questions about the fairness or unfairness of who gets the credit, who bears the responsibility and who makes the final decisions continue to churn off-screen as their many fans keep clamoring for more, more, more...Zevin provides alluring descriptions of the products that Unfair Games creates, and she includes just enough technical detail to make us feel as if we may understand what a graphics engine does, but she rarely exploits the gaming structure much in this conventionally told novel...In her acknowledgments, Zevin describes herself as \'a lifelong gamer\'...That level of experience could very well have produced a story of hermetically sealed nostalgia impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t still own a copy of \'Space Invaders\'...But instead, she’s written a novel that draws any curious reader into the pioneering days of a vast entertainment industry too often scorned by bookworms.

Bruce Holsinger

Positive The Washington Post Holsinger has built an apocalyptic plot on ground more secure than the foundations of many Miami homes ... Holsinger brings the cost of climate change home ... I gripped the covers of this book as though it might be blown from my hands. Indeed, the disaster that The Displacements whips up isn’t just powerful enough to smear Miami off the map; it’s powerful enough to wipe away our naive confidence that such a disaster isn’t coming for us ... If Holsinger is as subtle as a category 6 hurricane, he also twists his novel around a strange tension: While mocking the elitism that marks our national response to natural disasters, he’s also exploiting that elitism for dramatic effect. This is, after all, a work of suburban horror carefully engineered to scratch the anxieties of upper-middle-class White readers...In such self-conscious moments, The Displacements feels as though it’s deconstructing itself, challenging not just Daphne’s privilege but its own ... And Holsinger offers incisive speculation about the way such an existential crisis might reshape our political rhetoric and create a new class of \'undeserving\' refugees to disdain and cut off.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Rave Washington Post Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary new novel is the weirdest, most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever inhaled...Part history, part prophecy, all fever dream, Thrust offers a radical critique of the foundational ideals that conceal our persistent national crimes...As we march from Juneteenth to July 4, this is a story to scrub the patinated surface of our civic pride...In this dystopian vision of our drowned future, government functions have collapsed except, of course, the rabid pursuit of immigrants; that cause persists, the last shuddering movements of the body politic in its death throes...Amid this hellscape, we meet a strange little girl named Laisve, whose name means \'freedom\' in Lithuanian, her frightened father hiding from the Raids...Yuknavitch’s descriptions of Brooklyn — now called simply the Brook — are incongruously precise and impressionistic, blending a dream’s concrete details floating in a cloud of terrors...As Thrust progresses, Yuknavitch drifts through several different storylines, separated by decades but threaded together by Laisve’s helpful visitations through the vast history of America’s halting struggle for freedom...Yuknavitch provides nothing less than a revised past and future of America with a vast new canon of attendant mythology...You might whine about the novel’s amorphous form, recurrent vagueness or multiple loose ends, but I read Thrust in a state of flustered fascination and finished longing to dream it again.

Julia Armfield

Rave Washington Post Exceedingly moody ... Often achingly poetic ... But Armfield exercises an exquisite — even sadistic — sense of suspense. She’s cleverly designed this story so that we only gradually become aware of how little we know ... \'Panic is a misuse of oxygen,\' Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.

Tom Perrotta

Rave The Washington Post ... ruminative ... in both novels, the humor is a subtle indictment ... Perrotta often is billed as a comic novelist, but he has become our patron saint of suburban melancholy. He knows so well how little worlds can generate their own unbearable pressures. Despite his steadily rising success — novels! movies! TV shows! — he demonstrates an intense empathy for the anguish experienced “by those who ne’er succeed.” Moving through short chapters, mostly narrated in the first person by a rotating collection of characters, Tracy Flick Can’t Win offers a sobering vision of lives marinating in regret ... The ending depends on a perverse kind of deus ex machina that some readers will consider too melodramatic. But that’s for us to argue about after you’ve read it. For the moment, suffice it to say that although Witherspoon’s note-perfect performance may never be forgotten, Perrotta has reclaimed the name Tracy Flick from the bucket of misogynist punchlines.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Rave The Washington Post ... sharp ... like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Korelitz simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants. Other readers will hear in this vivisection of a dysfunctional family a Franzenesque attention to the great forces pulsing through American culture. But Korelitz writes with such a light touch that one doesn’t feel strong-armed through a college seminar on, say, pharmaceuticals or bird conservation ... casts a witty eye on a wide spectrum of American life, but when Harrison, Lewyn and Sally become teenagers, Korelitz turns her satiric vision to the excesses of liberal education with particularly singeing effect ... Korelitz’s skill as the ringmaster of this vast collection of episodes feels particularly dazzling ... the resulting scandal shows how deftly Korelitz moves as a satirist, feinting in one direction and then delivering a knockout blow in the other ... There’s a jigsaw-puzzle thrill to Korelitz’s family epic — the way it feels like a thousand scrambled, randomly shaped events until you’ve got the edges in place, and then the picture begins to resolve with accelerating inevitability and surprise. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the climactic scene at a triple birthday party at the Oppenheimers’ \'cottage\' on Martha’s Vineyard is one of the most hilarious and horrible calamities I’ve ever found in a novel ... Korelitz is not so sentimental as to finally draw the Oppenheimer triplets together in a hug, but she knows how to adopt the old conventions of romantic comedy and domestic drama to her thoroughly modern ends. By the time we’re done with these siblings, their lives have been turned inside out, and all their stored-up junk and secret treasures have been sorted, culled and curated for this immensely enjoyable sojourn with a truly memorable family.

Leila Mottley

Rave The Washington Post ... a powerful, poignant story worth your attention. Despite all of Mottley’s good fortune, she demonstrates an extraordinary degree of sympathy with people who have none ... What’s even more remarkable is that Nightcrawling isn’t one of those thinly disguised diaries we’ve come to expect from precocious young novelists who can’t think of anything else to write about except their own heartache ... Mottley wastes no time with subtlety. She’s describing people whose lives are a series of shocks and humiliations that arrive with such regularity that they’ve become routine ... In these opening pages, Mottley effectively outlines the perilous economy of poverty in America. It’s a dramatic accounting that gives tangible form to what millions of invisible people endure amid so much bounty ... My god — that voice. It’s sometimes too painful to keep reading, but always too urgent to stop. In page after page, you can hear Mottley’s precocious work as a poet, first recognized by the Oakland Public Library that named her Oakland’s youth poet laureate in 2018. She’s already perfected the delicate task of infusing these observations with a kind of raw poetry without doing violence to the natural cadence of her narrator’s speech ... Mottley never drifts from Kiara’s point of view and never uses her as a mere device to retell the criminal story of what happened in Oakland. After all, that was already well covered by journalists. Instead, as the scandal breaks around Kiara with all its legal complications and criminal threats, the novel stays focused on the young woman’s concern for the people she loves, and that tight perspective proves surprisingly revelatory about the way our justice system re-traumatizes victims of sexual violence ... Mottley, just a few years from childhood herself, has managed to preserve that imperiled spirit in this harrowing novel.

Jokha Alharthi, trans. by Marilyn Booth

Mixed The Washington Post As before, the author continues to demonstrate a deep sympathy for the ways women suffer and survive the vicissitudes of a society that gives them little agency. And fans will recognize Alharthi’s fluid treatment of chronology and setting, once again gorgeously translated by Booth ... Alharthi, who earned a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh and now teaches in Oman, can simultaneously emphasize the universality of her characters’ feelings and the unique cultural context of their experiences. Bitter Orange Tree is a story of mourning and alienation, and Alharthi has developed a tone that captures that sense of being suspended in the timelessness of grief ... If Bitter Orange Tree has a weakness, it’s this emphasis on the narrator’s static grief, which may tax readers’ sympathy and then exceed their interest. But fortunately, the swirling current of the narrative pushes against the narrow confines of Zuhour’s extravagant mourning. In the undulating rhythms of this story, we’re repeatedly drawn into the early details of Bint Aamir’s life as a woman in Oman ... Aside from how emotionally painful that sounds, frozen in torment and tongue-tied in destiny are particularly challenging conditions to sustain in a novel, which demands at least a modicum of dynamic movement ... this exquisitely sensitive novel spins its wheels without going anywhere.

Steve Toltz

Positive The Washington Post Every copy of this book should come with a starter dose of Prozac ... This is a comedy that takes the tragedy of immortality seriously. It flips the fear of oblivion on its head to meditate on the terrifying suspicion that \'the abyss of eternal nothingness was just a pipedream\' ... Although there are no eternal flames in this novel, like Mark Twain near the end of his life, Toltz is writing with a pen warmed up in hell. Beneath its wry surface, Here Goes Nothing is a relentless deconstruction of religious certainty and spiritual affirmation ... Clever lines drop down on these pages like flowers thrown on a casket. But a plot about the eternally static nature of reality risks being infected by its own lack of progress. Having underlined so many of Toltz’s clever quips, I kept running up against the question of what this mound of philosophical pessimism amounts to? It’s hard to shake the impression that Toltz and Angus are spinning on the same ground ... Behind this zany, increasingly dark comedy, though, lies a wry rejection of the persistent hope that death will either snuff us out or make us better by serving up justice, solace, salvation, revelation, something. In Toltz’s pages, imperishability doesn’t convey any transformation at all. The bad news is that improving ourselves is still and forever up to us alone.

Hernan Diaz

Rave The Washington Post The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book ... In each grandly choreographed chapter of this novella, disparate movements are gradually brought to conclusions both surprising and inevitable ... when their fateful punishment arrives, it’s suitably shocking and humiliating, a melodrama of debasement designed to reassure readers that the ethical accounting of the universe cannot be cheated ... sounds repellently overcomplicated, but in execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. By the end, the only voice I had any faith in belonged to Diaz.

Michelle Huneven

Rave The Washington Post I would never have believed that I’d review — and love — a novel that includes recipes. But Michelle Huneven’s Search and her Midmorning Glory Muffins have made me a believer ... the story that develops from this wafer-thin premise is miraculously engaging ... That theme, explored with light wit and deep humanity, makes this unabashedly churchly novel strikingly relevant to our conflicted political era ... there is something refreshingly candid and transparent ... For all our oversharing, we have relatively few novelists willing to write about the role of religion in contemporary life — and even fewer who address spiritual practices with humor, empathy and lived wisdom. Huneven is one of those rare spirits. Religion doesn’t bore or frighten her. She knows what a rich and fraught sanctuary the sanctuary can be ... thoughtful.

Tara M. Stringfellow

Mixed Washington Post Sweeping ... The path to...joy leads through decades of trauma, and during much of that time, hope is all these characters possess. Indeed, Stringfellow has a lush, romantic style that’s often the only counterweight to the grim details of her story ... The novel’s scrambled chronology initially feels like a challenge, but the chapters are clearly dated and named as they move to focus on a grandmother, her daughters and her grandchildren. Readers will come to see that Stringfellow is demonstrating the erratic movements of history, the false starts and reversals and, yes, the moments of progress that are reflected in our haphazard march toward realizing King’s vision for America ... There is, however, one irreducible problem with Miriam’s plan and, I think, with Stringfellow’s novel. In the first chapter, we learn that the last time Miriam visited, her then-3-year-old daughter, Joan, was raped by her sister’s 8-year-old son. Now that boy is a teenager, and Joan is so terrified to see him that she immediately wets herself. She will spend the next few years living with him ... Try as I might, I could never get beyond the shocking implausibility of this move ... I don’t mean to criticize the plot, per se; fiction should be free to reach for the infinitely bizarre events of real life. The issue, really, is that Memphis never commits itself to the considerable work of making this ghastly event psychologically persuasive ... It’s eventually clear that these things must come to pass so that Stringfellow can engineer a redemptive story of forgiveness. But along the way, she fails to contend sufficiently with the lasting damage and complications of incest and sexual abuse ... Fortunately, other parts of Memphis are more convincing and subtle. With her richly impressionistic style, Stringfellow captures the changes transforming Memphis in the latter half of the 20th century ... The most lovely, even inspiring element of Memphis is the story of Joan’s artistic ambitions.

Anne Tyler

Rave The Washington Post The story offers such a complete checklist of the author’s usual motifs and themes that it could serve as the Guidebook to Anne Tyler in the Wild. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods — they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon ... There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of French Braid offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace ... With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout French Braid. It’s also a reminder that. although Tyler has devoted her life to novels, she commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer ... Now 80 years old, Tyler can move freely up and down the scale of ages with complete authority, capturing the patient spirit of a retiree, the buoyant expectation of a second-grader or the unstable realm of naivete and dread where teenagers hang out ... Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?

Susan Straight

Rave The Washington Post Straight’s characters are the backbones of agriculture, health care and hospitality — those people of color who pick, wipe and disinfect for long hours on low wages. Through the tinted windows of a speeding Mercedes, their communities may look as plain as the desert, but under Straight’s capacious vision, they appear in all their vibrant humanity ... Mecca is, among many things, a shrewd deconstruction of racial categories and the racist assumptions built upon them. Straight tackles not only the way prejudice motivates violence but the way it distorts the response to violence ... The novel’s structure cleverly reflects this diversity: The chapters move from character to character, some with first-person narrators, some with third. One particularly devastating chapter written in the second person, you will never forget ... Between the poles of these two ambiguous crimes — committed 20 years apart — Straight strings the details of a terrifically engaging novel about a network of people related by blood, love and duty. A subplot detailing the way children struggle with loneliness during the covid pandemic is heartbreaking. Another one involving a mother’s response to a police shooting is a tour de force that could spin off and persist on its own as a classic short story ... But what might be most impressive about this novel is how large it becomes without ever feeling bloated by extraneous plotlines or too neatly sewn up. Instead, what initially appears to be a disparate collection of experiences gradually develops interweaving tendrils to create a celebration of families — a celebration made all the more poignant by the constant threat of being separated, exiled, wounded or even killed. Remarkably, the most persistent impression here is not one of suffering but of determined survival, even triumph.

Stewart O'Nan

Mixed The Washington Post His new novel, Ocean State, makes a murder mystery as compelling as the closing of a Red Lobster restaurant. It’s a curious but apparently intentional achievement in a book that feels allergic to its own suspense ... Even with the killer’s identity revealed, much remains tantalizingly hidden but only for a few pages ... O’Nan has purposefully drained the tension from this tragedy. What’s left for us in Ocean State are doleful reflections on various characters’ motives and reactions. It’s a gamble ... As usual, O’Nan writes about financially stressed people with a clear and empathetic sense of the constant pressures they endure ... O’Nan’s careful, sepia-toned observations offer no satirical wit on the machinations of horny teenagers nor any chilling insight on the horrors that sexual desire can activate ... we don’t particularly need a novel that feels so unwilling to tell us something we haven’t already heard. Even the act of murder itself is politely obscured in these pages, and the trial that takes place late in the story does so largely offstage.

Emily St. John Mandel

Rave The Washington Post It’s a curious thought experiment ... an elegant demonstration of Mandel’s facility with a range of tones and historical periods ... Mandel delivers [a] futuristic section with an impish blend of wit and dread ... All these various stories are finely constructed, but they gather force only during the novel’s time-traveling second half set in the year 2401. Mandel moves lightly across this distant era. A world utterly transformed is merely implied by allusions to China’s primacy and various independent regions of the United States. Rather than clutter the pages with technological advances and gee-whiz gadgets, Sea of Tranquility concentrates on the psychological implications of living in domed colonies on the surface of the moon. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose ... it’s a chance to re-experience the thrill of Sophie’s World, to wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see.

Jennifer Haigh

Positive The Washington Post ... surprisingly restrained ... likely to be the last abortion-focused novel that appears before our newly reconstituted Supreme Court reasserts the state’s control of women’s bodies. And yet it’s not so much a clarion call as a melancholy appraisal of the stalemate that has long held sway in the United States ... Haigh seems well aware of the heavy curtain that’s been drawn across these services. Much of her novel is devoted to demystifying this quotidian work ... carefully sketches out the geography of poverty, that invisible realm that lies just beyond the horizon of middle-class life. Without condescension or sentimentality, Haigh describes people who aspire to live in a double-wide trailer, who must decide between paying the water bill and the cable bill, who feel the humiliation of using food stamps. Indeed, that life was Claudia’s adolescence, a background that makes her particularly attuned to the logic of the clinic’s poorer clients ... avoids any such climactic melodrama and stays true to its fundamental decency ... Is it too much to wish this novel is not just hopeful but prophetic?

Douglas Stuart

Rave The Washington Post ... moving ... Stuart writes like an angel ... masterful ... if Stuart has not departed much from the scaffolding of his debut novel, he has managed to produce a story with a very different shape and pace ... The raw poetry of Stuart’s prose is perfect to catch the open spirit of this handsome boy, with his strange facial tics ... The way Stuart carves out this oasis amid a rising tide of homophobia infuses these scenes with almost unbearable poignancy ... Stuart quickly proves himself an extraordinarily effective thriller writer. He’s capable of pulling the strings of suspense excruciatingly tight while still sensitively exploring the confused mind of this gentle adolescent trying to make sense of his sexuality ... The result is a novel that moves toward two crises simultaneously: whatever happened with James in Glasgow and whatever might happen to Mungo in the Scottish wilds. The one is a foregone calamity we can only intuit; the other an approaching horror we can only dread. But even as Stuart draws these timelines together like a pair of scissors, he creates a little space for Mungo’s future, a little mercy for this buoyant young man.

Marlon James

Mixed The Washington Post When Sogolon is moving, Moon Witch, Spider King comes spectacularly alive. James choreographs fight scenes that make Quentin Tarantino’s movies feel comparatively tranquil. And there’s a catalogue of diabolically ingenious creatures creeping along the ceilings, jumping from behind trees and even reaching through fourth-dimension portals to keep the pages simmering with terror ... In its structure and pacing, though, this is a different novel from Black Leopard, Red Wolf. The previous book was certainly difficult, but it was a grand quest, charging forward with inexorable momentum, luxuriating in its vast length to unspool a series of adventures ... Moon Witch, Spider King, on the other hand, is the confession of someone nursing a horrible anger and a consuming sorrow. As such, the story sometimes skids into pits of rumination that increase the narrative’s persistent fogginess. Those challenges are exacerbated by the special lexicon of this series, which involves so many fantastical geographical references and cryptozoological figures that I began to worry that the Aesi had erased my mind, too ... only readers who very recently read Black Leopard, Red Wolf will have a snowball’s chance in Mantha of following this new volume’s final section, which offers a highly compressed, bafflingly elliptical retelling of the search for the lost boy ... Sogolon is a thrilling, haunting heroine; in fact, she’s \'the baddest woman alive.\' And when she says, \'Every connection reminded me of loneliness,\' my heart aches for her to be free from such sorrow. But I also wish she could be loosened a bit from the dense thicket of this novel.

Tessa Hadley

Rave The Washington Post Free Love, is smartly situated in [a] fusion of defiance and regret, liberation and attachment ... Hadley alludes to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but her story cuts its own path ... Hadley writes, \'Phyllis hadn’t known that the young had this power, to reduce the present of the middle-aged to rubble.\' That sounds like witty hyperbole, and it is, but it’s also an intimation of the demolition that’s coming. Fans of Hadley’s exquisitely written novels know that nothing is accidental or wasted ... Delightful as [the] climactic opening is, the real triumph of Hadley’s novel stems from her judicious portrayal of what happens next.

Jennifer Egan

Mixed Washington Post You’re likely to be as baffled as dazzled by The Candy House ... The music that ran through Goon Squad and gave the novel its melody is far harder to hear in these new chapters. Also, 12 years later, readers are less likely to be awed by literary experimentation ... But if The Candy House is less uniformly successful than A Visit From the Goon Squad, it still contains terrific parts ... Much of The Candy House takes place in a future influenced by Bix’s revolution, but the novel rarely contends with the implications of that premise for Bix’s life, the tech industry or the world shaped by it. Instead, Bix’s skin color remains about as relevant as his hair color ... Egan presumes a lot on her readers’ ability to know what she’s talking about. It would have taken so little additional information to make this more inviting that I can’t help feeling the author was overindulged by her editor ... The chapters that work best embrace their radical forms more gently — or even mock them.

Andrew Lipstein

Rave The Washington Post Lipstein of plagiarizing Kolker’s article — his novel was finished long before the Times piece appeared — but Last Resort offers an uncanny dramatization of the issues Kolker explored. Clearly, we live in an age sweaty with anxiety about authenticity ... If you’ve ever wondered where writers get their ideas from, Last Resort is wicked fun. If you’re a writer, Last Resort is heartburn in print. Splayed across these pages is the dark terror that lurks within any creative person’s breast: the embarrassing facts that might demolish the glorious claims made in the name of literary invention ... As Lipstein skewers the pretensions and delusions of literary ambition, he reveals the mental tricks that allow writers to imagine that they care only for art, not money or fame. And he exposes the extent to which novelists will go to ignore, obscure and even deny their sources ... expands into a deliciously absurd comedy about literary fame. This is Lipstein’s first novel, but he has somehow already acquired a bitterly accurate understanding of the tiny arena in which reviews, blurbs, book signings, Goodreads comments and puffy author profiles can coalesce to make a writer rich — or notorious ... is ultimately about the difference between what we say we want and what we pursue at our own peril. And that’s a conflict any of us can relate to, even if we haven’t stolen a friend’s story — yet.

Xochitl Gonzalez

Rave The Washington Post In short: Don’t underestimate this new novelist. She’s jump-starting the year with a smart romantic comedy that lures us in with laughter and keeps us hooked with a fantastically engaging story ... Presumably, Gonzalez is pulling at least some of these funny shenanigans from her own experience: She once worked as a wedding planner herself. But it’s the tremendous verve of her prose that makes these pages crackle ... Gonzalez develops a rich parallel story about Olga’s brother, Prieto ... If this is a novel about toxic family secrets, it’s also a novel about clandestine national schemes. Aside from a collection of winning characters and an ingenious plot, what’s most impressive about Olga Dies Dreaming is the way Gonzalez stretches the seams of the rom-com genre to accommodate her complex analysis of racial politics ... with remarkable dexterity, Olga Dies Dreaming transitions temporarily into a political thriller about the way Washington and powerful business interests conspire to profit from the island’s suffering ... Rarely does a novel, particularly a debut novel, contend so powerfully and so delightfully with such a vast web of personal, cultural, political and even international imperatives.

Jenni Fagan

Rave The Washington Post ... deliciously weird ... Fagan once again examines the way people are affected by unhealthy spaces ... she writes about placement and displacement with an arresting mix of insight and passion ... Fagan tests each floor of No. 10 Luckenbooth as though she’s playing a literary version of Jenga, drawing out one block after another from this unstable structure ... a muffled scream—with a feral melody and a thundering bass line. Her prose has never been more cinematic. This story’s inexorable acceleration and its crafty use of suggestion and elision demonstrate the special effects that the best writers can brew up without a single line of Hollywood software—just paper, ink and ghosts.

Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft

Rave The Washington Post The Books of Jacob is finally available here in a wondrous English translation by Jennifer Croft, and it’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing \'the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.\' In terms of its scope and ambition, The Books of Jacob is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. Even its voluminous subtitle is a witty expression of Tokarczuk’s irrepressible, omnivorous reach ... The challenges here — for author and reader — are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today ... As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections ... The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records ... This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious ... Haunting and irresistible.

Nadifa Mohamed

Rave The Washington Post ... an extraordinary novel ... As a work of historical fiction, Mohamed’s novel is equally informative and moving. While the details of her story are drawn from news accounts and court records, the interior portraits stem from her own deeply sympathetic imagination. The resulting confluence of fact and fiction provides a damning indictment of judicial racism. But with a vision that exceeds this one tragic case, The Fortune Men also plumbs the existential plight of so many similar victims. The immediate allure of the novel is the vibrancy of Mohamed’s prose, her ability to capture the complicated culture of Cardiff and the sound of tortured optimism ... Hovering close to Mahmood’s thoughts, The Fortune Men conveys the mix of deprivation and harassment that exhausts unemployed laborers ... the crux of Mohamed’s artistry: Her clear-eyed acknowledgment of this man’s self-pity runs parallel to her piercing exposure of his society’s relentless, enervating prejudice ... The horrific finale of The Fortune Men is never in doubt, but for more than 200 pages Mohamed still creates a sharp sense of suspense by pulling us right into Mahmood’s world as his life tilts and then crashes.

Hervé Le Tellier, Tr. Adriana Hunter

Positive The Washington Post Although Americans are frustratingly xenophobic when they make reading choices, The Anomaly, translated by Adriana Hunter, could be the rare exception. It’s French, but not trop francais. The book’s intellectuality is neatly camouflaged by its impish humor. Indeed, with its elegant mix of science fiction and metaphysical mystery, Le Tellier’s thriller is comfortably settled in the middle seat between Lost and Manifest ... Le Tellier writes with a heavy dose of his very French condescension ... But these broad bits of social and political satire — along with some silly drama involving emergency mathematicians — are the weakest elements of The Anomaly. (A scene showing a Trumpy American president struggling to understand string theory feels like shooting supernovas in a bucket) ... The novel soars, though, when it focuses instead on individual passengers from the Air France flight(s). In these chapters — each carefully dated to help us keep everyone straight — we see people struggling to comprehend this most incomprehensible moment of personal inflation ... In these clever stories and a handful of others, Le Tellier dares us to wonder if we could stand meeting the figure in the mirror. It’s what makes The Anomaly a flight of imagination you’ll be rolling over in your mind long after deplaning.

Claire Keegan

Rave Washington Post At the opening of Small Things Like These, one immediately senses that Keegan is breathing something vital into the season’s most cherished tales, until, as gently as snow falling, her little book accrues the unmistakable aura of a classic ... Keegan’s Everyman hero is Bill Furlong, whose past and present she sketches with such crisp efficiency that the brush marks of her artistry are almost invisible ... From the elements of this simple existence in an inconsequential town, Keegan has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. There’s nothing preachy here, just the strange joy and anxiety of firmly resisting cruelty ... Grand gestures, extravagant generosity, moments of surprising forgiveness all have their rightful place in our holiday legends. But Small Things Like These reminds us that the real miracle in any season is courage ... Get two copies: one to keep, one to give.

Mitch Albom

Pan The Washington Post As this divine ordeal drags on, the Lord offers what passes for profundity ... Alas, the survivors’ prayers go unanswered, as did mine for better dialogue ... Such soggy inspirational literature makes me seasick. Everything about The Stranger in the Lifeboat is sketched in cartoon colors — from its vacuous theology and maudlin tragedies to its class warfare theme. Instead of character development, TV news reports interrupt the story to provide potted biographies of the lost souls. And the Lord’s statements supply all the holy insight of a sympathy card from your insurance agent ... Panning a book like this may feel like harpooning a minnow, but I think treacly metaphysical fiction does us a cultural disservice. To borrow a word, it narcotizes people in search of real spiritual wisdom. That’s a shame because every religious tradition and many thoughtful writers of faith provide profound guidance through dark times of despair and grief. Cotton candy such as The Stranger in the Lifeboat is a saccharine substitute that spoils the appetite for sacred food.

Elif Shafak

Rave The Washington Post American readers unfamiliar with the tumultuous history of Cyprus will appreciate how gracefully Shafak folds in details about the violence that swept across the island nation in the second half of the 20th century. But this is not a novel about the cataclysms that reshape nations; it’s about how those disasters recast ordinary lives ... isn’t just a cleverly constructed novel; it’s explicitly about the way stories are constructed, the way meaning is created, and the way devotion persists. Without snarling readers in a thicket of confusion — don’t worry, each chapter is clearly dated — Shafak involves us in the task of assembling these events ... Yes, it’s an odd conceit, particularly whimsical for a novel that explores such painful material, but not surprising from Shafak. As an author, she’s that rare alchemist who can mix grains of tragedy and delight without diminishing the savor of either. The results may sometimes feel surreal, but this technique allows her to capture the impossibly strange events of real life ... Near the end, Kostas’s precious tree tells us, \'If it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.\' This novel offers the same invitation — and the same reward.

Dave Eggers

Pan The Washington Post You can’t buy a hardcover edition of The Every from Amazon ... It’s the most interesting thing about The Every. In this unnecessary sequel to The Circle, Eggers goes around again, banging on about the corrosive effects of the Internet, social media and especially Silicon Valley’s hegemony. It’s no better for being entirely right. And at 577 pages, The Every suffers from the Web’s worst quality: unlimited space. It’s like a 27-hour TED Talk by some clever guy who thinks smoking is bad for your health ... [The] exciting premise of corporate sabotage immediately devolves into a thinly plotted series of mildly amusing set pieces ... This emphasis on apps and services only exposes the novel’s static plot and increasingly hectoring thesis. Weirdly, The Every reserves its most pointed satire for people who are too concerned about global warming ... The novel feels more smug than illuminating.

Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton

Positive The Washington Post The stakes couldn’t be higher ... It’s wholly ridiculous but consistently entertaining. In an author’s note, Penny acknowledges that after a career of writing crime novels, the idea of tackling a political thriller felt awfully intimidating. But Penny and Clinton demonstrate a sure hand at international intrigue and narrative pacing ... The real key to State of Terror, though, is its secret weapon: female friendship. Despite exploding buses and the grim prospect of nuclear annihilation, these pages are leavened by Ellen’s trusty sidekick, a retired schoolteacher based on a real-life friend of Clinton. International terrorists may have all the materials they need for a dirty bomb, but America has these two middle-aged women with a plan. Honestly, it’s not a fair fight.

Sarah Winman

Rave The Washington Post I’m not promising too much by claiming that Sarah Winman’s Still Life is a tonic for wanderlust and a cure for loneliness. It’s that rare, affectionate novel that makes one feel grateful to have been carried along. Unfurling with no more hurry than a Saturday night among old friends, the story celebrates the myriad ways love is expressed and families are formed ... That may sound suspiciously sentimental, but the joys of Still Life are cured in a furnace of tragedy ... Winman has perfected a style as comfortable and agile as the greetings and anecdotes these old friends have traded for years. She moves among them, licking up phrases and glances, catching the sharp savor of this smoky place so well you’ll taste it on your lips ... Under the spell of Winman’s narration, this seems entirely possible — and endlessly charming ... the novel never feels anything less than captivating because Winman creates such a flawless illusion of spontaneity, an atmosphere capable of sustaining these characters’ macabre wit, comedy of manners and poignant longing.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Rave The Washington Post I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness is an audaciously candid story about the crush of conflicted feelings that a baby inspires ... This late in the history of feminism that theme may sound too familiar, but Watkins’s book sparks the same electric jolt that The Awakening must have sent juicing through Kate Chopin’s readers in 1899. Here is a novel to hate and to love, to make you feel simultaneously disgusted and unloosed ... With such naked honesty, Watkins provides a perfect articulation of her mutinous thoughts, the unresolvable tension between what she feels and what she knows is expected of her ... The unusual method of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness — its illicit mingling of fact and fiction — serves as a surprisingly effective representation of what it’s like, for some women, to be handed a newborn ... It’s no coincidence that much of this story takes place in the American desert, a territory that burns away ornament and affectation. Here, on the terrain where she began, Claire sloughs off the skin of a life that doesn’t fit her and begins to discover one that might. It’s a painful transformation, but utterly captivating to witness.

Anthony Doerr

Pan The Washington Post ... exceedingly busy ... Think of it as a triptych love letter to the millions of readers who made his previous novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, a phenomenal bestseller ... Any one of these stories — except the sci-fi tale, which has a moldy Twilight Zone funk — might have made a compelling novel. But Doerr has not only packed them together, he’s put them in a blender and then laid out the bits in a great scramble, as though his own book were a textual puzzle as complicated as the ancient Diogenes codex ... Yes, libraries are awesome, and we all love books. But the artificial convolutedness of Cloud Cuckoo Land is not enough to confer any additional depth on Doerr’s simple, belabored theme, a theme that thumps through the novel insisting that every character kneel in reverent submission ... What’s worse, julienning these disparate plots saps them of their natural drama, and no amount of grandiose narration can pump that tension back in. The fall of Constantinople inches forward so deliberately you’ll think you’re dragging the sultan’s great cannon along the ground by yourself ... That problem becomes even more acute in the contemporary sections. While Zeno and the children are practicing their theatrical adaptation of Cloud Cuckoo Land, an eco-terrorist slips into the library carrying a homemade bomb equipped with a cellphone trigger. It’s a terrifying setup, but the scenes are laboriously sliced almost into individual breaths. Had I known the cellphone number, I would have dialed it myself.

Louise Erdrich

Rave Washington Post The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet ... Such is the mystery of Erdrich’s work, and The Sentence is among her most magical novels, switching tones with the felicity of a mockingbird ... The great arc of [the] first 30 pages — zany body-snatching! harrowing prison ordeal! opposites-attract rom-com! — could have provided all the material needed for a whole novel, but Erdrich has something else in mind for The Sentence: This is a ghost story — though not like any I’ve read before. The novel’s ectoplasm hovers between the realms of historical horror and cultural comedy ... Moving at its own peculiar rhythm with a scope that feels somehow both cloistered and expansive, The Sentence captures a traumatic year in the history of a nation struggling to appreciate its own diversity.

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The Washington Post Thank God for Jonathan Franzen ... With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, Crossroads is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a marked evolution, a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy ... Although Russ can be an old fool capable of absurd acts of self-delusion and pomposity, he’s spent decades considering his life in terms of his fidelity to God. Betraying his marriage vows and pursuing the affections of another woman in his congregation require equal degrees of physical and theological flexibility, which Franzen portrays with an exquisite combination of comedy and sympathy ... Initially, it’s hard to take the novel’s spiritual concerns seriously. Given his reputation for piercing characters on the mandibles of his superior intellect, a praying Franzen doesn’t feel much more sanctified than a praying mantis. But Crossroads quickly demonstrates that it isn’t — or isn’t just — a satire of suburban church culture or the hypocrisies of religious faith. It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne ... a story of spiritual crises with a narrative range more expansive than Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, which can sometimes feel liturgical in their arcane ruminations. Franzen is working closer to the practical theology and moral realism of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and In the Beauty of the Lilies. Grasping at reeds of grace and selfishness, the Hildebrandts demonstrate in the most poignant way how mortals stumble through life freighted with ideals that simultaneously mock and inspire them.

Richard Powers

Mixed The Washington Post ... poignant ... a cri de cœur ... a hauntingly intimate story ... The whole novel comes across in that wounded, confessional tone, the voice of a man so overwhelmed that he can barely contend with the ordinary diversions of life ... if those earlier novels sometimes felt like auditing a graduate course in neurology, Bewilderment holds forth in a shadowy forest of fables ... This mother-son spirit mingling may be incredibly lovely, but it’s also irreducibly creepy. And there’s a high risk of sentimentality here: the precious Messiah child mewing his little Whitmanesque profundities at us about the unity of all life. More problematic still is a corny story line in which Theo suspects that the lead neurologist might be carrying on some kind of adulterous affair with his dead wife’s brain print. All this neurological mumbo-jumbo creates a clammy atmosphere for what is, at its heart, a tender story about a child who responds to the plight of our planet just as passionately as we all should ... Unfortunately, Bewilderment goes out of its way to cast the tale of Robin’s miraculous evolution as a green version of Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon. That classic tear-jerker has taught generations of seventh-graders that the only thing worse than being intellectually disabled is getting smarter and then becoming intellectually disabled again. Powers’s thoroughly modern fable of environmental mourning hardly needs to dredge up that cringeworthy antecedent. It feels like just one more bit of fantastical melodrama that dilutes the potential power of Bewilderment.

Lauren Groff

Rave The Washington Post Now that we’ve endured almost two years of quarantine and social distancing, [Groff\'s] new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely ... We need a trusted guide, someone who can dramatize this remote period while making it somehow relevant to our own lives. Groff is that guide largely because she knows what to leave out. Indeed, it’s breathtaking how little ink she spills on filling in historical context ... Though Matrix is radically different from Groff’s masterpiece, Fates and Furies, it is, once again, the story of a woman redefining both the possibilities of her life and the bounds of her realm ... Although there are no clunky contemporary allusions in Matrix, it seems clear that Groff is using this ancient story as a way of reflecting on how women might survive and thrive in a culture increasingly violent and irrational.

Sheng Keyi

Positive The Washington Post ... it’s clear early on that Sheng is working in a tradition that includes George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood and other keen critics of human folly. But if Death Fugue nods to those predecessors, it’s fueled entirely by Sheng’s own elixir of genius and rage. The result is a relentless deconstruction of the Communist Party’s insistence that society can be perfected through enlightened centralized control ... mental confusion is effectively reflected in the structure of Death Fugue, which shifts time and place erratically. The tone, too, is weirdly chaotic, sliding from philosophical conversation to moments of grotesque absurdity. To be frank, it’s not an easy read, but in a crowded field of dystopian fiction, it’s destabilizing and finally enlightening in a wholly unique way ... This infinitely twisty novel couldn’t elude Chinese censors, but it still managed to slip out into the world and shout its scorching critique of the ongoing humiliation of the human spirit.

Ash Davidson

Rave The Washington Post To enter Damnation Spring, the debut novel by Ash Davidson, is to encounter all the wonder and terror of a great forest. Set amid the majestic redwoods of Northern California, the story runs as clear as the mountain streams that draw salmon back to spawn. Here is an author who knows and appreciates the land from every dimension — as nature, home, cathedral and cash ... This may be the most affecting aspect of Davidson’s novel, her tremendous empathy for the way a lost pregnancy, with all its mystery and guilt and sorrow, can fracture a good marriage ... a brilliantly balanced act of synchronous narration, never succumbing to the temptation of sentimentality or cuteness but always attendant to the child’s wonder ... But the greatest accomplishment of this absorbing novel is its capacious understanding of the competing values these folks hold. Nobody knows or loves the forest more than they do, but saving it could mean losing their jobs, their homes, their food — and Davidson is deeply sympathetic to their concerns, even their rage. In that way,Damnation Spring, offers that rare opportunity to become part of a small community and move among its members until their hopes and fears seem as real as our own. By the end, I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind.

Omar El Akkad

Rave The Washington Post ... riveting ... surprising ... vibrates between parable and particular. While the story is soaked in the sweat and blood of millions of wasted wanderers, it comes to life in the experiences of this one boy ... The simplicity of their friendship belies the novel’s true complexity — the way El Akkad has wrapped an adventure in a blanket of tragedy ... The scenes of their disastrous passage at sea are drawn with gorgeous and horrible strokes, sometimes Melvillean in their grandeur. In this way, the book functions on several levels at once, critiquing the West’s indifference while interrogating the refugees’ blended cynicism and naivete ... Nothing I’ve read before has given me such a visceral sense of the grisly predicament confronted by millions of people expelled from their homes by conflict and climate change. Though What Strange Paradise celebrates a few radical acts of compassion, it does so only by placing those moments of moral courage against a vast ocean of cruelty.

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Rave The Washington Post Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I’ll say, because The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America ... Jeffers has poured a lifetime of experience and research into this epic about the travails of a Black family. As any honest record of several centuries must, Jeffers’s story traverses a geography of unspeakable horror, but it eventually arrives at a place of hard-won peace ... One of the many marvels of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the protean quality of Jeffers’s voice. Sweeping back and forth across the years, her narration shifts nimbly to reflect the tenor of the times — from the shared legends of tribal people to the candid realism of the modern era ... You don’t read these phrases so much as hear them on the wind ... If the convoluted racial composition of these characters is a challenge to track, that’s the point: Despite the strict demarcations of color that reside in the White imagination, the society that evolves in these pages is peopled by a spectrum of hues ... Jeffers is particularly deft in the way she portrays Ailey coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, trying to chart her own way amid heavy guidance from her accomplished family ... The ultimate demonstration of Jeffers’s skill is that she effects that same profound impression on her readers. With the depth of its intelligence and the breadth of its vision, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is simply magnificent.

Katie Kitamura

Rave The Washington Post ...intense, unsettling ... Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange ... The incongruity between [the narrator\'s] domestic life and professional life is what makes Intimacies so fascinating ... Through parts of this story, Kitamura is exploring impossibly remote territory ... Her narrator’s experiences in the translation box raise some of the same questions as Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs ... But with her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable.

Colson Whitehead

Positive The Washington Post If the ghost of Chester Himes hovers over these pages, there’s nothing derivative about Whitehead’s storytelling. As usual, when he moves into a new genre, he keeps the bones but does his own decorating ... There’s nothing zany about Harlem Shuffle, but Whitehead has cast this novel with toughs like Chet the Vet, who flashes gold canines, and Miami Joe, who wears a high-waisted purple suit. Although they’re not harmless figures, they’re definitely comic/

Francine Prose

Positive The Washington Post Depending on the light, it’s either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story. But no matter how you turn it, The Vixen offers an illuminating reflection on the slippery nature of truth in America, then and now ... As a work of historical speculation, this is unlikely. But as a satire of the publishing industry, it’s hilarious ... You can practically hear Prose guffawing over these excerpts; they provide a wonderful excuse for this superb stylist to dress up like a literary tramp ... Ultimately, The Vixen is about guilt and innocence, but not the Rosenbergs\'.

Nathan Harris

Rave The Washington Post That this powerful book is Nathan Harris’s debut novel is remarkable; that he’s only 29 is miraculous. His prose is burnished with an antique patina that evokes the mid-19th century. And he explores this liminal moment in our history with extraordinary sensitivity to the range of responses from Black and White Americans contending with a revolutionary ideal of personhood ... All of this is drawn with gorgeous fidelity to these cautious characters, struggling to remake the world, or at least this little patch of it ... Harris stacks the timbers of this plot deliberately, and the moment a spark alights, the whole structure begins to burn hot ... What’s most impressive about Harris’s novel is how he attends to the lives of these peculiar people while capturing the tectonic tensions at play in the American South ... As an author, Harris eventually exercises a kind of fiery Old Testament justice, which is at once satisfying and terrifying. But if this is an era — and a genre — that has no room for encouragement, The Sweetness of Water is finally willing to carve out a little oasis of hope.

Nghi Vo

Rave The Washington Post Vo’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is completely ridiculous, and I love it with the passion of a thousand burning hearts ... Not only does Vo capture the timbre of Fitzgerald’s lush prose, but she follows the trajectory of the novel’s contrails into another realm ... sounds like some monstrous act of literary desecration like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doing the Charleston. But The Chosen and the Beautiful is much closer to Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel, The Accursed, her fiend-infused history of Princeton University ... Vo’s audacious amendments shift the register of The Great Gatsby, creating a story that galvanizes Fitzgerald’s classic and leaves a new one vibrating alongside. It may sound counterintuitive, but Vo’s introduction of witchcraft, necromancy and enchantment miraculously produces a more relevant novel than that poetic tale of a gaudy stalker and his closeted pimp that’s been passed off for decades as the ultimate interrogation of the American Dream. By inflating the story’s most fantastical implications, The Chosen and the Beautiful offers a timely consideration of class exploitation, sexual aggression and racial privilege ... Even the smallest enchanted details are tinged with infernal infection ... This novel’s wry wit and eerie eroticism are surely not for every mortal, but from the old bones of an American classic, Vo has conjured up something magically alive.

Christina McDowell

Positive Washington Post More interested in the bloodless crimes committed in country club dining rooms and at private school parties ... For its merciless humor and brazen exposure of salon secrets, \'The Cave Dwellers\' should join that small collection of essential Washington books. And don’t worry if you haven’t recently visited — or stormed — the Capitol. Between chapters, McDowell provides potted explanations of Embassy Row, Washington Life Magazine, Cafe Milano — everything you need to follow along this new-old vanity fair ... But if the melody of \'The Cave Dwellers\' is satire, its baseline is sorrow. That sometimes produces a strange clashing of tones, as though the author is still recovering from her own trauma while mocking her old peers.

James Patterson

Pan The Washington Post Readers expecting a sequel, though, will discover that this new novel offers an entirely different cast of characters. The President Is Missing gave us President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, a former Gulf War hero who battles a dastardly terrorist. But The President’s Daughter gives us President Matthew Keating, a former Navy SEAL hero who battles a dastardly terrorist. It’s a change as startling as the shift from tan to beige ... With this brave and monogamous hero, Clinton has once again revealed such a naked fantasy version of himself that you almost feel embarrassed for the man. And that’s pretty much where the revelations peter out. The publishers claim that Clinton has contributed information that could be provided only by a former president — or, I would add, by somebody who’s watched an episode of Homeland ... it would be unfair to say that there’s no suspense in The President’s Daughter. Again and again, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering, \'Can this story get any sillier?\' In that respect, this is a novel that continually defies expectations — all presented in chapters so short you could read one during a yawn ... Drawing inspiration from America’s most advanced missiles, the text of The President’s Daughter is capable of hitting multiple stereotypes simultaneously ... Save yourself.

Rivka Galchen

Rave The Washington Post The comedy that runs through Everyone Knows is a magical brew of absurdity and brutality. Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic ... There’s real sorcery here, but it arises only from the way Galchen fuses ancient and modern consciousness ... testimonies present a jaw-dropping catalogue of anxieties, irritations and non sequiturs—all the various ways human beings can make themselves believe whatever they must to avoid acknowledging that they’re afraid, that they’re jealous, that they can’t control their lives. Late in the novel, all the most bizarre accusations are enumerated in a list that could pass for Renaissance Twitter ... The fate of Kepler’s mother is a matter of historical record, but Galchen arrives at something the facts can’t catch: The exhaustion, the bone-weariness of fighting such misogyny year after year. It’s enough to break a weaker person.

Susan Choi

Mixed The Washington Post Who could possibly trace another erotic tension or envious impulse through the groves of academe? Answer: Susan Choi. She’s never sounded smarter or wittier ... by the force of her stylistic virtuosity and psychological precision, Choi gives this worn setup all the nubile energy of a new school year ... a hilarious parody of self-righteous feminism and political correctness ... Choi’s great triumph here is her ability to create a voice that enacts Regina’s cluelessness while simultaneously critiquing her. She’s the embodiment of that uniquely modern educational disaster: the brilliant student who knows nothing ... Choi tries—and largely succeeds—to convey the overwhelming sensation of Regina’s first experience with \'lovemaking’s arduous toil.\' Sometimes, that’s thrilling. Sometimes, it involves effusing lines that might catch the attention of the judges for the Bad Sex Award ... The impossible highs of youthful passion, the inevitable despair of asymmetrical devotion, and especially the withering bickering between two lovers of such wildly different levels of maturity—it’s all here in engorged Technicolor. What makes this so delicious, though, is Choi’s relentless style, the unflagging force of her scrutiny. She spins Regina’s voice into a breathless parody of Jamesean analysis ... few other writers alive today make their sentences work so hard ... Although...I’ve got to say that I found the 80-page coda of My Education distractingly poor ... this conclusion wastes the focused energy that the body of the novel generates. It thrusts a side character awkwardly into the center of the plot and introduces new characters whom we can’t care about. Worse, this novella-length section revolves around a series of quickly developed, even zany events that lack the necessary combination of wit and plausibility.

Sam Riviere

Positive The Washington Post Dead Souls, by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down. But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: Dead Souls is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry ... This is not a negative review. Indeed, I think Dead Souls is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell.

Jim Shepard

Mixed The Washington Post ... is best when it draws us into these three lives reshaped by a mysterious disease ... Shepard is peerless when it comes to the way children experience trauma. The sections that describe Aleq scampering around Ilimanaq and then hermetically sealed in a biosafety lab are harrowing and heartbreaking ... overall, Phase Six is an odd act of genetic manipulation that results in what might be called Apocalypse Minimalism. Beautifully drawn episodes of private anguish are interrupted by quick-cut scenes and potted explanations of the way viruses and bacteria kill. You can spot strains of Michael Crichton in these thoughtful pages like panther paws grafted onto a lab-created sheep. That could satisfy fans of cinematic thrillers and literary fiction, but I suspect the clash of tones and approaches will, instead, disappoint both audiences. There simply isn’t room here to accommodate what this novel wants to do. The thriller elements feel familiar and undercooked; the personal stories are rushed and cramped ... The essential problem, though, may be one of motive. They mean well, of course, but pandemic apocalypses are the most schoolmarmish of all apocalypses. Asteroids, vampires, zombies — these scourges lunge at us from out of nowhere. It’s not our fault! A virus that wipes out humanity, though, could have been avoided if only we’d protected the environment, monitored transboundary animal infections and nurtured global coordination ... Those are great points for a persuasive op-ed, but the nuance of Phase Six sometimes gets rubbed away by such declarations and its cursory re-creation of our recent history. The best apocalyptic fiction doesn’t convince; it inspires.

Kristen Arnett

Rave The Washington Post ... the perfect baby shower gift for someone you hate. Absolutely captivating and scathingly frank, it’s a story of motherhood stripped of every ribbon of sentimentality. Arnett conjures up the disturbing mixture of devotion and alienation endured by anyone raising a child they don’t understand, don’t even like ... Arnett’s sympathetic attention to the cascading flow of Sammy’s depression is heartbreaking. But between every chapter, the novel offers one-page moments, each from a different minor character’s point of view. It’s just a fleeting switch in perspective, easy to discount, but oddly base-shifting if you pay attention. Again and again, we’re reminded that Sammie’s hermetically sealed understanding of her dismal situation is not necessarily complete—or even correct ... strangely shrewd and tender ... Arnett is that rare, brave writer willing to articulate the darkest thoughts even the best parents entertain while trudging along through the most challenging job in the world.

Joan Silber

Rave The Washington Post Secrets of Happiness looks like a series of linked stories, but it’s more like a roulette wheel in print: Each chapter spins to some other character in a large circle of possibilities. It takes only a moment to get your bearings, and the disappointment of leaving one narrator behind is instantly replaced by the delight of meeting a new one ... These stories unfurl with such verbal verisimilitude that they’re like late-night phone calls from old friends. Every imperative page trips along with the wry wisdom of ordinary speech — the illusion of artlessness that only the most artful writers can create ... One senses throughout this novel that Silber knows something crucial about the secrets of happiness.

Maggie Shipstead

Rave The Washington Post ... another surprising act of reinvention: a soaring work of historical fiction about a \'lady pilot\' in the mid-20th century. Indeed, so convincingly does Shipstead stitch her fictional heroine into the daring flight paths of early aviators that you’ll be convinced that you remember the tragic day her plane disappeared ... Shipstead creates this catastrophe in all its watery terror, but what’s even more impressive is the way she sets up these characters so that we feel the full weight of the fears and passions pulling on them as the boat burns and sinks. Although we’ll never see some of these people again, the author’s careful investment in them sets down a thicket of secrets and obligations that will play out over the coming decades ... a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. It’s also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century ... A novel that switches between two different periods and tones confronts the essential challenge of rendering both competing story lines engaging, and Great Circle struggles to make that case. Hollywood, with all its hypocrisy and excess, may be a fat target, but it’s also a tattered one, and Shipstead has far more success bringing 1914 to life than 2014. The extraordinary realism of Marian’s chapters can make the broad strokes of Hadley’s sections feel light in comparison ... But fortunately, when Hadley gets serious about discovering the real story of Marian, the novel’s parallel stories begin to resonate with each other in interesting ways. Though separated by decades, the aviator and the actress are both powerful women, rising from devastating tragedies to forge their own way ... Whether you’re planning a trip or settling in for a staycation, Great Circle is my top recommendation for this summer.

Sanjena Sathian

Rave The Washington Post ... a work of 24-karat genius. This remarkable debut novel melts down striving immigrant tales, Old West mythology and even madcap thrillers to produce an invaluable new alloy of American literature ... Charting the route that generations of Indian immigrants have taken to these shores, Sathian locates the precarious nexus of pride and anxiety where so many newcomers reside ... in the process, she plumbs the universal challenge of satisfying the hunger for more — more money, more prestige, more time — an obsession that would make any of us strangers to ourselves ... Sathian creates that cul-de-sac with a wry and loving eye — a kind of South Asian version of The Wonder Years, with Neil’s awkward antics narrated by his older self ... Sathian’s portrait of this mania is tempered with enough tenderness to make it witty but never bitter ... Sathian’s effervescent social satire breaks the bonds of ordinary reality and rises to another level ... the real miracle here is the way Sathian melds that ancient magic to the contours of her otherwise natural story of contemporary life. Like Aimee Bender, Karen Russell and Colson Whitehead, she’s working in a liminal realm where the laws of science aren’t suspended so much as stretched ... In a dazzling demonstration of Sathian’s range, the book’s second half jumps a decade later, beyond the tragedy of Neil’s adolescence to the smoldering wreckage of his adulthood. It’s a jarring transition — and meant to be ... With Neil’s struggle to find a usable past and a viable future, Sathian has created a funny, compassionate, tragic novel of astonishing cultural richness. She understands the contradictory, sometimes deadly demands that second-generation young people face, but she commands the narrative power to demonstrate that this struggle is central rather than merely tangential to the American experience. The result is a novel of Indian magic and modern technology, a parody of New World ambition and an elegy of assimilation. Looking up from the pages of this sparkling debut, I experienced something like the thrill the luckiest 49ers must have felt: Gold! Gold! Gold!

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Rave The Washington Post Good Company is a sweeter novel [than The Nest], gentler all around, though the stakes are higher than the disappointments of a few middle-aged leeches ... For most readers...Good Company will resonate as a story about those rare choices that define life by cleanly dividing it into Before and After ... It’s a moment caught in time, but its meaning is informed by everything around it ... this novel plays with time in a similarly complex way, moving back into the history of a small group to bring everything to bear on the perfectly staged image of \'the couple everyone wanted to be\' ... There are no villains in Good Company, which only makes the theme of betrayal more poignant—and more realistic ... Sweeney’s effectiveness as a novelist stems from her protean sympathy, her ability to move among these characters and capture each one’s feelings without judgment ... we get a poignant, sometimes comic sense of the way we each experience the same events, the same decisions, the same mistakes.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Mixed The Washington Post ... strikes a victory for female representation ... [Lahiri] wrote Whereabouts in Italian and then translated it into English, which contributes to its sheen of deliberateness and distance ... Although Whereabouts is not a long novel, it offers plenty of time to kill. In place of a traditional plot, we’re given vignettes of quiet despair or anecdotes of minor irritation all distilled into a syrup of poisonous self-absorption. At times, I was tempted to hear a note of parody in the narrator’s relentless melancholy ... Depression is a perfectly legitimate subject for fiction, of course, and God knows it’s an exigent aspect of modern life. But the insular nature of the condition makes it extraordinarily difficult to render in an emotionally compelling way. The late, great Anita Brookner managed to pull off that feat to haunting effect, but in Whereabouts, descriptions of chilled despair have been so aggressively honed that there’s little for us to hang on to but the sighs.

Claire Thomas

Rave The Washington Post Australian writer Claire Thomas has just published The Performance, a curious novel about three women watching Happy Days. It begins moments before the lights go down in the theater. Some 228 pages later, members of the audience file out to the parking lot. The end. Thank you for coming. As a plot, that sounds like Beckett squared. The fact that The Performance works at all is noteworthy; that it’s engaging and evocative is something of a miracle ... Although, in one sense, nothing \'happens\' in this novel, there’s something uniquely revealing about it ... It feels oddly intimate ... The structure of The Performance forces Thomas to create movement even while her characters are sitting stock still, but she rises to the challenge ... The Performance is an insightful response to Beckett’s 60-year-old classic and a thoughtful reflection on what’s burying women in the modern age.

Russell Banks

Rave The Washington Post Drawing at times on the broad outlines of his own life, Banks presents the story of a man tearing through the affections of others in search of a sense of purpose commensurate with his ego. In many ways, this is a well-worn story in America and American literature — the facile White male darting from responsibilities he considers too restrictive and too beneath him ... But Banks has embedded that self-indulgent tragedy in the larger context of an anguished confession ... Without ever collapsing into nonsense, it’s a remarkably fluid use of prose to represent the experience of delirium while wrestling to the final moments with the challenge of absolution ... in this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mixed The Washington Post If you read The Sympathizer, you’ll immediately recognize this ironic and endlessly conflicted voice. If you haven’t read The Sympathizer, you’ll be hopelessly lost, so don’t even think of jumping in here. The setting and action of this second book are different, but The Committed is so dependent on earlier relationships and plot details that these two novels are more like volumes of the same continuing story ... Just as The Sympathizer transformed the hulk of an old spy novel, The Committed does the same with a tale of noir crime ... \'The French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy,\' the narrator says, \'that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand.\' The same hurdle will challenge American readers of The Committed, which is heavily fortified with philosophical rumination. In this novel, even the whorehouse bouncer reads Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. If the man’s size doesn’t scare you away from the pleasures within, his bookshelf might.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Rave The Washington Post Readers still reeling from his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go will find here a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements ... There’s a Jamesian quality to the searching, deliberate portrayal of life in Josie’s remote house. Like Klara, Ishiguro attends closely to the way apparently innocuous conversations shift, the way joy drains from a frozen smile. This is a home recovering from grief and bracing for more ... Beyond the dark enchantment of this peaceful house, Ishiguro suggests a world radically transformed. Another author would have been eager to elaborate on the dystopian features of the not-too-distant era, but Ishiguro always implies, never details. One reads Ishiguro in a defensive crouch, afraid to have our worst suspicions confirmed ... That’s the real power of this novel: Ishiguro’s ability to embrace a whole web of moral concerns about how we navigate technological advancements, environmental degradation and economic challenges even while dealing with the unalterable fact that we still die ... Ishiguro has perfectly calibrated Klara’s uncanny tone, with a personality just warm enough and alien enough to feel like the Artificial Friend we all need ... Ishiguro brings to this poignant subgenre a uniquely elegant style and flawless control of dramatic pacing.

Ethan Hawke

Rave The Washington Post Finally, a novel about the travails of a successful White guy! What could pull the heartstrings of our afflicted nation tighter than a story of brief, emotional setback suffered by a handsome movie star? Ethan Hawke has got a lot of nerve. But he’s also got a lot of talent ... what’s most irritating about A Bright Ray of Darkness is that it’s really good. If you can ignore the author’s motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you’ll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight ... I want to be immune to Hawke’s charms, but I admit it: He’s written a witty, wise and heartfelt novel about a spoiled young man growing up and becoming, haltingly, a better person. A Bright Ray of Darkness is a deeply hopeful story about the possibility of rising above one’s narcissism. Bravo.

Kristin Hannah

Pan The Washington Post ... the echoes of Steinbeck’s classic are sometimes so strong that I expected to see the Joads’ Hudson Super Six chugging along the road ... In fact, despite the strong echoes to The Grapes of Wrath, Hannah may be working closer to 19th-century melodrama. The heroines of The Four Winds are purely heroic; its villains wholly evil. Hannah never risks ambiguity; her pages are 100 percent irony-free. And she moves with a relentless pace. Her prose, so ordinary line by line, nevertheless accumulates into scenes that rush from one emergency to the next—starving! beating! flooding!—pausing only for respites of sentimentality ... the snob in me wonders what this indefatigable author could produce if she endured a little tougher editorial criticism and gave herself a little more time. (She’s published 24 novels in 30 years.) But that would mean fiddling with the well-oiled machine that reliably produces such marketable passion. I confess, I spent too long rolling my eyes at the flat style, the shiny characters and the clunky polemics of The Four Winds before finally giving in and snuffling, \'I’m not crying—you’re crying!\'

Patricia Lockwood

Rave The Washington Post ... brilliant ... The short sections that pour across these pages — most not much longer than a couple of tweets — offer a tour of our collective consciousness, the great cacophony of images and voices that catch the virtual world’s attention ... You can hear in these moments Lockwood’s experience as a poet. She’s a master of startling concision when highlighting the absurdities we’ve grown too lazy to notice ... Despite her novel’s wit, there’s something almost brutal about the relentless way Lockwood draws us, eyes pried open, through the social media morass we’ve grown accustomed to: Steeped in the unfiltered flow of manicure advice, torture videos, ferret selfies, traffic accidents, birthday-cake disasters and tornado sightings, we float in a state of blasé disregard and treacly sentimentality, knowing everything and nothing ... the story’s second half may be too much for some readers. It’s a vertiginous experience, gorgeously rendered but utterly devastating. I rattled around the house for days afterwards, shattered but grateful for the reminder that the ephemeral world we’ve constructed online is a shadow compared to the pain and affection we’re blessed to experience in real life.

Avni Doshi

Rave The Washington Post Avni Doshi’s debut novel has cut a slow but inexorable path around the world, dazzling readers in country after country ... And now, trailing clouds of international praise, it has finally arrived in the United States. Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication. It is also the world’s worst Mother’s Day present ... This is a novel stained with all manner of fluids, excretions and smells, and the narrator fights an almost constant sense of nausea. But if Burnt Sugar is often as unpleasant as a sinus infection, it’s just as hard to shake off ... \'Burnt Sugar\' perfectly captures this story’s complex flavor, the taste of something sweet transformed into something deep and melancholy. I don’t mean to scare you away; only to make sure you know what you’re getting into. This is, among other things, a challenging interrogation of the presumption that a book’s protagonist should be likable. Where can our sympathies find purchase with this woman who is devoted to her mother and yet filled with rage toward her? Our simultaneous revulsion and attraction stems, I suspect, from the nagging suspicion that Antara is dragging us toward a species of candor that’s terrifying.

Lauren Oyler

Rave The Washington Post ... [a] witty novel that captures a certain species of Internet life better than any other book I’ve read. A century ago New York City got Edith Wharton; now the World Wide Web gets Lauren Oyler. We’re even ... That disarming candor extends throughout the novel, which is delivered in the cool, confidential tone of a narrator who anticipates every charge against her. Each scathing criticism she delivers twists into a mortifying admission ... isn’t just a comedy of manners, it’s a literary snake that eats its own tail ... Oyler seems to have gathered the despairing 3 a.m. thoughts of a whole class of media professionals and published them ... There is a plot here, though it’s somewhat incidental to the book’s success, which rests on the narrator’s deadpan skewering of everything from podcasts to Instagram feminism to online dating. Fake Accounts is particularly sharp when it comes to the trite, self-aggrandizing liberalism that arose along with Donald Trump ... Among the tiny group of people concerned with such things, Oyler is known as a fearsome literary critic, but Fake Accounts should bring her the vastly larger audience she deserves.

Jonathan Franzen

Positive The Washington Post Franzen once again begins with a family, but his ravenous intellect strides the globe, drawing us through a collection of cleverly connected plots infused with Major Issues of the Day ... Everybody harbors secrets: shameful, disgusting, sometimes deadly secrets. If that adolescent revelation gets a bit too much emphasis in these pages, at least it’s smartly considered and reconsidered in the seven distinct but connected sections that make up the book ... Purity demonstrates Franzen’s ingenious plotting, his ability to steer the chaos of real life toward moments that feel utterly surprising yet inevitable ... one hears Franzen’s well-known complaints about the tyranny of the Web and the inanity of social media, but these criticisms are so effectively integrated into the mind of this hypocritical Internet warrior [character] that the novel never dissolves into a cranky essay ... almost 600 pages requires an extraordinarily engaging style, and in Purity Franzen writes with a perfectly balanced fluency that has sometimes eluded him in the past. He’s grown more transparent as a narrator, still brilliant and endlessly allusive, but less nervous about mugging for attention. And when he switches—only once—to narrate a section in the voice of one of his characters, it sounds wholly authentic ... if Purity isn’t as much fun as The Corrections, it’s free of the self-indulgence that sometimes marred that fantastic novel.

Mateo Askaripour

Rave The Washington Post ... irresistible ... marks the launch of an effervescent new career ... alternately sly and sweet, a work of cultural criticism that laments and celebrates the power of money ... Depending on the light, the magical sheen of Askaripour’s prose can make those bits of homespun advice look wholly sincere or wickedly parodic ... what makes Black Buck rise above other corporate satires is Askaripour’s dexterous treatment of race in the modern workplace ... This is satire richly fertilized with Trumpist anxiety. Darren — Buck — confronts fragility so finely attuned that even to suggest the existence of racism incites a White backlash of racist attacks cloaked in sententious outrage. It’s a brilliant sendup of the way some privileged people respond to the gentlest, most practical efforts to combat discrimination ... But don’t imagine you’ve got Askaripour all figured out. The syncopated tone of Black Buck keeps the story constantly shifting. In these pages, even cringe-inducing moments can suddenly slip into wise counsel or heartfelt confession. No matter how lacerating this vision of systemic racism is, Darren seems buoyed by a generous spirit, a well of joy that feels downright miraculous.

Anna North

Rave The Washington Post \"...stirs up the western with a provocative blend of alt-history and feminist consciousness. The result is a thrilling tale eerily familiar but utterly transformed ... There’s nothing formulaic or dogmatic about North’s approach, but she has cleverly repurposed the worn elements of 19th-century mythology to explore the position of childless women. The shame and sorrow these young women suffer in the 1890s is not so different from what women trying to get pregnant — or end a pregnancy — endure in our own supposedly enlightened era ... In North’s galloping prose, it’s a fantastically cinematic adventure that turns the sexual politics of the Old West inside out. But if this is a legendary story, it’s a legend with its own idiosyncratic and highly satisfying ending.\

Michael Farris Smith

Mixed The Washington Post Smith, the author of several Southern Gothic novels, is a talented writer who approaches Fitzgerald’s work with reverence and close attention to detail. Anyone who knows The Great Gatsby will hear echoes of that book’s luxurious melancholy ... Creating a worthy homage to Fitzgerald’s finest novel is a remarkable accomplishment, and Smith’s explanation of Nick’s detached personality makes perfect sense. It feels, though, more like confirmation than expansion of the original story. If Smith does no violence to The Great Gatsby, he also breaks open little space for himself ... as polite and well-behaved as Nick Carraway himself ... What develops offers a macabre counterpoint to The Great Gatsby. The mansions of Long Island have been replaced by the saloons of New Orleans ... Withdraw Nick’s perspective and the lurid plot sticks out of the water like a shipwreck at low tide. By denying Nick that crucial role and pushing him aside, Smith asks that we become invested in a set of noir caricatures and their lurid spat simply for its own sake.

Michelle Gallen

Rave The Washington Post [An] immensely lovable debut novel ... I read most of Gallen’s mournful comedy aloud to my wife, and even with my mangled Irish brogue, we loved it ... The listicle structure is surprisingly expansive in Gallen’s hands. What at first feels artificial to us gradually proves its function as Majella’s effort to systematize the chaos swirling around her ... They’re all hilariously odd and desperately tragic — the razor’s edge on which Big Girl, Small Town is balanced. Because behind the persistent comedy of this quirky village, the ground is damp with blood ... But if Majella’s spoken range is curtailed, her interior range is vast and illuminated by a prose style at once accessible and stippled with strangeness ... It’s the kind of magic you’ll feel lucky to find.

Paulo Coelho

Mixed The Washington Post The setting of The Archer is the world of parables that we might think of as Meaningville, an abstract realm with muted colors and a fuzzy periphery signaling Lessons are about to be unfurled ... The superficiality of The Archer is exacerbated by its deadening style ... My only relief came from moments of unintended humor ... You may think I’m being too hard on this slim volume, but I’ve started to worry that Coelho and his ilk aren’t nearly as harmless as we imagine ... Critics are advised not to be so snobby or to take solace in the assumption that these books will eventually lead readers to more substantive works. But what if, instead, trite literature dulls the senses and makes one less able to appreciate quality, complexity, real insight? ... Fortune cookies bound into lovely little books won’t get us through the dark night of the soul.

Jonas Lüscher, tr. Tess Lewis

Positive The Washington Post Some books are a hard sell. Some are well nigh impossible to recommend. And then there’s Jonas Lüscher’s Kraft. It’s an exceedingly cerebral comic novel about Leibnizian optimism translated from the German ... This is the kind of review in which I have to say things like Kraft is the best novel about theodicy I’ve read all year! ... the perspective is foreign, but the setting familiar ... Writer’s block is painful to endure, harder to write about and even harder to read about. But anyone who’s stared at a blank screen while an important deadline creeps closer will laugh nervously at Kraft’s plight ... Lüscher’s style, a hybrid of intellectual posturing and absurd slapstick, is sharply translated by Tess Lewis, who captures Kraft’s pomposity and the indefatigable march of German syntax ... this peculiar book is not for everyone. The philosophical allusions present a hurdle. But a greater one may be the references to late-20th-century European politics, which will challenge American readers who can’t quickly distinguish the economic policies of Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt...Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Kraft, it sometimes felt like the humor was taking place in an adjacent room that excluded me ... But for all its intellectual scaffolding, “Kraft” is essentially the story of a man realizing what a jerk he’s been. Whether that’s a comedy or a tragedy is the abiding suspense of this plot. I’m not optimistic that Lüscher’s satire of neoliberalism will attract a large audience in America, but if Kraft finds the right readers, the laughter will trickle down, right?

Simon Han

Rave The Washington Post [D]esperation pervades every page of Simon Han’s debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened. ... What’s most fascinating about Nights When Nothing Happened is the way Han, who was born in China and raised in Texas, explores how anxiety thwarts the archetypal experience of immigrant success. In his telling, the American Dream is disrupted by nightmares that a good job and a house in the suburbs can’t quell ... Han builds the tension in this story slowly, but he builds it with exquisite care, and it’s entirely worth the investment ... Physical attacks, name-calling, job discrimination — such dramatic expressions of prejudice naturally draw our attention, but Nights When Nothing Happened captures a more insidious breed of racism: an atmosphere of White wariness that the Chengs must constantly navigate ... Han’s expansive sympathy and twilight lyricism make Nights When Nothing Happened a poignant study of the immigrant experience. This is an author who understands on a profound level the way past trauma interacts with the pressures of assimilation to disrupt a good night’s sleep, even a life.

Jonathan Lethem

Positive The Washington Post \'Some say the world will end in fire,\' Robert Frost wrote, \'Some say in ice.\' But in this era of terrifying dystopias, Jonathan Lethem imagines a kinder, gentler apocalypse ... In Lethem’s new novel, The Arrest, all technology simply grinds to a halt ... but without crime or crisis, The Arrest is the sort of cruelty-free dystopia you might pick up at Whole Foods ... From this eccentric premise, the plot of The Arrest settles quickly into an odd stasis, sustained only by the cerebral wit of Lethem’s voice ... It’s clever but not funny; a satire that never pricks its target. And there’s something frustratingly elliptical about this plot, as though pages may have fallen out on the way to the binder ... In the end, Lethem designs a vast contraption to bring this apocalyptic plot to a mini-climax, but what’s at stake remains oblique. So, if you want a post-apocalyptic story that thwarts the expectations of the dystopian genre, here it is — with a slice of artisanal cheese. This is the way the novel ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Jess Walter

Rave The Washington Post In 2012, Jess Walter’s breakout bestseller, Beautiful Ruins, brought movieland hilariously and brilliantly to life ... But now, with his new novel, The Cold Millions, Walter attempts to bring that same verve to the pitiless realm of Spokane, Wash., in 1909 ... The Cold Millions is a work of irresistible characters, harrowing adventures and rip-roaring fun ... Walter’s new tragicomedy about this moment of American history is one of the most captivating novels of the year.

emily m. danforth

Rave The Washington Post [A] shapeshifting novel ... A hot amalgamation of gothic horror and Hollywood satire, it’s draped with death but bursting with life ... Indeed, Plain Bad Heroines may be the only novel I know that should come with an EpiPen. What makes all this so much fun is Danforth’s deliciously ghoulish voice, a kind of Victorian Gossip Girl ... The supernatural elements grow across these pages as slowly — and ominously — as black mold ... It stings — but oh, the sensation is exquisite.

Don Delillo

Pan The Washington Post \"The kindest response to Don DeLillo’s new novel may be suggested by its title ... The Silence is one of DeLillo’s short, curious novels, possibly the shortest and the curiousest. Harper’s recently published an excerpt, which may have tempted you to hope that something more substantial lies in the book itself. It does not ... Our dangerous reliance on technology is a well-trod concern—trod brilliantly, in fact, by DeLillo’s own earlier novels. In these latter days, it’s not possible to articulate something profound about society’s fragility by striking a series of eccentric affectations. After The Road, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven and other unnerving dystopias, The Silence feels like Apocalypse Lite for people who don’t want to get their hands dirty.\

Scott O'Connor

Rave The Washington Post ... a sophisticated thriller ... O’Connor has constructed the plot of Zero Zone as a kaleidoscope, frequently shattering the chronology of events and remixing the parts. That may sound baffling, but it’s compellingly done — a constant process of filling in context and meaning, solving some mysteries and raising others ... One of the challenges of writing fiction about a great artist is how to convincingly create the presence of artistic genius. For instance, if the novel is about a brilliant poet, sooner or later we’ll want to read some immortal verse. If, as in this case, the central character is a famous installation artist, we need to see some of those astonishing sites. Fortunately, O’Connor meets that burden. He provides alluring descriptions of Jess’s famous pieces ... I wish O’Connor hadn’t felt it necessary to give Tanner a gruesome skin disease that covers his entire body. At its best, that \'ugly equals evil\' motif is a remnant of cheap fairy-tale propaganda. At its worst, it’s a pernicious moral equation that perpetuates prejudice against people with disfiguring conditions ... Aside from that misstep, though, Zero Zone is an engaging reflection on the function of art and the responsibilities of the artist. Following these characters along their circuitous routes offers a rare chance to consider the risks that great creators take when they try to inspire us to action — but not too much.

Bryan Washington

Rave The Washington Post Memorial is a profoundly sensitive story about the rough boundaries of love in a multicultural society. In fact, no other novel I’ve read this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America. The range of cultures, races, generations and sexual identities contending with one another in these pages is not a woke argument; it’s the nature of modern family life fully realized ... Memorial unfolds as a series of isolated moments, many only a page long, some merely a single line. Told first from Ben’s perspective and then from Mike’s, these moments continually blend past and present, enacting each narrator’s confession as a kind of prose poem ... Washington inhabits these two men so naturally that the sophistication of this form is rendered entirely invisible, and their narratives unspool as spontaneously and clearly as late-night conversation ... In a disposable society, Memorial is a testament to the permanence of filial connections, a clear-eyed acknowledgment that our relatives don’t always behave nicely, but they’re with us for life.

Susanna Clarke

Rave The Washington Post We believers have waited a long time for a second novel from Clarke, and so it’s especially exciting to see that none of her enchantment has worn off—it’s evolved. Reading her lithe new book, Piranesi, feels like finding a copy of Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler in the back of C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe ... The hypnotic quality of Piranesi stems largely from how majestically Clarke conjures up this surreal House ... an unusually fragile mystery—as delicate as the slender fingers and wispy petals on the marble statues that fill the House. Clarke’s power certainly extends beyond mere suspense, but her story relies on the steady accretion of apprehension that finally gives way to a base-shifting revelation. Until you read the book yourself, keep your wand drawn to ward off the summaries of enthusiastic fans and clumsy reviewers. I promise to tread carefully here ... Perhaps Clarke’s cleverest move in this infinitely clever novel is the way she critiques our obliterating efforts to extract deeper meaning and greater value from everything in our world ... This is the abiding magic of Clarke’s novel: We’re as likely to pity Piranesi for his cheerful acceptance of imprisonment as we are to envy him for his ready appreciation of the world as he finds it. Clarke conceived of this story long before the coronavirus pandemic, but tragedy has made Piranesi resonate with a planet in quarantine. To abide in these pages is to find oneself happily detained in awe.

Marilynne Robinson

Mixed The Washington Post ... particularly dependent on those previous books. If you’re tempted to read them out of order, be warned...Jack rests on what came before, and its poignancy arises from what we know lies ahead for these characters ... ferociously restrained ... Jack is a distinctly Robinsonian bum: genteel to the point of parody and well-versed in the conundrums of 16th-century theology ... It’s Della’s ability to see through Jack’s persona that saves him — and this novel — from pretentiousness ... I only wish we got to see more of that fire in this novel. Robinson remains so focused on Jack’s ruminations that whatever Della may be thinking by loving him back is exalted as an ontological fact beyond scrutiny. Sweet as their affection for each other is, the story’s asymmetrical insight into their motives makes Della feel flat. That’s particularly surprising since a peripheral character watching out for her interests is more fully drawn, more conflicted by the complicated rules of success in a racist society ... But Jack is wholly Jack’s story. And Robinson cradles his love for Della with the tenderness of a gracious creator.

Ayad Akhtar

Rave The Washington Post ... remarkable ... a phenomenal coalescence of memoir, fiction, history and cultural analysis ... One of the most fascinating themes of this tour de force is the sustained tension between memoir and invention that runs through any creative person’s life ... Akhtar’s portrait of the artist as a young Muslim exposes both his vanity and his capacity for obsequiousness, particularly around wealthy people ... Everywhere one can hear Akhtar’s award-winning ear for dialogue that conveys the unexpected rhythms of conversation and drama. But what’s surprising is his equally engaging mode as a lecturer. Personal episodes mingle effectively with engaging disquisitions on, say, the dilution of antitrust law ... paradox runs like a wire through this book, which so poignantly expresses the loneliness of pining for one’s own homeland.

Yaa Gyasi

Rave The Washington Post Homegoing wasn’t beginner’s luck. Gyasi’s new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is a book of blazing brilliance. What’s more, it’s entirely unlike Homegoing ...still and ruminative — a novel of profound scientific and spiritual reflection that recalls the works of Richard Powers and Marilynne Robinson ... Not that there’s anything derivative about this story. Indeed, Gyasi’s ability to interrogate medical and religious issues in the context of America’s fraught racial environment makes her one of the most enlightening novelists writing today ... A double helix of wisdom and rage twists through the quiet lines of this novel ... remarkable.

Darin Strauss

Rave The Washington Post Such reverie is more intoxicating than a tall glass of Vitameatavegamin ... if you want a biography of the comedian, look elsewhere ... So much of what The Queen of Tuesday describes hews to the general outlines of our cultural memory that it’s easy to elide Strauss’s creative license, but the alterations start right on the title page: I Love Lucy ran on Mondays — not Tuesdays ... if you give yourself over to his premise, The Queen of Tuesday is a striking exploration of how fame confounds the lives of prominent and obscure people ... Strauss conjures up those heady days of I Love Lucy with such vibrancy that it’s impossible not to hope that everything might work out after all ... what makes The Queen of Tuesday so peculiar and fascinating is the story that Strauss weaves through it about his grandfather, Izzy ... impossibly daring ... tragic and poignant.

Jennifer Hofmann

Positive The Washington Post After months of nerve-racking social isolation and a gazillion unhinged tweets from President Trump, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures may sound like the last book you want to read right now. But in this era of death and gaslighting, there’s something cathartic about Jennifer Hofmann’s debut novel. She’s created a story that John le Carré might have written for The Twilight Zone, the tale of a spy who comes in from the cold while his world turns inside out ... Hofmann, who lives in Berlin, writes with a wit so dry that it allows her to retain complete deniability. She has constructed this story as a quest, but the path forward feels like descending stairs in an Escher drawing ... It’s not easy to make such a bureaucratic monster sympathetic, but by plumbing Zeiger’s existential crisis, Hofmann manages to reach his essential humanity ... Like Marisha Pessl and Rivka Galchen, Hofmann knows how to create intricate illusions of certainty in the midst of derangement. The result is a rare novel that encourages you to read as though your sanity depends on it — just a little further, just a little faster. It’s an unsettling simulation of living in a state that denies basic facts and perpetuates the most inane claims. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one wishes this mind-set didn’t feel quite so familiar.

Akwaeke Emezi

Positive The Washington Post Vivek’s death is emphasized so often that it acquires an odd kind of mystery, like the blurry edges of a legend. Although the presence of spiritual forces is muted in The Death of Vivek Oji, the possibility of ancestral reincarnation frames the story in tantalizing ways ... The Death of Vivek Oji swirls around incidents, before and after Vivek’s passing, not so much rising toward its climax as gradually accruing power. Again and again, we learn of events long before we understand their cause or significance. Such a presentation could easily become a muddle, but Emezi is a remarkably assured and graceful guide through this family’s calamity of silence ... There’s just no way to finish this powerful novel and not feel more deeply than ever the ghastly consequences of intolerance. But in these intense pages of tightly coiled desire and dread, Emezi has once again encouraged us to embrace a fuller spectrum of human experience.

Christopher Buckley

Rave The Washington Post ... an outrageously funny novel equal to the absurdity roiling Washington ... There’s much to choose from here, but perhaps the funniest aspect of Make Russia Great Again is how calmly Herb conveys the craziness of the Trump administration. With the unruffled decorum of a five-star resort manager, he describes all the complicated maneuvers needed to entertain a president who does not read, who cannot concentrate for more than a few minutes and who will not listen to anything but soliloquies comparing him to \'Napoleon, or God\' ... There’s a Twain-like quality to this loyal naif who skewers without intending to. While Make Russia Great Again rushes along from one folly to the next, Herb’s increasingly pained efforts to see only the bright side of Trump’s reign is the joke that keeps on winning. Amid the twin economic and health catastrophes of our era, Buckley has done the impossible: Made Politics Funny Again. Laughter may not be the best medicine for covid-19, but it’s a heck of a lot better than bleach.

David Mitchell

Rave The Washington Post David Mitchell’s groovy new rock novel belts out the lives of a fictional band in such vivid tones that you may imagine you once heard the group play in the late ’60s ... Mitchell — cult writer, critical darling, popular novelist — knows much about the unpredictable currents of fame, and he brings that empathy and his own extraordinarily dynamic style to this tale of four musicians ... One of the many delights of Utopia Avenue is seeing the cosmic dust of genius swirling in chaos before the stars are formed ... Mitchell’s magic chemistry is certain; this band’s not so much ... Mitchell captures the tension between artists and their labels trying to divine the next turn of teen tastes. He re-creates the music shows in all their cringing giddiness. And the pages of Utopia Avenue are a veritable Who’s Who of the era ... Even the syncopated structure of Utopia Avenue demonstrates how attentive he is to the rhythm of human experience.

J. Courtney Sullivan

Rave The Washington Post Friends and Strangers captures the conflicting emotions of parenthood with palpable sympathy ... We’ve seen this scenario played for satire and terror, but Sullivan approaches her story with deep-seated compassion for both sides ... With its carefully drawn scenes of home life and its focus on the trials of motherhood and infertility, Friends and Strangers will be shelved as domestic fiction. But it’s as much a story about money and politics. Everywhere in the background we can detect the wreckage of an economy no longer capable of sustaining middle-class life ... But if Sullivan’s vision of this country sounds cynical, her faith in individuals remains profound. There’s a rare degree of emotional maturity in Friends and Strangers, a willingness to resist demonizing any of the players, a commitment to exploring the demands of family with the deliberate care such complex relations require. Once again, Sullivan has shown herself to be one of the wisest and least pretentious chroniclers of modern life. Every hard-won insight here is offered up with such casual grace.

Max Brooks

Mixed The Washington Post This marks a significant change for Brooks, who is a well-known expert on zombies, which are still widely disputed, like werewolves or climate change ... With Devolution, Brooks brings his considerable investigative powers to a cryptozoological controversy that has been raging in the Pacific Northwest for decades ... Cleverly, some of the elements of this story do seem reasonably plausible, which, as we’ve learned, is the key to any abominable conspiracy theory ... Given the monster stories set upon the world by Mary Shelley and other masters of the macabre, Brooks is trying to fill some awfully big shoes here. The results are uneven ... for far too many pages, Devolution plods along a dull middle ground, not so much building suspense as venting it ... Part of the problem is the diary format. We’re stuck in Kate’s limited perspective trudging through her flat prose ... There’s probably a great horror novel about Sasquatch out there somewhere, but I won’t believe it till I see it.

Imbolo Mbue

Rave The Washington Post ... that familiar desecration is made wrenchingly fresh by the power of Mbue’s storytelling. Through some rare alchemy, she has blended the specificity of a documentary with the universality of a parable to create a novel that will disturb the conscience of every reader ... With a style that conveys the musical cadence of a local dialect, Mbue creates the African village in all its ancient nuance. Time flows and eddies in this telling, rushing forward and looping back the way legends gradually coalesce in the shared memories of scattered people ... polemical as the novel may be, it never loses its moral complexity. Although How Beautiful We Were is a love letter to a communal way of life lived close to nature, it’s not a wholly romantic vision that ignores the villagers’ own flaws. Despite their \'brand of fragile innocence,\' Mbue affords the people of Kosawa the full range of human decency and selfishness. And though Thula eventually enjoys considerable respect as the leader of an opposition movement, she must always contend with her own chauvinistic culture that’s deeply skeptical of an unmarried woman who asserts herself ... the fatalism of this story is countered by the beauty of Mbue’s prose and the purity of her vision.

Marisel Vera

Rave The Washington Post ... enthralling ... The style of The Taste of Sugar is heavily inflected with Spanish words and phrases, conveying the rich linguistic culture of this place. And sometimes, without warning, Vera drops her own narrative voice and shifts into the higher register of a character’s excited monologue. It’s a tremendously enlivening dramatic effect ... One of the many pleasures of this story stems from Vera’s emotional range ... a passionate love story purified in the crucible of suffering .... All these intimate and finely drawn details are nested within a masterful work of historical fiction that traces monumental economic and political currents ... Vera never reduces him or any of her characters to mere cogs in this vast system. Her vision is always grounded in this hard-working family, their struggles, their flaws, their persistent decency ... One of the great challenges of globe-spanning stories about the forces that raise and cripple nations is maintaining a fragile realm of free will in which ordinary characters can still act, even in their highly oppressed circumstances. That’s the rich feat of The Taste of Sugar. Here, the drama always stays rooted in the suspenseful ordeal of these farmers to whom we grow more and more attached. Vera writes as confidently about the mechanics of international markets as she does about the hopes whispered between grieving lovers.

Gail Godwin

Rave The Washington Post At 82, [Godwin] is still challenging herself and us. Her latest book is a richly layered novel based on a lifetime of reflection on friendship and storytelling. In a culture obsessed with youth, it’s a welcome reminder that age and wisdom can confer certain advantages, too ... Godwin writes women’s fiction that deconstructs the condescending presumptions of that label. Her new book is a brilliant example of the way she can don even the most ladylike concerns while working through issues of independence, power and artistic integrity ... This campus, with its overlay of Southern evasiveness, is tempting grounds for satire, but Godwin has something more complex in mind. She’s created these genteel administrators in such fullness that they exemplify Lovegood’s noble values even as they take pleasure in their own slightly parodic performance ... the story travels nimbly through an enormous swath of American history, while remaining grounded in the particular experiences of these women who would seem to have nothing in common ... an extraordinary novel about the nature of those rare friendships that fade for long periods of time only to rekindle in an instant when the conditions are right again.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Positive San Francisco Chronicle In these Dark Ages of the Reign of Trump, Curtis Sittenfeld\'s Rodham descends like an avenging angel ... This isn\'t just fiction as fantasy; it\'s fiction as therapy for that majority of Americans who voted for Clinton in 2016 and are now sick and unemployed under the current calamitous administration ... Rodham, though, is a high-profile novel - not a parody or a joke book, but a serious work of literary fiction - designed to rally the political spirits of liberal readers ... [The] erotic trysts might seem over the top, but they\'re all part of the novel\'s corrective impulse, its determination to rebalance the way men and women exist in our political imagination. After all, if Bill can carry on and Donald Trump can grab women, why can\'t a female politician have a healthy sex life? ... Yes, this is an implicitly polemical novel. It\'s devoted to exonerating a politician who has been maligned for decades. But that motive doesn\'t crimp the book\'s energy or its suspense because there are other larger themes at work besides Hillary\'s basic goodness. While telling a compelling story, Rodham provides an insightful analysis of the function of sexism in our political discourse ... And as an extra bonus, Rodham captures Trump better than any other novel has so far. Sittenfeld showcases the real estate developer in all his bombastic narcissism and self-delusion. It\'s an astounding, slaying parody, while also, mercifully, offering us a future that avoids today\'s ever-expanding disaster ... The novel\'s exculpatory impulse exacts a cost, though. As a study of sexism and American politics, Rodham is rich. But as a character study, it knows everything. That leaves little distance between the narrator and her words in which we can sense the mysteries of an actual mind. In that sense, Rodham mimics Hillary\'s own careful presentation of herself. Perhaps what I\'m tempted to call a flaw is merely another element of the novel\'s verisimilitude.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Positive The Washington Post In these Dark Ages of the Reign of Trump, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham descends like an avenging angel ... a high-profile novel — not a parody or a joke book, but a serious work of literary fiction — designed to rally the political spirits of liberal readers ... These early chapters follow the general outlines of Hillary’s life, and sometimes it’s hard to remember we’re reading fiction, not autobiography. But that becomes easier to remember when Hillary describes having sex with Bill ... These erotic trysts might seem over the top, but they’re all part of the novel’s corrective impulse, its determination to rebalance the way men and women exist in our political imagination ... While telling a compelling story, Rodham provides an insightful analysis of the function of sexism in our political discourse ... Sittenfeld is at her wittiest when re-creating the men who dominate modern American politics ... captures Trump better than any other novel has so far...It’s an astounding, slaying parody, while also, mercifully, offering us a future that avoids today’s ever-expanding disaster ... The novel’s exculpatory impulse exacts a cost, though. As a study of sexism and American politics, Rodham is rich. But as a character study, it knows everything. That leaves little distance between the narrator and her words in which we can sense the mysteries of an actual mind. In that sense, Rodham mimics Hillary’s own careful presentation of herself. Perhaps what I’m tempted to call a flaw is merely another element of the novel’s verisimilitude.

Lionel Shriver

Pan The Washington Post Sitting on the couch reading a slaying satire about exercise fanatics should be as satisfying as a chocolate chip cookie, but Lionel Shriver’s new novel is exhausting. I’ve never felt so worn out by the labor of wincing ... the fitness industry is a fat target for satire. And Shriver brings all her ferocious wit to bear to mock its hucksters and disciples. Readers who have endured condescending pity from well-toned gods and goddesses will initially relish Shriver’s merciless ridicule ... As a character, Serenata is a fascinating and daringly unsympathetic heroine, burdened with the loneliness of her greater insight. But she can also be a hectoring bore. Many pages of the novel are given over to acerbic arguments in which Serenata spars with her husband about his rabid training. She claims the two of them are engaged in Noël Coward-like repartee, but their interactions sound wholly mirthless. This is satire that moves, like Remington, with heavy weights strapped to its legs ... Unfortunately, beneath its parody of fitness fanatics, the plot is premised on whiny canards about the insidious effects of reverse racism ... tremendously disappointing because there’s a rich and sympathetic story here about how aging can disrupt a marriage in strange and surprising ways. Remington’s frantic efforts to run himself back into virility and purpose will resonate with anyone staring at the prospect of a long, useless retirement. And Serenata’s resentment toward her failing knees feels poignant and universal. But this is a novel more determined to make its point than to make us consider the profound mystery of what it means to tend a body for the long haul.

Megha Majumdar

Rave The Washington Post This all-consuming story rages along, bright and scalding, illuminating three intertwined lives in contemporary India ... [Majumdar] demonstrates an uncanny ability to capture the vast scope of a tumultuous society by attending to the hopes and fears of people living on the margins. The effect is transporting, often thrilling, finally harrowing ... Majumdar’s outrage is matched only by her sympathy for these ordinary people so deft in the practice of self-justification. Building on their perfectly natural weaknesses, the short, intense chapters of A Burning present a society riven with influence peddling and abuses of power but still wholly devoted to the appearance of propriety.

Ishmael Beah

Rave The Washington Post ... deeply affecting ... the experiences of Beah’s characters are the experiences of the powerless everywhere ... Much is silent and unspoken in this subtle novel about people we rarely hear from. Beah’s narration rests lightly across these lives, suggesting only the outlines of their ruined childhoods ... Tender as this is, Beah has no interest in romanticizing their little family. He means only to insist on their humanity, which the upper classes so aggressively deny. The novel conveys the precariousness of their position with shocking clarity ... What endows the novel with such stirring energy is the way Beah focuses on their remarkable skills. To work the streets as grifters, shoplifters and pickpockets, the five members of this family must be extraordinarily observant and disciplined ... an empathy-expanding story without the heavy gears of polemical fiction. In a sense, Beah has written an African social novel that complements earlier novels by Dickens and Twain, but he conveys his unsettling assessment with a more delicate balance of tenderness and dread. Elimane, Khoudi and the other members of their little family have such a clear-eyed sense of their place as disposable members of society. To hear their story should make our confirmed blindness a little harder to maintain.

Paulette Jiles

Positive The Washington Post ... endearing ... sweeter than Jiles’s previous work but no less attentive to the texture of the American Southwest ... if you understand how a romantic quest works, you know the conclusion is already locked and loaded. And if the plot of Simon the Fiddler unfolds at a fairly leisurely trot, well, at least it’s never anything less than thoroughly charming. And when the final battle royal arrives in San Antonio, it’s just the rousing ballad we want to hear.

Sue Monk Kidd

Pan The Washington Post For better or worse, Kidd has succeeded in writing a novel about Jesus’s wife, not Jesus. She also sidesteps the Mary Magdalene controversy by presenting a fully invented character ... Kidd has constructed the plot to keep Jesus offstage through much of the novel. That’s crucial to elevating Ana’s position but tends to reduce her beloved to a really sweet guy with gorgeous eyes ... The period details are fascinating, but the dialogue can feel over-starched ... Pronouncements mingled with casual banter make the book sound like a costume drama trying to find its tone. Also, Ana’s feminist consciousness seems immaculately conceived, wholly uncontaminated by the trappings of her culture ... Confined in Ana’s earnest narration, the story provides no critical distance, no irony, no real thematic ambiguity. Despite its efforts to deconstruct Christian orthodoxy, The Book of Longings insists on its own orthodoxy ... The best historical fiction disorients us by demonstrating the uncanny nature of the past—a world like and not like ours, woven through with strands of ancient DNA. Unfortunately, The Book of Longings rarely confronts us with anything that might challenge our contemporary liberalism.

Maggie O'Farrell

Rave The Washington Post ... told with the urgency of a whispered prayer — or curse ... Unintimidated by the presence of the Bard’s canon or the paucity of the historical record, O’Farrell creates Shakespeare before the radiance of veneration obscured everyone around him. In this book, William is simply a clever young man — not even the central character — and O’Farrell makes no effort to lard her pages with intimations of his genius or cute allusions to his plays. Instead, through the alchemy of her own vision, she has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage ... This is a richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death. O’Farrell, always a master of timing and rhythm, uses these flashbacks of young love and early marriage to heighten the sense of dread that accumulates as Hamnet waits for his mother ... None of the villagers know it yet, but bubonic plague has arrived in Warwickshire and is ravaging the Shakespeare twins, overwhelming their little bodies with bacteria. That lit fuse races through the novel toward a disaster that history has already recorded but O’Farrell renders unbearably suspenseful.

Graham Swift

Positive The Washington Post ... the real magic may be the way Swift moves through time ... Then and now, so much depends on the alchemy of luck and desire. With a sigh, Swift captures the tragicomedy of human life in a single phrase.

Elizabeth Wetmore

Rave The Washington Post ... a novel that serpentines around our expectations ... This is the story of their lives in a backwater oil town in the mid-1970s, which Wetmore seems to know with empathy so deep it aches ... If these chapters weren’t so carefully wrought and emotionally compelling, they might feel like mere distractions from the prosecution of Gloria’s attacker ... Several of these chapters are masterful short stories in their own right, but Wetmore knits them together with increasing intensity ... Wetmore has written something thrilling and thoughtful. Don’t let the launch of this novelist’s career be drowned out. Someday book clubs will meet again, and this would be a rousing choice.

Anne Tyler

Mixed The Washington Post ... is either wholly irrelevant or just what we need — or possibly both. Slight and slightly charming, it’s like the cherry Jell-O that Mom serves when you’re feeling under the weather. Not much of a meal, perhaps, but who could handle more now? ... I have switched dry cleaners with more drama ... If you’ve read and adored as many of Tyler’s novels as I have, such idiosyncrasies convey all the reassuring warmth of an old hymn ... There is nothing necessarily objectionable about a novel focused on \'such a narrow and limited man,\' as Tyler calls Micah...But in this case, the mold growing on Micah’s airless character seems to have spread to the narration itself. These characters are a series of moderately eccentric poses presented without much wit or psychological insight ... Although the real world exists in this novel, it’s safely off to the side. Here, sadness is possible, even loneliness, but the bumper guards are up: No one risks slipping into despair or, for that matter, tasting anything like elation. The movie adaptation should be filmed entirely in shades of beige ... Tightly compressed, Micah’s gentle quest for a better life would feel more buoyant — and this novel’s lovely final page wouldn’t feel so needlessly delayed.

Amanda Leduc

Rave The Washington Post A brilliant young critic ... Her daring approach is a hybrid of memoir, literary criticism and cultural commentary. She moves fluidly between grade-school memories and scholarly analysis. She quotes from medieval texts and TV shows. She’s equally familiar with the Brothers Grimm and the X-Men ... long overdue. Watch your language. Challenge your stories. Read this smart, tenacious book.

Laura Zigman

Rave The Washington Post The light from Laura Zigman’s new novel is generated by a kind of literary nuclear fusion: an intense compression of grief and humor. The combination of those elements usually produces cynical black comedy, something witty and bitter, but Zigman’s work is too tender for that ... Zigman digs into the self-confirming nature of depression with the authenticity of someone who’s been hounded by that black dog. But the sorrow here is always twined with comedy ... [a] deliciously absurd tone runs straight through this novel ... what keeps Separation Anxiety from spinning off into some surreal parallel universe of silliness is Zigman’s attention to the ordinary absurdities of middle-class life. She has a great humorist’s eye for the comedy we’ve seen but overlooked...She’s particularly witty about the vapidity of our self-help culture ... Perhaps the most admirable aspect of Separation Anxiety is the way Zigman subtly choreographs the novel’s apparently random goofiness ... Stalked by the loneliness of middle age, you may think the last thing you need is a novel about a woman driven to wearing her dog. You’d be wrong.

A.D. Miller

Positive The Washington Post The story Miller tells in Independence Square is a double helix of espionage and regret ... a tense, private tale set against the Orange Revolution but evoking the whole complicated enterprise of spycraft and nation-building.Short but complex ... He’s particularly acerbic when portraying Western journalists ... Miller spins the chaotic exuberance ... it’s still harrowing to see the way power radiates through nations and lives, raising some, crushing others.

Anne Enright

Rave The Washington Post Anne Enright writes so well that she just might ruin you for anyone else. The deceptively casual flow of her stories belies their craft, a profound intelligence sealed invisibly behind life’s mirror ... thoughtful, sometimes wrenching ... The chronology would appear no more ordered than the flow of anecdotes around a dinner table, but there’s always a design to Enright’s novels, a gradual coalescing of insight. Early on, Actress glides from one hilarious, calamitous theater story to the next ... the epitome of Enright’s subtlety: the way she can suggest the anaerobic pain of a strained marriage with just a few lines ... Stripped raw of any sentimentality, the result is a critique, a confession, a love letter — and another brilliant novel from Anne Enright.

Arthur Phillips

Positive The Washington Post ... rich ... All this historical and theological detail is not so much the content of the novel as its premise, which sets the bar for entry fairly high. But Phillips is a terrifically engaging teacher, and he’s devised the perfect guide ... Ezzedine is an ingenious foil for exploring the treacherous territory of Elizabethan England. He’s essentially a Turkish Gulliver ... Phillips laces Ezzedine’s sojourn in England with melancholy wit, but the novel’s real energy comes from its exploration of two related industries that flourished under Queen Elizabeth: theater and spycraft.

Lily King

Rave The Washington Post ... wonderful, witty, heartfelt ... Writers & Lovers is a funny novel about grief ... it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness ... This is a bracingly realistic vision of the economic hopelessness that so many young people are trapped in: serving extraordinary wealth but entirely separate from it ... the arc of this story [is] so enchanting. All of these tragedies and obstacles are drawn with stark realism and deep emotional resonance. But even during the early pages, we can sense Casey’s spirit crouching in determined resistance ... As in her previous novels, King explores the dimensions of mourning with aching honesty, but in Writers & Lovers she’s leavened that sorrow with an irreducible sense of humor ... With Casey, King has created an irresistible heroine—equally vulnerable and tenacious—and we’re immediately invested in her search for comfort, for love, for success ... The result is an absolute delight, the kind of happiness that sometimes slingshots out of despair with such force you can’t help but cheer, amazed.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Washington Post Erdrich’s career has been an act of resistance against racism — the hateful and the sentimental varieties — and the implacable force of white America’s ignorance. In one powerful book after another, she has carved Indians’ lives, histories and stories back into our national literature, a canon once determined to wipe them away ... The Night Watchman is more overtly political...but it’s a political novel reconceived as only Erdrich could ... As usual, modern realism and Native spirituality mingle harmoniously in Erdrich’s pages without calling either into question ... This tapestry of stories is a signature of Erdrich’s literary craft, but she does it so beautifully that it’s tempting to forget how remarkable it is. Chapter by chapter, we encounter characters interrelated but traveling along their own paths ... This narrator’s vision is...capacious, reaching out across a whole community in tender conversation with itself. Expecting to follow the linear trajectory of a mystery, we discover in Erdrich’s fiction something more organic, more humane.

Emily St. John Mandel

Rave The Washington Post ... may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. Mandel is always casually revealing future turns of success or demise in ways that only pique our curiosity. Indeed, the fate of the story’s heroine appears in a brief, impressionistic preface, but you won’t fully appreciate that opening until you finish the whole novel and begin obsessively reading it again ... Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next ... The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels. When she turns to the art world, to a federal prison, to an international cargo ship, each realm rises out of the dark waters of her imagination with just as much substance as that hotel on the shore of Vancouver Island. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next ... The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.

Ann Napolitano

Positive The Washington Post There’s something brutal about killing a planeload of people and then introducing a handful of them and killing them all over again. But the cruelty of this aspect of the novel’s structure is countered by the astonishing tenderness of other sections ... Napolitano has written a novel about the peculiar challenges of surviving a public disaster in the modern age. She shows with bracing clarity just how cable news and social media magnify misery and exposure as never before ... Napolitano attends to this cultural context deftly, letting the world’s agony and curiosity play out largely on the sidelines of what remains a delicate story of one boy’s physical and psychological recovery ... That blankness at the center of this novel could have become a kind of black hole absorbing all light and interest, but Napolitano captures the subtle shades of Edward’s spirit like the earliest intimations of dawn ... in Napolitano’s gentle handling, it’s persistently lovely ... one of the most touching stories you’re likely to read in the new year.

Paul Yoon

Rave The Washington Post ... a tightly integrated collection of six masterfully written stories ... Yoon’s perspective shifts nimbly from one teenager to another, catching the currents of delight, confusion or terror flitting through this \'orbit of chaos\' ... We know, of course, how impossible that modest dream is for these three young friends working in the most dangerous spot on Earth. But Yoon’s narration is so closely pared, so free of excess drama that when violence rips through these lives, it feels especially shocking. In a sense, he’s re-created the psychological experience of battle: the weird interludes of happiness and boredom suddenly shattered by incomprehensible disorder ... Individually, the chapters exercise hypnotic intensity, but the overall effect is even more profound. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power ... Yoon makes us care deeply about these adolescents and what happens to them. For all that he eventually reveals, some details are forever dropped between the shifting plates of survivors’ memories. That’s cruel, but like everything else here, entirely true to the lives of people scattered by war.

Garth Greenwell

Rave The Washington Post Three of these nine stories have appeared in the New Yorker — and almost all of them are extraordinary. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes ... Greenwell is repeatedly drawn to precarious moments of emotional transition, particularly in regards to romantic attachment and erotic compulsion ... The intimate physical detail of this disturbing story will exceed some readers’ tolerance, but that’s entirely Greenwell’s point ... But Cleanness is not unrelentingly bleak. Indeed, the range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound ... incomparably bittersweet ... Fortunately, it almost feels too late or at least superfluous to celebrate the fact that this remarkable collection will not be shunted away to a back shelf for \'Gay & Lesbian Literature\' ... brilliant.

A. R. Moxon

Positive The Washington Post I was baffled, dazzled, angered and awed. In between bouts of hating it, I adored it ... a self-indulgent muddle; it’s a modern-day classic ... action gushes off the page ... Moxon is a literary demon, constantly exploiting and thwarting our need for coherence and logic. He grabs other stories and motifs like he’s charging through a three-hour sale at Filene’s Basement ... All these elements — past and present, real and surreal, serious and absurd — are stacked like some Olympic version of literary Jenga. Admittedly, sometimes it feels like reading a novel by Murakami in the original Japanese if you don’t speak Japanese ... This is as plastic as narrative can be; in the eeriest parts, the story feels like it’s melting in our hands. Exploring the fluid relationship between writer, reader and interpretation, it’s equally audacious and brilliant ... As a satire of psychiatric hospitals and prisons, the novel is frighteningly insightful. Its critique of masculine solipsism is devastating. And finally, as this bizarre story expands like the Big Bang, sections start to cohere around what are essentially theological themes. The result is Paradise Lost but with more gangsters: a zany interrogation of religious concepts in a wholly secular context ... In his own strange way, Moxon has translated his eschatological revelations into the lurid colors of a comic book universe ... If you make it through this brazen novel, the only thing you’ll want to do is find another survivor to talk about what it meant and what you missed. Call me.

Perumal Murugan, trans. by N. Kalyan Raman

Positive The Washington Post ... jumps nimbly from fantasy to realism to parable. How much it resonates with you will depend on the breadth of your sympathies and your interest in adult tales that include the thoughts and feelings of animal characters. The effect is not so much escapist fantasy as existential reflection ... You may be tempted to think this novel doesn’t interest you, doesn’t relate to the sophisticated architecture of your experience, but the elegance of Murugan’s simple tone will lull you deeper into his story. If there’s something remote about the work of subsistence farming and the friction of a small village, there’s also something hypnotic about the rhythms of such a life ... Woven through this slim novel is an acidic satire about the burdens and humiliations of the over-regulated country in which the old man and woman live. His portrayal of arrogant officials who intimidate these poor people with a blizzard of regulations and forms will make you pine for the relative graciousness of the DMV. Murugan never pushes the point, but it’s clear that the human characters are not much freer than the goats they keep penned in their yard ... as The Story of a Goat demonstrates, just because we’ve put away childish things doesn’t mean we have to deny ourselves the strange pleasure of fiction in which animals articulate their own curious perspectives on their lives — and ours.

Michael Crichton and Daniel H. Wilson

Positive Washington Post Yes, the end is near — but not for Crichton’s brand. If you thought his death in 2008 was enough to stop another outbreak, you know nothing about extraterrestrial germs or American publishing ... Wilson is a good choice for carrying the master’s work forward. He’s a robotics engineer, a writer of witty books about technology and the author of a ridiculous thriller called Robopocalypse. ... With little genetic decay, Wilson replicates Crichton’s tone and tics, particularly his wide-stance mansplaining. Each chapter begins with a quotation by Crichton selected, apparently, for its L. Ron Hubbard-like profundity ... And the pages — sanitized of wit — are larded with lots of Crichtonian technical explanations, weapons porn, top-secret documents and so many acronyms that I began to worry Wilson had accidentally left the caps lock on ... But who cares? These various lapses may be irritating, but ultimately they don’t derail what is a fairly ingenious adventure.

Stephen Wright

Rave The Washington Post Here, one is tempted to believe, is a writer crazy enough, crude enough and gluttonous enough to swallow the whole Trump era and then belch out its poisonous comedy ... The premise of Processed Cheese is simple; its execution is cuckoo — a critical term I don’t think I’ve ever used before ... You want subtlety, read a different book ... a broiling parody of American excess, fermented with wild violence and crazy sex acts. (Attention Bad Sex Award judges: Look no further than Pages 236-237, although all of Chapter 15 is perhaps the most repulsive thing I’ve ever read) ... a retail fantasy clotted with gangster thrills. But its sharp taste stems entirely from Wright’s attention to detail: an indefatigable piling on of ludicrousness. Here, finally, is that rare satirist who doesn’t feel outstripped by the actual details of today’s culture. There is no page, no paragraph, not even a line that doesn’t feel crammed with Wright’s comic bile ... Like President Trump, this absurdity can be grotesquely funny. But like the Trump presidency, it runs on way too long. That, I suspect is the point. Nothing else I’ve read is as faithful to the obscenity of these latter days, the consummation of vacuous pop culture and complete social bankruptcy. For readers who can stomach it, Processed Cheese is jolting enough to reveal what degradation we’ve become inured to.

Matt Bell

Positive The Washington Post Beware. A novel like this — not that there are many like it — presents a peculiar challenge. I don’t necessarily want to scare you away, but I’d hate to see you stumble into The Lake and the Woods expecting anything like [Karen] Russell’s witty alligator farm. Think instead of the magical realism of her most bizarre story in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Then imagine that story chanted by a druid on mushrooms ... Bell is working in a tradition that stretches from Aimee Bender to Richard Brautigan to Walt Whitman and much, much further back into the mists of myth. For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali with its claws ... Bell is doing fascinating, unnerving things here in his exploration of the most painful aspects of family life. This is the Oedipal complex flipped on its head ... But like its title, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods runs on longer than it should ... Eventually, his ideas are buried in the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods by the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the moon and the cave and the stars and . . .Well, you get the idea.

Bernardine Evaristo

Rave The Washington Post ... [Evaristo] is an astonishingly creative, insightful and humane writer ... Girl, Woman, Other is a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that’s nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming ... choreographed with such fluid artistry that it never feels labored ... There’s nothing forced about the virtual exclusion of white characters from this novel; they have simply been shifted to the periphery, relegated to the blurry sidelines where black characters reside in so much literary fiction written by white authors ... The complex movements of this large group could easily have overwhelmed all but the chess masters among us, but Evaristo doesn’t shove us into the whole crowd at once. Instead, we meet these women in a series of elegantly layered stories ... Together, all these women present a cross-section of Britain that feels godlike in its scope and insight ... With the passage from gentle empathy to steely realism to wry satire, one marvels at the dimensions of Evaristo’s tonal range ... a novel so modern in its vision, so confident in its insight that it seems to grasp the full spectrum of racism that black women confront, while also interrogating black women’s response to it ... But just as crucial to this novel’s triumph is Evaristo’s proprietary style, a long-breath, free-verse structure that sends her phrases cascading down the page. She’s formulated a literary mode somewhere between prose and poetry that enhances the rhythms of speech and narrative. It’s that rare experimental technique that sounds like a sophisticated affectation but in her hands feels instantly accommodating, entirely natural. It’s just the style needed to carry along all these women’s stories and then bring them to a perfectly calibrated moment of harmony — a grace note that rings out after the orchestral grandness of Girl, Woman, Other draws to a perfect close.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Positive The Washington Post Sexton explores these unspoken tensions brilliantly. Her subtle portrayal of a black mother’s competing desires is layered with both pathos and wit ... that structure is complex, particularly for such a relatively compact novel, but Sexton writes with such a clear sense of place and time that each of these intermingled stories feels essential and dramatic in its own way ... That life-or-death drama on the plantation provides the novel’s most terrifying moments, which could easily have rendered the other sections slight by comparison. Instead, Sexton echoes and complicates Josephine’s experience in each of the later two story lines in ways that feel both historically accurate and socially illuminating ... a novel marked by acts of cruelty but not, ultimately, overwhelmed by them. The line stretching from Ava back to Josephine and beyond connects a collection of women attuned to danger, quick to adapt, remarkably hopeful about the future.

Jon Clinch

Mixed The Washington Post Clinch creates wholly original stories that snap together with the edges of classics we all know ... an amusing imitation of Dickens’s style ... Although Clinch relies on the details provided in A Christmas Carol, he never seems cramped by them .. If Marley has any flaws, it’s that this Battle of the Bookkeepers is not sufficiently dramatic to carry along the whole story. To its own detriment, the narrative concentrates too much on genteel domestic scenes and refined romantic conversations. Inexplicably, a potentially fantastic story line involving Marley in America takes place offstage. Alas, we hear just the barest details of that New World adventure, which gives us more time for drawing-room chatter. Unfortunately, that’s typical of this novel: Its violent acts are related with Victorian decorum; its emotional range is as tightly drawn as Mother Scrooge’s corset ... The result is a costume drama that pleasantly mimics Dickens’s tone and presents a plausible backstory to his most familiar creation but fails to generate enough of its own energy...We’re never chilled by anything close to the terror that Scrooge feels before his own gravestone. We never feel anything like the elation of his early-morning reformation. We never brush away embarrassed tears at anything like Tiny Tim’s sappy blessing ... Dickens, after all, offers more than complicated plots and comical characters. He knew the profound pleasure of succumbing to unbridled pathos and joy. If you can’t give us that, well, then . . . bah, humbug.

Bret Anthony Johnston

Positive The Washington Post ... great tenderness ... This portrayal of a family struggling through what should be its happiest moment is tremendously moving, but there’s a taunting quality to Johnston’s refusal to admit any of the usual elements of the abducted-child story. The novel seems allergic to the legal details a case like this would involve. While therapists and prosecutors warn Eric and Laura not to ask their son about what happened to him, Johnston adheres to that advice, too, and so we learn almost nothing about those four missing years. Even Justin’s kidnapper remains a shadowy, off-stage figure ... Although I respect Johnston’s willingness to eschew the cheap titillation of lurid details, he’s clearly sensitive enough and talented enough to have delved into the horror of whatever Justin experienced during that crucial quarter of his life. Avoiding it entirely seems like a failure of nerve. Even Eric’s adulterous affair fades away with no more trouble than a magazine subscription expiring. With so many of the story’s inherently exciting elements ruled inadmissible, the novel risks bloating with rumination ... there’s real humanity in Johnston’s writing, and it’s heartening to spend time with these folks as they relearn how to be a family. Rendered in these compassionate, candid chapters, theirs is a struggle that speaks to those of us who have endured far less.

Yelena Akhtiorskaya

Rave The Washington Post Her first novel, Panic in a Suitcase, is equal parts borscht stew and Borscht Belt — an immigration comedy that can’t tell whether it’s leaving or coming to America ... Her prose retains a Slavic accent and sense of humor pickled in Eastern European endurance ... Written as a comic corrective to those dynamic rags-to-riches tales, Panic in a Suitcase is skimpy with plot ... In place of some carefully developing story, Akhtiorskaya delivers a series of scenes and irresistibly grotesque character studies ... One wonders if Akhtiorskaya hasn’t descended from some unacknowledged Russian branch of Kingsley Amis’s family ... Akhtiorskaya’s genius is her ability to throw off observations that sound — if they weren’t so witty — like lines from a folktale.

Niall Williams

Positive The Washington Post The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn’t stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined ... If Faha isn’t for everybody, then neither, frankly, is Williams’s novel, delivered in the pensive voice of a man in his 70s recalling his youth. \'This in miniature was the world,\' he writes, but that demands a kind of attention and patience that’s increasingly scarce. If you’re in a hurry, hurry along to another book. Williams is engaged in the careful labor of teaching us to hear the subtler melodies drowned out by the din of modern life ... The sweetness of this novel would curdle if it weren’t preserved by a tincture of tragedy that runs through so many of these lives ... Williams’s most affecting skill is his ability to narrate this novel in two registers simultaneously, capturing Noe’s naivete as a teen and his wisdom as an old man ... If you’re a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare insight, this, truly, is happiness.

Kevin Wilson

Rave The Washington Post Wilson scrapes away all the cloying sentimentality that so often sticks to young characters ... that’s the most wonderful aspect of Wilson’s story: It’s entirely true to life . . . except that now and then, the kids spontaneously combust ... Wilson understands the mixture of affection and embarrassment that runs through all loving families. His satire is always marbled with tenderness ... his most perfect novel. Paradoxically light and melancholy, it hews to the border of fantasy but stays in the land of realism ... you can sense the real heat radiating off these pages ... offers a brutal critique of American aristocrats and especially the distortion field around them that makes their selfishness look like duty to a higher cause ... Wilson is clearly writing from a point of deep sympathy ... This novel may seem slight and quirky, but don’t be fooled. There’s a lot to see here.

Miriam Toews

Rave The Washington Post In the crucible of her genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life ... There are conversations in this novel so heartbreaking that you will be tempted to recoil, but Toews is working near the emotional territory of Lorrie Moore, where humor is a bulwark against despair ... Toews mines the frustration and absurdity of caring for someone set on self-destruction ... Between those distant poles, Toews hangs a tale about the unspeakable pain and surprising joy of persisting in the world, puny sorrows and all.

Margaret Atwood

Rave The Washington Post The Testaments opens in Gilead about 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s an entirely different novel in form and tone. Inevitably, the details are less shocking ... Atwood responds to the challenge of that familiarity by giving us the narrator we least expect: Aunt Lydia. It’s a brilliant strategic move that turns the world of Gilead inside out ... Aunt Lydia’s wry wit...endows The Testaments with far more humor than The Handmaid’s Tale or its exceedingly grim TV adaptation ... That’s the genius of Atwood’s creation. Aunt Lydia is a mercurial assassin: a pious leader, a ruthless administrator, a deliciously acerbic confessor ... Interlaced among her journal entries are the testimonies of two young women ... Their mysterious identities fuel much of the story’s suspense — and electrify the novel with an extra dose of melodrama ... The Testaments is not nearly the devastating satire of political and theological misogyny that The Handmaid’s Tale is. In this new novel, Atwood is far more focused on creating a brisk thriller than she is on exploring the perversity of systemic repression ... the fact that Atwood keeps challenging such categories is all part of her extraordinary effort to resist the chains we place on each other ... Praise be.

Salman Rushdie

Pan The Washington Post ... an alternately cerebral and goofy novel ... [a] chronic lack of restraint. Rushdie’s style once unfurled with hypnotic elegance, but here it’s become a fire hose of brainy gags and literary allusions — tremendously clever but frequently tedious ... Unfortunately, Quichotte is such a brittle pinwheel of parody that its sharp edges never cut very deep. Much of the novel is a satire of TV stars and by extension the easily manipulated country that adores them. Meanwhile, racism, the opioid crisis, Brexit, gun control, immigration, assisted suicide, corporate fraud, the existence of God, sexual abuse, cyberterrorism — these issues rumble by just as fast as that old Chevy Cruze can drive. Then Jiminy Cricket pops up — yep — and another town is overrun with mastodons. A statue of Hans Christian Andersen talks. Whatever ... I barely have the heart to tell you that this modern-day take on Don Quixote is merely a story within another story ... Even as its various subplots shamble on, the novel keeps reminding us about the rising conflation of reality and fiction ... It would be easier to step over these thematic bricks thrown in our path if the novel’s characters offered any emotional substance, but by design they’re just constructs in this literary game. And so we die-hard fans of Salman Rushdie keep turning the pages, hoping for a reward commensurate to the journey.

Nell Zink

Mixed The Washington Post ...surprisingly conventional. This time around, there is no straining against the dimensions of reality, no postmodern backflips. It feels like a quirky genius trying her best to behave at the dinner table ... Her portrait of the parasitic relationship between fans and their idols is hilarious; her take on the record business exposes an industry of endemic pomposity and abuse. Doxology includes an interview from Rolling Stone that is so spot on the magazine could sue for plagiarism if Zink had not made the whole thing up. But about halfway through the novel, history crashes into this plot, and it feels like somebody unplugged the electric guitars. What was initially a brash riff on pop culture becomes, in the story’s next generation, a fairly labored postmortem of the Clinton/Trump campaign ... Zink is an astute critic of our recent election and its alarming abuses, but this shift seems designed as a grasp for weightiness and relevance, which succeeds at the expense of the novel’s humor and surprise. In the same way, a final section about a privileged young woman trying to choose between a wealthy older suitor and a penniless young lover is pleasant, but surprisingly bland. Bring back Minor Threat—and Zink’s electric wit.

Louis Menand

Rave The Christian Science Monitor A story of almost ludicrous breadth and depth, winding around handwriting analysis, birds, racism, railroads, universities, and God. The threat of philosophical textbookism hovers in the margins, but Menand\'s determination to \'see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them\' fends off that danger with sometimes dazzling effect ... The triumph of The Metaphysical Club is the author\'s dramatic demonstration of the parallel between developments in science and philosophy ... He catches the rhythms of 19th-century America with striking clarity, swinging from complex explanations to epigraphic summaries. The doors of The Metaphysical Club look intimidating, but don\'t be put off. It\'s engaging, wise, and touched with wit - a chance to follow an inspector around the foundations of American thought and understand this house of mirrors we\'ve inherited.

Carmen Gimenéz Smith

Rave The Washington Post ...all [the poems] knocked me out ... Smith...can be sardonic, insightful and worried all in the same line—and she’s never afraid to express her anger ... Moving between short lines and prose poems, Smith’s urgent verse can be sharply political or tenderly intimate, confronting the persistence of racism or exploring her mother’s decline into dementia.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Rave The Washington Post While neither polemical nor wholly fantastical, the story draws on skills [Coates] developed in those other genres ... Coates isn’t dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates’s fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain ... Despite his extraordinary skill as a modern-day social critic, Coates never intrudes on the stately, slightly antique voice of his narrator. But his understanding of modern-day racism illuminates this portrayal of the 19th century, and it’s not difficult to hear the contemporary echoes of Hiram’s observations.

Elizabeth Macneal

Rave The Washington Post The final chapters of Elizabeth Macneal’s delightfully creepy novel kept me screwed to my office chair ... What more could one want from a Victorian thriller? But Macneal delivers even more. The Doll Factory, which is already a hit in England, offers an eerily lifelike re-creation of 1850s London laced with a smart feminist critique of Western aesthetics. It’s a perfect blend of froth and substance, a guilty pleasure wrapped around a provocative history lesson ... Macneal deftly paints her fictional heroine into the colorful lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ... They strut through these pages radiating all their brash brilliance, fragile enthusiasms and comic eccentricities (including their fondness for wombats) ... This exuberant re-creation of London is fascinating, but it wasn’t Macneal’s feminist critique of the Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetics that almost made me miss a flight to California. Credit for that goes to a taxidermist named Silas, whose story slithers along underneath the tale of Iris’s liberation.

Emma Donoghue

Positive The Washington Post If Room was a horror novel laced with sweetness, Akin is a sweet novel laced with horror ... Yes, this odd-couple situation is contrived, but it’s also continuously charming ... Donoghue, a mother herself, has a perfect ear for the exasperated sighs of preteens ... offers little in the way of plot. Instead, “Akin” is true to the quiet investment of time needed to win a child’s trust. The movement here is the slow accrual of affection ... For us, the reward stems from Donoghue’s ability to wring moments of tenderness and comedy from this mismatched pair of relatives who never crossed paths in their own country.

Bruce Holsinger

Positive The Washington Post One wants to say that The Gifted School is preternaturally timely, but it feels, instead, like a faint imitation: a story dripped from the headlines. And even if current events didn’t overshadow The Gifted School, the novel’s opening would still feel weighed down by its desultory pace ... Although The Gifted School starts too slowly, once the story gets moving, it builds impressive momentum ... There’s plenty of wry humor in Holsinger’s portrayal of this dysfunction, especially the moral gymnastics that liberal parents perform to preserve the purity of their ideals ... But Holsinger is not at heart a satirist, or at least not a mean one. These harried parents and their children are drawn with real sensitivity, and despite how horribly some of them act, he doesn’t sacrifice anyone on the altar of his wit. His regard for their dreams and fears, regardless of their weaknesses and failings, remains deeply humane. Indeed, for such a relentless diagnosis of the toxic culture we’ve created, The Gifted School is, ultimately, a surprisingly hopeful novel. There’s a sweetness to its resolution, a satisfying possibility that no matter what monsters we parents are at times, we can still graduate to something better.

Richard Russo

Mixed The Washington Post Russo has become our senior correspondent on masculinity. No one captures so well the gruff affection of men or the friction between guys from different classes ... rotates gently through these characters — each one so appealing that you hate to let him go, though you’ll quickly feel just as fond of the next one ... Russo clearly knows the pleasures and perils of retrospection, and he’s constructed a novel about the way the past constantly bleeds into the present ... One of the great pleasures of Chances Are. . . stems from how gracefully Russo moves the story along two time frames, creating that uncanny sense of memories that feel simultaneously near and remote ... best when it focuses on that tantalizing interplay of past and present, the insistent way that adolescent experiences and parental expectations continue to circumscribe our hopes and dreams ... What’s more disappointing, though, is the way the novel doubles down on the hackneyed cliche of the tragic, unattainable beauty...As college students, these smitten guys never really knew Jacy, and four decades later on Fantasy Island, they don’t seem to understand the fundamental immaturity of their regard ... Unfortunately, Russo tries to complicate our understanding of Jacy by diving deeper into the mystery of her disappearance. That results in a long section of increasingly melodramatic revelations involving a host of offstage characters. But this isn’t storytelling; it’s gossip ... Once the novel gets back to the present day, it regains a more nuanced and satisfying tone ... It’s disappointing to see how firmly such complexity is denied the female characters.

Nell Fink

Mixed The Washington Post Zink writes with such faux innocence that her cracks about sexuality and race detonate only after she has riffed off to the next unlikely incident. If you’re easily offended or confused, mislay this book and go back to All the Light We Cannot See. ... one picks up this novel ready to be transformed by the afflatus of its hipnicity. And at first, the advance praise sounds wholly deserved. Not a drop of acid mars the surface of this deadpan satire as it darts along, mocking and skewering the racist, homophobic and generally dingbat ideals of its characters ... Mislaid feels like a subversive minstrel show sprung from an encyclopedic mind drunk on the Mad Hatter’s tea. ... her satire has blood on its fangs, but she’s still smiling ... While the improvisational quality of her storytelling keeps Mislaid engagingly off-balance, it also creates thin stretches and dead ends as the plot lurches toward a romantic-comedy ending. It’s tempting to hope that Zink’s unnerving humor might pry open a space for us to think more reflectively about racism, homophobia and sexism than our earnestness usually allows. But the audience for Mislaid is surely limited, not by its politics so much as by those spores of tedium that eventually germinate and spread across the pages. This is a slim novel that reads better in excerpts.

Elif Shafak

Rave The Washington Post Elif Shafak is vexing officials in Turkey again. Good. A brilliant writer fluent in both English and Turkish, Shafak is a difficult problem for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s repressive government ... a deeply humane story about the cruel effects of Turkey’s intolerant sexual attitudes ... These early sections of the novel are a heartbreaking portrayal of the way misogynist social and religious attitudes conspire to crush a girl’s spirit. Shafak demonstrates with piercing insight how young Muslim women in Turkey are caught between religious ideals of purity and male fantasies of debasement ... Shafak is a master of captivating moments that provide a sprawling and intimate vision of Istanbul ... What’s most surprising, though, is the novel’s bright humor, even, at times, its zaniness: Weekend at Byzantine Bernie’s! ... truly subversive.

Téa Obreht

Rave The Washington Post It’s a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel. She has such a perfectly tuned ear for the simple poetry of Lurie’s vision ... On the day we meet her, Nora has run out of water—a calamity that Obreht conveys with such visceral realism that each copy of Inland should come with its own canteen ... The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose; it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography ... Sip slowly, make it last.

Jeanette Winterson

Rave The Washington Post ...a brainy, batty story—an unholy amalgamation of scholarship and comedy. She manages to pay homage to Shelley’s insight and passion while demonstrating her own extraordinary creativity ... From the start, these contemporary scenes feel like they’ve got a screw loose in the best possible way ... The dialogue is slick and funny, often delightfully obscene, but beneath all the kookiness, Winterson is satirizing sexual politics and exploring complicated issues of human desire. (Ian McEwan’s recent novel Machines Like Me buzzed through similar material, but it feels a little lifeless compared to Frankissstein) ... in Winterson’s hands it’s a bag of provocative tricks and treats. With diabolical ingenuity, she’s found a way to inject fresh questions about humanity’s future into the old veins of Frankenstein ... Winterson’s cleverest maneuver may be suggesting that transgender people are the true pioneers of a self-determined future in which we’ll all design our own bodies. Recast in that way, Frankenstein’s creation was not monstrous; he was just too early.

Leah Hager Cohen

Rave The Washington Post ... it’s an absolute delight... if anything about Strangers and Cousins sounds tepid or old-fashioned, know that Cohen has infused this story with the most pressing concerns of our era. The result is an unusually substantive comedy, a perfect summer novel: funny and tender but also provocative and wise ... Zoning, pollution, racism, anti-Semitism—these are heavy themes that could easily overwhelm Strangers and Cousins or, worse, look tritely exploited by it. But that’s the real artistry of Cohen’s work: her sensitive exploration of the whole range of our complicated, compromised lives. And she puts to rest the smug assumption that there’s anything minor or unambitious about a witty domestic novel ... Cohen’s ability to acknowledge the agony of that strife in the context of a modern, loving family makes this one of the most hopeful and insightful novels I’ve read in years.

Thomas Harris

Pan The Washington Post The story is mostly a snooze: not so much The Silence of the Lambs as The Counting of the Sheep ... the novel plods along with a hodgepodge of macabre silliness ... Which is the central problem with Cari Mora. Despite all its ghastly goings-on, this creaky thriller constantly slips on banana peels of its own unintentional comedy ... Even Anthony Hopkins would strain to make this gory goofiness frightening ... A couple of sentimental side stories eventually lead off to nowhere ... Toward the end of the novel, a man-eating crocodile in Biscayne Bay suffers a small bout of indigestion while passing one of the gangsters he ate. Readers of Cari Mora are likely to suffer similar but wholly temporary discomfort.

Mark Haddon

Rave The Washington Post Mark Haddon has written a terrifically exciting novel ... The whole thing would be a postmodern mess if it weren’t for Haddon’s astounding skill as a storyteller. The Porpoise is so riveting that I found myself constantly pining to fall back into its labyrinth of swashbuckling adventure and feminist resistance ... In the most magical way, the narrative seems to melt, transforming this modern-day crime into the ancient tale of Pericles ... We’re used to such molten transitions in film, but seeing one take place so flawlessly on the page feels like sorcery ... The way Haddon has streamlined this ramshackle tale into a sleek voyage of gripping tribulation is fantastic. But what’s especially remarkable is that the modern-day scenes interwoven with Pericles’ ancient adventures feel no less electrifying. The contemporary events have been polished to an antique patina and endowed with classical weight ... Please don’t let the obscure source material of The Porpoise scare you away. I promise its intimidating tangle of backstories will yield to your interest, and its structural complications will cohere in your imagination. The result is a novel just as thrilling as it is thoughtful.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Washington Post ... no mere sequel. Despite its focus on a subsequent chapter of black experience, it’s a surprisingly different kind of novel. The linguistic antics that have long dazzled Whitehead’s readers have been set aside here for a style that feels restrained and transparent. And the plot of The Nickel Boys tolerates no fissures in the fabric of ordinary reality; no surreal intrusions complicate the grim progress of this story. That groundedness in the soil of natural life is, perhaps, an implicit admission that the treatment of African Americans has been so bizarre and grotesque that fantastical enhancements are unnecessary ... Whitehead reveals the clandestine atrocities of Nickel Academy with just enough restraint to keep us in a state of wincing dread. He’s superb at creating synecdoches of pain ... feels like a smaller novel than The Underground Railroad, but it’s ultimately a tougher one, even a meaner one. It’s in conversation with works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and especially Martin Luther King ... what a deeply troubling novel this is. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Rave The Washington Post ... even better than we were promised. Taffy Brodesser-Akner brings to her first novel the currency of a hot dating app and the wisdom of a Greek tragedy. The result is a feminist jeremiad nested inside a brilliant comic novel—a book that makes you laugh so hard you don’t notice till later that your eyebrows have been singed off ... Brodesser-Akner demonstrates an anthropologist’s thoroughness in her study of contemporary adult dating and its catalogue of sexual practices, but her prose, ringing with manic energy, is obscenely funny ... With merciless precision, Brodesser-Akner traces the arcing trajectory of doomed affections: the glorious takeoff, the deluded calm, the shrieking descent ... I haven’t felt this much energy sparking off a novel since Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. ... Conveying the full tragedy of that predicament in a story that’s often blisteringly funny is the real triumph of this book. Few novels express so clearly that we’re all in trouble.

Ryan Chapman

Rave The Washington Post ... a compact cluster bomb of satire that kills widely and indiscriminately ... If you get it, there’s something rewarding about Chapman’s manic humor, the special satisfaction of catching his references to Foucault, Pentagram or Martin Baron. His satire of academic pomposity, the commercialization of the prison system and the infectious influence of marketing zaps with the power of a highly charged stun gun ... if you’re part of the Venn diagram that subscribes to N+1 and McSweeney’s, this is the most fun book you’ll read all year.

Eve Ensler

Rave The Washington Post ... a slim book of unbearable heft ... not a creation of psychological realism so much as an act of therapeutic imagination ... may be a very personal act of therapeutic recovery for the author, but Ensler also offers it as model for others.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Mixed The Washington Post Fans of Jennifer Egan’s last novel, Manhattan Beach, will recognize the same setting and time period, though the tone here is humorous rather than noirish ... Unfortunately, what should have been a mere 300-page novel became a 470-page tome. The best and worst thing that can be said about City of Girls is that it’s perfectly pleasant, the kind of book one wouldn’t mind finding in a vacation condo during a rainy week. In exchange for a series of diverting adventures, it demands only stamina from its readers. Not that it’s without charm ... [Gilbert\'s] got a good ear for the arch repartee of 1940s comedy. In the best passages, her witty dialogue sparkles like diamonds in champagne ... a story that takes a half-hour to travel a New York minute. And that leisurely pace pushes hard against the novel’s form ... the issue of female pleasure becomes the novel’s central, surprisingly pleasureless theme...never infuses the novel with much erotic energy. Vivian might as well be telling us how much she enjoys bowling ... Novels so rarely get better that I was shocked to discover that the ending of City of Girls is genuinely moving...it’s a delight to see Gilbert finally invest these characters with some real emotional heft and complexity.

Ocean Vuong

Rave The Washington Post May 31 marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, and the best present we could possibly receive is Ocean Vuong’s debut novel ... with his radical approach to form and his daring mix of personal reflection, historical recollection and sexual exploration, Vuong is surely a literary descendant of the author of Leaves of Grass. Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal ... this narrative flows—rushing from one anecdote to another, swirling past and present, constantly swelling with poignancy ... At times, the tension between Little Dog’s passion and his concern seems to explode the very structure of traditional narrative, and the pages break apart into the lines of an evocative prose poem—not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning ... Kindness and wisdom, always flickering through these pages, begin to accrue more thickly. The healing that finally arrives is fraught with pain and paradox, but no less welcome and remarkable.

Sarah Blake

Mixed The Washington Post This is very much a novel about what is left unsaid, which is ironic considering that so much is said — hundreds and hundreds of pages of repressed grief and strained smiles. Despite its dramatic opening, the bulk of the story is far more immersive than propulsive ... This rare species of gilded immutability is easy to mock, but it’s difficult to locate the author’s sympathies. Blake...seems to waver between satirizing these people and romanticizing their opulence ... ... Perhaps it’s appropriate that The Guest Book feels as conflicted about its values as several generations of Miltons do — or maybe I’m just trying to stabilize my feelings toward this frustrating novel. There’s no denying that Blake writes powerfully about these people ... Indeed, The Guest Book is monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt. But is the loss of a $3.5 million vacation home a relevant subject for a great American novel at this moment? Or does the whole lyrical enterprise feel overwrought, even precious?

Gary Shteyngart

Positive The Washington Post ... a slit-your-wrist satire illuminated by the author\'s absurd wit ... what pulls on our affections and keeps the satire from growing too brittle is Lenny\'s earnest voice as he struggles to fit into a world that clearly has no more use for him ... light on plot but studded with hilarious and sometimes depressing details of our culture\'s decay ... Shteyngart\'s most trenchant satire depicts the inane, hyper-sexualized culture that connects everybody even while destroying any actual community or intimacy. This may be the only time I\'ve wanted to stand up on the subway and read passages of a book out loud ... Perhaps the saddest aspect of this Super Sad True Love Story is that you can smell Shteyngart sweating to stay one step ahead of the decaying world he\'s trying to satirize. It\'s an almost impossible race now that the exhibitionism of ordinary people has lost its ability to shock us.

Ian McEwan

Rave The Christian Science Monitor The boiling wit of Amsterdam won\'t be everyone\'s cup of tea, but those thirsty for satire will gulp down this little book ... McEwan writes the sort of scathing retorts and witty repartee we wish we could think of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic ... This is a dark morality tale in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh\'s best work.

Ian McEwan

Positive The Washington Post \"... [a] carefully constructed comedy of terrors ... McEwan... is a master at cerebral silliness ... McEwan is incapable of writing a dull line, but his AI conundrums feel as fresh as a game of Pong ... McEwan’s special contribution is not to articulate the challenge of robots but to cleverly embed that challenge in the lives of two people trying to find a way to exist with purpose. That human drama makes Machines Like Me strikingly relevant even though it’s set in a world that never happened almost 40 years ago ... [McEwan] is not only one of the most elegant writers alive, he is one of the most astute at crafting moral dilemmas within the drama of everyday life. True, contending with an attractive synthetic rival is a problem most of us won’t have to deal with anytime soon (sorry, Alexa), but figuring out how to treat each other, how to do some good in the world, how to create a sense of value in our lives, these are problems no robot will ever solve for us.\

Susan Choi

Positive The Washington Post \"As you’ll learn, [Choi\'s] a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack. She’s equally astute at portraying the exaggerated passions of teenage life and the way that youthful energy warps the fabric of reality ... How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated and remembered. And no one writes about erotic misadventures with more vicious humor than Choi ... Don’t fancy you know where this is going; Choi will outsmart you at every step ... Committing time and attention to a novel is always a trust exercise. This author never takes you where you thought you were going, but have faith: You won’t be disappointed.\

T.C. Boyle

Positive The Washington Post \"... we can feel Boyle’s censorious attitude pumping through these pages like a naloxone drip. That’s not to say that Outside Looking In is one long buzzkill, but it is a farce laced with tragedy: the story of a good man’s increasingly tortuous moral gymnastics ... There’s plenty of zany comedy here — including a poo-flinging monkey and a sombrero from which Leary picks the names of sex partners like some kind of libidinous predecessor of the sorting hat in \'Harry Potter.\' The humor, though, is tempered by the damage that Leary wreaks on Fitz and his family ... This is a superbly paced novel that manages to feel simultaneously suspenseful and inevitable ... Yes, it’s a drag, man, but any enlightenment that comes from a pill isn’t worth having. Better to get high on a good book.\

Sadie Jones

Rave The Washington Post Jones is a patient sower of dread. The tiny seeds of concern she plants along the way germinate and blossom in lurid hues ... The disaster that unfolds is like something Shirley Jackson might have spun from Meet the Parents and Snakes on a Plane — which is such an absurd description that I suspect Jones’s special venom has already coursed its way to my brain. But that’s the effect of this clever writer who undulates so eerily from phantasmal excess to psychological realism ... The Snakes eventually sloughs off its spookier elements, but the criminal story that emerges grows more shocking because of the rare quality of brutality in Jones’s prose. Of course, we’ve no shortage of gruesome writers, particularly in the thriller genre, but that’s not Jones’s technique. She excels, instead, at drawing us into tender sympathy with her characters even as she coolly subjects them to the most monstrous treatment. The result is hypnotic — like staring into the serpent’s eyes just before it strikes.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Positive The Washington Post \"What follows for the next 150 pages is a volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud. Do I recommend it? Yes I said yes I will Yes ... As he swoops back and forth through the impressions and highlights of his long life, Ferlinghetti spits on conventional grammar and mocks the very idea of linear coherence. A Beat sensibility? Sure, but there’s also a dose of Robin Williams’s manic comedy here: the hairpin turns, the interior voices bantering with each other, the constant spinning of an idea till it ricochets off to another. He’s the silliest, angriest, kindest, smartest man you’ve ever heard — a whirling dervish of scholarly asides, literary allusions, corny puns and twisted aphorisms ... Yes, [reading this book] can feel like trying to set the table while falling down the stairs, but there’s something hypnotic about Ferlinghetti’s relentless commentary, a style that amuses him, too ... Stick with this book long enough, and you’ll start to hear the central concerns of Ferlinghetti’s life.\

Dave Eggers

Pan The Washington Post \"All of this is fairly engaging, though it’s tempting to think we’ve seen this buddy film before ... Which brings us to what this novel is missing. Eggers has pared his clever style down to a series of flat, declarative sentences. The characters have been crunched into types. The details of this place have been sandblasted away. At best, we’re left with the stark elements of a parable, which raises the book’s pretentiousness quotient to dangerously high levels. At worst, we have a story that conforms to the West’s reductive attitudes about the developing world ... But what’s truly disappointing is the novel’s final paragraph, which lands like a molotov cocktail of toxic cynicism.\

Helen Oyeyemi

Positive The Washington Post \"... a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses. If you think you know where you’re going in this forest, you’ll soon be lost. Oyeyemi has built her house out of something far more complex than candy ... dizzying ... Anyone who resists Oyeyemi’s absurdism will find Gingerbread a very bitter meal, indeed. A fan of Aimee Bender, Oyeyemi works in an adjacent realm of dreams where things simultaneously make perfect sense and no sense at all. What’s always clear, though, is Oyeyemi’s wit, often tossed off in satirical asides — sometimes silly, sometimes sharply political.\

Miriam Toews

Positive The Washington Post \"This is fiction as deliberation, and yet it feels packed with drama. It also feels infused with a deeply sympathetic understanding of the way women talk — a subject that has drawn the attention of scholars as diverse as Luce Irigaray and Deborah Tannen. Toews captures the Mennonites’ antique way of speaking, a language thick with biblical tropes and Christian ideals challenged by the obscenity of what has been done to them ... Toews conveys not only what these women suffered but how stoically and graciously they endure ... Though Toews remains frustratingly unknown in the United States, she has long been one of my favorite contemporary authors. The compressed structure of Women Talking makes it unlike her earlier novels, but once again she draws us into the lives of obscure people and makes their survival feel as crucial and precarious as our own.\

Colson Whitehead

Positive The Washington Post \"... a charming autobiographical novel that comes honey-glazed with nostalgia ... Whitehead is sharpest on the plight of well-off black kids, his tone wavering between resigned sympathy and impatient mockery ... [Benji\'s] fragile hope may be the most irresistible quality of this wise, affectionate novel.\

Toni Morrison

Rave The Washington Post Her new novel, Home, is a surprisingly unpretentious story from America’s only living Nobel laureate in literature ... This scarily quiet tale packs all the thundering themes Morrison has explored before. She’s never been more concise, though, and that restraint demonstrates the full range of her power ... a transparent narrator who re-creates scenes and conveys dialogue in sharp but unadorned prose—no ghosts, no magical realism, none of the famous (or infamous) impressionism that so annoyed John Updike ... Morrison is composing a kind of prose poem here in which only a few tightly described incidents convey the ill health of the larger culture ... Despite all the old horrors that Morrison faces in these pages with weary recognition, Home is a daringly hopeful story about the possibility of healing—or at least surviving in a shadow of peace.

Helen Oyeyemi

Rave The Washington Post \"But I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land ... Oyeyemi aggravates our anxieties about maternal jealousy and the limits of parental love, subjects we’ve been trained from childhood to consider in black and white ... Oyeyemi proves herself a daring and unnerving writer about race. This isn’t one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment... Boy, Snow, Bird wants to draw us into the dark woods of America’s racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk. Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism ... Oyeyemi captures that unresolvable strangeness in the original fairy tales that later editors — from Grimm to Disney — sanded away.\

Nathan Englander

Rave The Washington Post \"There’s nothing derivative about this clever novel, but its tragicomic treatment of death, guilt and Jewish orthodoxy surely pays homage to the late great [Philip Roth] ... [the novel\'s] first part serves as another reminder of Englander’s extraordinary skill as a short story writer ... When the main part of the novel picks up 20 years later, Englander keeps pushing on [specific] issues with the same fertile wit and tender compassion ... Larry’s fanatical devotion and his anxiety about fulfilling it might look ridiculous to those who don’t feel the vitality of tradition, but the humor of kaddish.com is infused with delight rather than mockery. What a rare blessing to find a smart and witty novel about the unexpected ways religious commitment can fracture a life — and restore it.\

Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Positive The Washington Post \"But Sudbanthad’s skills are more than just meteorological. A native of Thailand now living in New York, he captures the nation’s lush history in all its turbulence and resilience. Even the novel’s complex structure reflects Bangkok’s culture ... The connections between [the book\'s] stories are sometimes clear, sometimes opaque, a structure that demands an extra degree of tolerance (a few brief chapters are told from the perspective of birds). But allow yourself to sink into that ambiguity, and you’ll find Bangkok Wakes to Rain entrancing. Individual incidents are dramatic and striking ... Sudbanthad’s narrative is not just a tribute to his home, it’s an act of resistance against the city’s mildew and amnesia: Bangkok’s unwillingness to retain what came before. These stories, loosely linked together, become a way of preserving what is otherwise inscribed only on the liquid surface of memory.\

John Lanchester

Mixed The Washington Post \"As a parable, [the direction of the novel] is all highly relevant. As a novel, it’s fairly dull. Boredom is a hard state to portray effectively without succumbing to it. And Lanchester doesn’t have the chilling style of, say, Cormac McCarthy or the wry satire of Margaret Atwood, which could have charged this apocalyptic vision ... There are moments of excitement — incursions from those mysterious Others — but what the story really needs is a richer sense of this complex society ... Floating somewhere between realism and fabulism, The Wall doesn’t fully harness the benefits of either mode.\

Madhuri Vijay

Rave The Washington Post \"Vijay ... captures Shalini’s wary curiosity about the mountainous realm far to the north of her hometown ... What seems at first like a quiet, ruminative story of one woman’s grief slowly begins to spark with the energy of religious conflicts and political battles. Vijay draws us into the bloody history of this contested region and the cruel conundrum of ordinary lives trapped between outside agitators and foreign conquerors ... The Far Field is most poignant when it exposes the unintentional havoc of good intentions ... The Far Field offers something essential: a chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible—and honest enough to make them real.\

Jerome Charyn

Rave The Washington Post Now in his 80s, [Charyn] seems ever more daring ... Charyn has found a path all his own — neither a substitute for biography nor a violation of it ... For fans of Roosevelt, this is tremendous fun. But readers unfamiliar with his life and the political history of the late 19th century should be forewarned: There will be no coddling on this breakneck tour. The five dozen names listed in the novel’s dramatis personae offer a handy guide to who’s who, but those terse descriptions will hardly bring the uninitiated up to speed ... [the front cover] strikes just the right tone, as does this delightful novel.

Elizabeth McCracken

Positive The Washington Post \"...nothing is ordinary in this story ... this is really a novel of characters, not mysteries, and Bertha is a whirlwind of personality capable of disrupting the staid patterns of Salford and drawing people into her orbit ... Indeed, the tone of Bowlaway wobbles like a knocked pin that might fall toward comedy or tragedy. There’s a wickedness to McCracken’s technique, the way she lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us ... Several of these episodes also serve as a reminder of what a masterful short story writer McCracken is ... Such is the endlessly surprising course of genealogy in this novel with compassion to spare.\

Marlon James

Rave The Washington Post \"... the first spectacular volume of a planned trilogy ... James has spun an African fantasy as vibrant, complex and haunting as any Western mythology, and nobody who survives reading this book will ever forget it ... \'Ocean’s Eleven\' has got nothing on this ensemble ... Harvesting mythology and fantasy from the rich soil of Africa — from the Anansi tales to the Sundiata Epic and so much more — James hangs a string of awesome adventures on this quest for the missing boy ... As these bloody stories and their mysteries pile up, I sometimes felt as lost as Tracker does in the woods, despite the inclusion of James’s five hand-drawn maps ... But I didn’t much mind the bouts of discombobulation because I was always enchanted by James’s prose with its adroit mingling of ancient and modern tones ... Scene by scene, the fights are cinematic spectacles, spellbinding blurs of violence set to the sounds of clanging swords and tearing tendons.\

Tessa Hadley

Positive The Washington Post \"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive ... [The events in the book are] nothing unusual, I suppose, just the everyday tragedies and betrayals of domestic life but rendered by Hadley’s prose into something extraordinary ... The tone of Late in the Day is perhaps Hadley’s most delicate accomplishment. This is romantic comedy pulled by a hearse. The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent — lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley’s attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire.\

Nuruddin Farah

Mixed The Washington Post \"North of Dawn is bracingly honest about the difficulties of assimilation, the way hospitality curdles into condescension and gratitude sours into resentment ... [The idea that Muslim radicalism is one side of the coin of intolerance that’s gaining currency in liberal democracies] is such a timely, necessary argument, but I wish it were expressed more gracefully in these pages. North of Dawn suffers from a ramshackle quality one might expect from an exciting but not quite finished draft. There are strange gaps in the plot, and the prose sometimes slips into antique cliches ... And Farah’s characters sometimes speak in weirdly artificial ways ... The story Farah shows us through these characters’ derailed lives is more illuminating than anything they can explain to us.\

Elaine Pagels

Positive The Washington Post Why Religion? is, as its subtitle states, a personal story, but it’s also a wide-ranging work of cultural reflection and a brisk tour of the most exciting religion scholarship over the past 40 years ... She is consistently, sometimes hilariously humble. She mentions that she started reading Greek the way one of us might mention that we started watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt ... Her controversial professional triumphs and critical discoveries are recounted with head-spinning speed ... As she speaks of profound spiritual and religious matters, I pined for a more poetic and contemplative style, something along the order of Marilynne Robinson or Christian Wiman ... But when the memoir arrives at the death of her little boy, Pagels’s tone feels bracingly appropriate ... One gets the impression that studying herself in the crucible of grief was often the lone activity that kept her sane ... Pagels is as fearless as she is candid. In the depths of her sorrow, she recalls uncanny coincidences, acts of precognition, ghostly visitations and even a confrontation with a demon one night in the hospital. These episodes are never submitted as factual evidence of supernatural intervention. Instead, Pagels offers her subjective experiences to demonstrate the way our lives are molded by ancient stories, consciously and unconsciously ... Why Religion? feels miraculous and yet entirely believable.

Jack Miles

Positive The Washington Post For many Americans who know little about the Muslim faith, reading this book could be a crucial step out of ignorance at a time of rising Islamophobia.

Anuradha Roy

Rave The Washington Post \"[Roy\'s] new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived, is once again filled with impossible longing ... Indeed, some of the novel’s most fascinating incidents involve his mother’s unlikely friendship with two real-life artists: the English dancer and scholar Beryl de Zoete (1879-1962) and the German painter and musician Walter Spies (1895-1942) ... Many readers may not be familiar with de Zoete and Spies, which makes Roy’s graceful reanimation of them even more enchanting ... All the Lives We Never Lived begins in such intimate, private pain, but as Myshkin’s sympathies expand, so does the novel’s scope. The result is a story that eventually encompasses the world far beyond a boy’s little town ... Even more captivating than the unexpected turns of this plot is the way [Roy] reaches into the depths of melancholy but never sinks into despair.\

Anonymous

Mixed The Washington Post The Kingfisher Secret, an anonymous novel about how the KGB engineered Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House. The publisher claims the author is \'a respected writer and former journalist,\' whose \'identity is being kept secret in order to protect the source of the ideas that inspired this novel.\' ... According to The Kingfisher Secret, Russia’s efforts to disrupt American democracy at the highest levels began in the late 1960s when a pretty athlete named Elena was plucked from Czechoslovakia for an elite spy program ... \'The goal of the program was achingly simple,\' the narrator explains with aching simplicity: \'to encourage and create agents of disorder and chaos in America, to use democracy as a weapon against itself.\' ... in general, though, The Kingfisher Secret is a silly confection about Russian scheming spun within the broad outlines of Ivana’s life. Aside from a few car chases and thuggish murders, the author demonstrates neither the narrative ingenuity nor the stylistic vitality to make the story engaging. Admittedly, the confirmed and speculative details of the president’s malfeasant career are hard for fiction to match, but this plot doesn’t exert itself any more than Donald Trump lumbering around his golf course ... Someday, we’ll get a great novel about this era, and when it comes, it won’t need anonymity to grab our attention.

Yan Lianke, Trans. by Carlos Rojas

Positive The Washington Post It’s the creepiest book I’ve read in years: a social comedy that bleeds like a zombie apocalypse ... an artfully organized, minute-by-minute description of \'the great somnambulism,\' a horrific night of sleepwalking ... A macabre subplot pushes this theme even further into the realm of the grotesque that stretches from Jonathan Swift to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ... Yan’s understated wit runs through these pages like a snake through fallen leaves, but if you don’t appreciate the harmonic repetitions of his narrative, it will seem maddeningly dull. And if you insist on traditional character development, you will be completely disappointed. You either fall under this incantation, or you break away in frustration. The novel’s style poses special challenges, too. The plot’s dreaminess is emphasized by Yan’s repeated phrases, relentless recycling and extraordinarily metaphoric language ... it’s a wake-up call about the path we’re on.

Anna Burns

Rave The Washington Post \"[Milkman is] the last great novel of the year. Possibly the most challenging one, too ... Lovers of modernist fiction by William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce — I know you’re out there, waiting for a book to slake your thirst for something strange and complex — Milkman is for you ... The counterweight to [the novel\'s] grim predicament is the narrator’s irrepressible wit ... The narrator’s thick patter, with its long sentences and infrequent paragraph breaks, rings with such a curious sound. It’s as though the intense pressure of this place has compressed the elements of comedy and horror to produce some new alloy.\

John Boyne

Rave The Washington Post \"I’m embarrassed by how much I enjoyed John Boyne’s wicked new novel, A Ladder to the Sky. It’s an addictive Rubik’s Cube of vice that keeps turning up new patterns of depravity. By the time every facet clicks into place, the story feels utterly surprising yet completely inevitable ... A Ladder to the Sky is a satire of writerly ambition wrapped in a psychological thriller. Beware reading this in public: Boyne’s prose inspires such a collision of laughing and wincing that you’re likely to seem a little unbalanced ... Clearly, decades in the business have rendered Boyne fluent in the language of literary combat. He knows just how certain writers pierce their colleagues with barbed compliments and hobble them with belittling praise.\

Markus Zusak

Positive The Washington Post A collage of charming, bracing and scarring moments ... There’s much to love about this capacious novel, but there’s also so much. In addition to its obvious symbolic weight, the story feels freighted ... an extravagantly overengineered story ... overstuffed as it is, Bridge of Clay is one of those monumental books that can draw you across space and time into another family’s experience in the most profound way.

Mitch Albom

Pan The Washington Post \"The Next Person is so packed with sweet aphorisms that it’s like scrolling through the Instagram account of a New Age masseuse ... What’s surprising about The Next Person You Meet in Heaven is how unmoving it remains, even during moments of horrible suffering. Cruel fathers, dead babies, severed limbs—these tragedies don’t catch at our heartstrings because, despite approaching the mysteries of life, death and salvation, the story always retreats into sentimentality, which can’t satisfy our most profound questions.\

Stephen King

Positive The Washington Post \"You’ll chew through a few chapters of Elevation before realizing there is no razor blade in this caramel apple. King’s new novel is trick and treat, a poignant parable of prejudice overcome and resentment healed ... And yet this novel may repel stridently progressive readers as much as it does staunchly conservative ones — which, I suspect, will not trouble King too much ... [King] has written a slim book about an ordinary man in an extraordinary condition rising above hatred and learning to live with tact and dignity. That’s not much of a Halloween book, but it’s well timed for our terrifying season.\

Joyce Carol Oates

Mixed The Washington Post \"Poor Adriane is never certain what’s happening to her, and anyone who reads Hazards of Time Travel is likely to feel the same way. At first, the story’s clunky political satire and feverish tone suggest the makings of a young-adult novel, but that’s another ruse. The plot quickly gets snarled up in B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviorism, which the kids won’t find all that rewarding. Adults, though, may be intrigued to see Oates’s sly efforts to create a time-loop ... the story’s unpredictable shocks may reduce readers to a state of learned helplessness. Nothing — including a happy ending — is as it seems in this accelerating swirl of political and academic satire, science fiction and romantic melodrama. At 80, after more than 40 novels, Oates is still casting some awfully dark magic.\

Jonathan Lethem

Rave The Washington Post The good news is that Lethem is back in the PI game, and there is no bad news. The Feral Detective is one of his nimblest novels, a plunky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era ... his celebrated parody of hard-boiled detective fiction is now distilled to a clear amber spirit ... The elements of detective fiction fit in Lethem’s hands as comfortably as a snub-nose .38. He can hit an old Ross Macdonald motif at 50 yards ... This Jerry-rigged contraption of Sam Spade and Mad Max could buckle under the weight of pretension and political anger, but The Feral Detective is too agile for that—thanks to its narrator, Phoebe. She’s sharp and sassy and always willing to confess her own contradictory feelings, which sway erratically from lust to terror. It’s a pleasure to see a smart writer having so much grisly fun ... What’s more, the plot maintains its centripetal acceleration, easily soaring over those swamps of Lethemian introspection that sometimes swallowed his previous novels ... Who can really be saved in our collapsing society is the question that rumbles below these pages, but the story races along so fast you’ll barely notice you’ve entered such dark territory till it’s too late to head back.

Susan Orlean

Rave The Washington Post ...a wide-ranging, deeply personal and terrifically engaging investigation of humanity’s bulwark against oblivion: the library ... As a narrator, Orlean moves like fire herself, with a pyrotechnic style that smolders for a time over some ancient bibliographic tragedy, leaps to the latest technique in book restoration and then illuminates the story of a wildly eccentric librarian ... With a great eye for telling and quirky detail, she presents a vast catalogue of remarkable characters ... If the spine of The Library Book seems strained to contain so much diverse material, that variety is also what makes this such a constant pleasure to read ... You can’t help but finish The Library Book and feel grateful that these marvelous places belong to us all.

Daniel Mason

Rave The Washington Post The beauty of Daniel Mason’s new novel, The Winter Soldier, persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of his talent. As a writer, Mason knows how to capture the grace of a moment ... he’s extraordinarily good at conjuring up journeys into unfamiliar places ... The story that unfolds in this forsaken place is so captivating that you may feel as unable to leave it as Lucius does ... The descriptions of maggots are a vision of hell you will never forget ... The redemption the story ultimately offers is equally unlikely and gorgeous, painfully limited but gratefully received in a world thrown into chaos.

James Frey

Pan The Washington Post \"...the only thing you really need to know about Katerina is that it’s ridiculous, a book so heated by narcissism that you have to read it wearing oven mitts ... Katerina offers a volcanic regurgitation of Frey’s dream of writing a bestseller, his descent into addiction and the literary scandal that made him infamous. The author seems to believe that his fall from grace is burned into America’s consciousness like the fall of Saigon ... I don’t know if his life would be easier, but his prose would be better if he actually looked at anything, if he tried to capture on the page something specific and fresh about his experience instead of leaning on a few trite rhetorical flourishes.\

Christina Dalcher

Mixed The Washington Post When does a publishing trend give voice to our anxieties, and when does it merely exploit those anxieties? ... That’s the uncomfortable question I kept asking myself as I read Christina Dalcher’s Vox, the latest novel to give us a fully inflated misogynist nightmare ... Unfortunately, the novel’s most interesting ideas are quickly muzzled. Almost as soon as Vox pivots from exposition to action, it loses its edge. It shifts from a sharp work of feminist speculative fiction to a frothy thriller ... Vox never plumbs the depths of its clever foundation.

Nico Walker

Rave The Washington Post Cherry is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph born of gore and suffering that reads as if it’s been scratched out with a dirty needle across the tender skin of a man’s forearm ... Walker credits Tim O’Connell, his editor at Knopf, with transforming those typewritten pages into this tour de force. But when I contacted O’Connell, he claimed ... \'Nico simply poured everything he had into it.\' That sounds right—and true to the searing authenticity of this novel, which tries to answer the question, \'How do you get to be a scumbag?\' But in the process of laying out the road to perdition, Walker demonstrates the depths of his humanity and challenges us to bridge the distance that we imagine separates us from the damned.

Leif Enger

Mixed The Washington Post \"And now, a full decade after [So Brave, Young, and Handsome], comes Virgil Wander, another small-town tale that struggles to be something more than merely charming ... I wanted to like Virgil Wander, and I appreciate Enger’s attempt to capture the subterranean tremors that can unsettle a person or a town, but the story’s assorted eccentricities never gain much forward momentum — until, suddenly, all its little puzzles explode in the final, absurd pages. What Virgil calls the \'fable-like atmosphere\' remains simply cloudy, clotted by earnest pronouncements ... Enger tempts us to imagine we can catch the scent of magic wafting through this story, but too often we get these limp aphorisms instead. For all their studied quaintness, Virgil and his town aren’t vital enough to offer us a world that can shake ours.\

Barbara Kingsolver

Positive The Washington Post Here comes the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats ... That may sound like the makings of a deadly polemical novel, a strident op-ed stretched out for more than 450 pages. But Unsheltered is not that — or it’s not just that — largely because Kingsolver has constructed this book as two interlaced stories, separated by more than a century ... there’s something a little claustrophobic about being confined within these axioms of liberal orthodoxy ... Ironically, the alternate chapters of Unsheltered, set in the 1870s, are fresher and more rewarding ... Unsheltered re-creates this post-Civil War period with wonderful fidelity to the tenor of the era ... these alternating stories about Willa and Thatcher maintain their distinctive tones but echo one another in curious, provocative ways.

Alice Mattison

Positive The Washington Post Alice Mattison’s new novel wrestles with the irreducibly complex demands of having a conscience in an age of political depravity ... Conscience offers a thoughtful reflection on who gets to curate history and what responsibility we have — if any — to our loved ones’ myths ... a big, messy novel of ideas encompassing more subplots involving racial tensions, sexual betrayal, shifting standards of privacy and the rights of the homeless. Some readers may find this story as inviting as a ball of tangled yarn, but Conscience will please those who complain that so much literary fiction is a little too neat, ironical or even adolescent ... the real triumph of this ruminative novel is that it transports us back to a period when exercising one’s conscience was a national emergency.

Esi Edugyan

Rave The Washington Post Washington Black — one of the most anticipated books of the year — should finally get American readers to wake up to this extraordinary novelist across our Northern border ... Washington Black is an engrossing hybrid of 19th-century adventure and contemporary subtlety, a rip-roaring tale of peril imbued with our most persistent strife ... Wash’s wide-eyed adolescence gives way to hard-won wisdom to produce a narrative voice that’s tinged with equal parts wonder and sorrow ... it’s those brittle tensions between the privileged and the powerless that Edugyan explores so elegantly in Washington Black ... Washington Black doesn’t suggest that slave and master suffer equally, of course, but it raises provocative questions about the way privilege poisons even those who benefit from it ... Edugyan is a magical writer.

Julie Schumacher

Rave The Washington Post The epistolary structure of her previous novel is gone—this is a straight narrative delivered with acrid wit—but [her character Jason] Fitger is still here at its center, just as irritated and harried as ever ... anyone who’s taught will recognize these characters, tightly bound in their arcane knowledge and rancid grievances ... Fitger is delightfully acerbic and self-destructive in these pages, raging against the dean (\'the human windsock\') and especially his arch-nemesis, Dr. Roland Gladwell, chair of the lavishly funded economics department ... That clash of cultures—mammon vs. art—burns through this novel, which provides a wry commentary on the plight of the arts in our mercantile era ... Enrollment is now open. Don’t skip this class.

Gary Shteyngart

Rave The Washington Post Adjust your expectations when you pick up Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success. His new book is not insanely funny nor hilariously absurd. It’s better than that. A mature blending of the author’s signature wit and melancholy, Lake Success feels timely but not fleeting ... There’s something uncanny about Shteyngart’s ability to inhabit this man’s boundless confidence, his neediness, his juvenile tendency to fall in love and imagine everyone as a life-changing friend ... comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.

R O Kwon

Rave The Washington Post \"The Incendiaries is a sharp, little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon doesn’t make it easy to get her debut out of your system ... Kwon’s crisp, poetic style conveys events that feel lightly obscured by fog, just enough to be disorienting without being frustrating ... One of the cleverest aspects of The Incendiaries is the way Kwon suggests that all three of these people are lying, though for different reasons and with wildly different repercussions ... In a nation still so haunted by the divine promise, on the cusp of ever-more contentious debates about abortion and other intrinsically spiritual issues, The Incendiaries arrives at precisely the right moment.\

Maria Dahvana Headley

Rave The Washington Post \"Her modern-day reimagining of Beowulf is the most surprising novel I’ve read this year. It’s a bloody parody of suburban sanctimony and a feminist revision of macho heroism. In this brash appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Headley swoops from comedy to tragedy, from the drama of brunch to the horrors of war ... One of the great pleasures of this novel is how cleverly and unpredictably Headley translates the actions of upper-class life into the sweep and gore of Beowulf ... But this is no mock heroic — or not merely a mock heroic. In her own destabilizing way, Headley vacillates between a wicked parody of privileged families and a tragic tale of their forgotten counterparts ... Headley is the most fearsome warrior here, lunging and pivoting between ancient and modern realms, skewering class prejudices, defending the helpless and venturing into the dark crevices of our shameful fears. Someday The Mere Wife may take its place alongside such feminist classics as The Wide Sargasso Sea because in its own wicked and wickedly funny way it’s just as insightful about how we make and kill our monsters.\

Kate Christensen

Rave The Washington Post Christensen is a discerning and witty writer ... Having gathered these disparate people together, Christensen gently rolls and pitches the stage, dislodging stones of sadness that had been safely stuck in the crevices of their everyday lives. That discombobulation is the key to the story’s appeal, its unstable mix of romantic comedy, class oppression and spiritual angst ... Christensen is a master at drawing us into the interior lives of her characters, toeing the line between satire and sympathy ... Although that geopolitical metaphor is convincing, it would ultimately make for a rather schematic and dull story. Fortunately, Christensen has something more mysterious and existential in mind. She’s interested in the most intimate and profound changes we’re willing to make only when tossed by the tempest of life.

Anne Tyler

Mixed The Washington Post Unfortunately, Tyler doesn’t supply many incidents as unsettling as that encounter with the real or imagined hijacker. Instead, the first half of Clock Dance skates through the decades of Willa’s life, from childhood to motherhood to widowhood. Characters are introduced and cast off the way one might rifle through old clothes in the attic—with the same amused sense of familiarity. If these chapters aren’t wholly engaging, at least they’re great for Anne Tyler Bingo Night ... Even as the story moves into the 21st century, it still feels fusty, like an antique speculation about how people might live in the year 2017 ... Still, despite those sepia tones, Clock Dance finally starts to work in its second half when all its largely superfluous foundation-setting is mercifully finished ... Tyler’s novels may feel too conciliatory toward the strictures of domestic life, too free of erotic energy to be feminist works, but her stories are often concerned with the central challenge of the feminist movement: How to imagine and then inhabit possibilities beyond those circumscribed by convention?

Tim Winton

Rave The Washington Post Tim Winton’s new novel hovers between a profane confession and a plea for help. A distinctly Down Under story by this most Australian writer, The Shepherd’s Hut is almost too painful to read, but also too plaintive to put down ... If too many contemporary novels strike you as effete and suburban, here’s survivalist fiction at its rawest from a novelist who sometimes sounds as bleak as our own Cormac McCarthy.\

Steve Israel

Mixed The Washington Post \"Israel reportedly wrote his previous novel largely on a cellphone, which may have accounted for that book’s antic comedy. His new novel is a more polished affair, but also flatter. Too often the humor shoots blanks ... Where we crave something subversive and shocking, a satire commensurate to the American carnage, we get, instead, one-liners that feel Bob-Hope-fresh. And ridiculous as the characters in Big Guns are, they pale next to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre or politicians like Marco Rubio and Rob Portman, who tweet their prayers at grieving parents while accepting millions from the gun lobby.\

Fatima Farheen Mirza

Rave The Washington Post ...absolutely gorgeous ... Mirza writes about family life with the wisdom, insight and patience you would expect from a mature novelist adding a final masterpiece to her canon, but this is, fortunately, just the start of an extraordinary career ... Has a household ever been cradled in such tender attention as this novel provides? Possibly, but in a different register. As Marilynne Robinson has done with Protestants and Alice McDermott has done with Catholics, Mirza finds in the intensity of a faithful Muslim family a universal language of love and anguish that speaks to us all ... In prose of quiet beauty and measured restraint, Mirza traces those twined strands of yearning and sorrow that faith involves. She writes with a mercy that encompasses all things.

Tommy Orange

Rave The Washington Post \"Everything about There There acknowledges a brutal legacy of subjugation — and shatters it. Even the book’s challenging structure is a performance of determined resistance. This is a work of fiction, but Orange opens with a white-hot essay. With the glide of a masterful stand-up comic and the depth of a seasoned historian, Orange rifles through our national storehouse of atrocities and slurs, alluding to figures from Col. John Chivington to John Wayne. References that initially seem disjointed soon twine into a rope on which the beads of American hatred are strung ... Orange makes little concession to distracted readers, but as the number of characters continues to grow we begin to grasp the web of connections between these people ... As these individual stories intersect, the plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. Technically, it’s a dazzling, cinematic climax played out in quick-cut, rotating points of view. But its greater impact is emotional: a final, sorrowful demonstration of the pathological effects of centuries of abuse and degradation.\

Bill Clinton & James Patterson

Pan The Washington Post \"The President Is Missing reveals as many secrets about the U.S. government as The Pink Panther reveals about the French government. And yet it provides plenty of insight on the former president’s ego ... As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments for years ... for much of The President Is Missing, Patterson seems to have deferred to the First Writer. That’s a problem. When we pick up a thriller this silly, we want underwear models shooting Hellfire missiles from hang gliders; Clinton gives us Cabinet members questioning each other over Skype ... The larger problem, though, is how cramped the novel’s scope remains. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password.\

Kevin Powers

Mixed The Washington Post A Shout in the Ruins marches with a phalanx of great novels by Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Geraldine Brooks, E.L. Doctorow, Paulette Jiles, Charles Frazier, Jeffrey Lent, Michael Shaara, Gore Vidal, Stephen Crane and so many more. Any new writer who tries to join the ranks of these authors risks tripping over their feet or, worse, being set upon by the cliches that scamper after them like mangy dogs ... Powers brings to Virginia battle scenes the same searing immediacy he brought to his stories of carnage in The Yellow Birds. Once again, we come to feel the mix of agony and absurdity suffered by soldiers caught between the tectonic plates of history ... Powers has curdled the gothic tradition into a thick paste and spread it all over these pages. Rather than highlighting the perversity of slavery, his sententious prose strains to upstage it ... That’s particularly lamentable because Powers can be such a forceful writer when he resists the temptation to substitute grandiose gestures for his own hard-won wisdom.

David Duchovny

Positive The Washington Post \"...this may be the only novel ever to start with epigraphs by W.B. Yeats and Ed Koch. Take that incongruity as fair warning for the blarney that lies ahead ... But Duchovny is in no hurry to cycle through that doomed romance. Miss Subways is definitely single-tracking, with lots of unloading along the way. If you can get yourself to sit back and stop focusing on the destination, there are plenty of oddly charming incidents to enjoy. Duchovny is particularly funny on the antics of schoolchildren and their uptight parents. He’s also got a great ear for the anxieties of dating, and the sweet comedy of middle-aged sex ... dark elements provide emotional ballast to what might otherwise have been a merely silly tale. That darkness can’t permanently overshadow the story, though. This is, after all, a classic romantic comedy — not a grim Celtic myth. It’s a novel that wonders, \'How steadfast is your belief in what is real?\' — just the kind of question Agent Mulder might ask.\

Jake Tapper

Mixed The Washington Post \"As openings go, this is terrific — a handful of taut pages steamed with confusion, sex and dread. But no sooner does Charlie climb out of that ditch than this novel careens into another one and stays there, spinning its wheels for 150 pages of leaden back story before we finally arrive again at that fateful morning crash ... Once all this cloak-and-dagger is methodically laid out, The Hellfire Club finally lurches into the crazy Dan Brownish adventure it was meant to be ... As the country’s future hangs in the balance, Tapper dutifully attends to the clashing racial attitudes of the era. Charlie, precocious as ever, possesses all the enlightened attitudes of a Brooklyn barista in 2018...I’m not complaining. The Hellfire Club is most enjoyable when it’s most groan-worthy.\

Rachel Kushner

Mixed The Washington Post \"The Mars Room shuffles along shackled with so much Importance that it barely has room to move. Swollen with certainty, the story tolerates little ambiguity and offers few surprises ... constrained by the prison setting, the plot mostly relies on shifts in focus and point of view to create movement. Kushner cycles through the women’s tragic stories, mingling horrific anecdotes from before they were incarcerated with grim events in prison. The result is a terrifying survey of what it means to be poor and female in the United States ... there’s something so calculated about The Mars Room that even the most progressive readers are bound to feel like they’re being marched down a narrow hallway. I never felt those heavy paws in Kushner’s previous, far more dynamic novels.\

Julian Barnes

Pan The Washington Post It feels heretical to confess, but for all Barnes’s writerly skill, I couldn’t help feeling like the aliens who appear in Stardust Memories and tell Woody Allen, \'We like your movies, particularly the early, funny ones.\' Where’s the biting wit of England, England or the knowing irony of Love, Etc.? By contrast, The Only Story is so full of grieving sighs that it practically hyperventilates. While the early parts of the novel contain striking vignettes about Paul’s naivete—his passion, his earnestness—the plot’s forward motion soon stalls in ruminations on the nature of love, the loss of innocence and the unreliability of memory. There’s a staleness to these themes that’s only partially camouflaged by Barnes’s elegant style, the way an expensive cologne might distract us, for a time, from the mustiness of a well-appointed sitting room. Indeed, despite its brevity, there’s something claustrophobic about The Only Story ... \'Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition,\' Paul thinks. \'It could only ever be captured in a story.\' Perhaps, but not in this one.

Madeline Miller

Rave The Washington Post \"Although she writes in prose, Miller hews to the poetic timber of the epic, with a rich, imaginative style commensurate to the realm of immortal beings sparked with mortal sass ... While working within the constraints of the The Odyssey and other ancient myths, Miller finds plenty of room to weave her own surprising story of a passionate young woman banished to lavish solitude ... There will be plenty of weeping later in this novel, although it’s likely to be your own. In the story that dawns from Miller’s rosy fingers, the fate that awaits Circe is at once divine and mortal, impossibility strange and yet entirely human.\

Tom McAllister

Rave The Washington Post \"Tom McAllister’s How to Be Safe is as startling as the crack of a bullet. The story’s volatile tone tears through the despair of our era’s devotion to guns ... Unemployed, depressed and allergic to sentimentality, Anna offers a vicious critique of her own experience in a poisonous male culture ... acid wit makes How to Be Safe particularly unnerving. Anna delivers the most caustic lines with a straight face sharp enough to cut your throat ... Like nothing else I’ve read, How to Be Safe contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions.\

Richard Powers

Rave The Washington Post This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction ... What makes The Overstory so fascinating is the way it talks to itself, responding to its own claims about the fate of the Earth with confirmation and contradiction. Individual stories constantly shift the novel’s setting and pace, changing registers, pushing into every cranny of these people’s lives ... In harrowing scenes of personal sacrifice — or deadly self-righteousness — we see an unlikely group drawn together by their absolute conviction that our rapacious destruction of trees is an act of mass suicide. The urgency of that belief gives rise to the novel’s most unsettling theme: the tension between complacency and stridency in the face of existential threats.

James Wood

Rave The Washington Post We fathers eventually become like wildlife photographers, quiet but hyperattentive, grateful for any sighting. Upstate, a new novel by the literary critic James Wood, brought this into focus for me as never before. It’s a slim book with a tiny cast doing little in a remote place, but it captures the anxious plight of a loving father with exquisite delicacy. Indeed, Upstate feels like a finely cut rebuttal to the hysterical realism of those sprawling social novels that Wood has famously criticized. But its affections are large, and its wisdom deep—a wonderful exception amid the voluminous literature of bad fathers ... Wood is a master of introspective domesticity. If his palette looks small, his attention to the subtle hues of human emotion is revelatory. He’s attuned to every fluctuation in the room’s frequencies, the frayed wires of sibling rivalry, the cloying taste of parental concern ... Watching can make all the difference on this darkling plain, as Wood’s thoughtful novel shows.

Jennifer Clement

Rave The Washington Post \"There’s an echo of Emma Donoghue’s Room in this story. Pearl speaks in a raw voice that can sound awkward one moment and precocious the next — a wholly believable consciousness for a child raised in such strange, constrained circumstances ... Full of sorrow and aching sweetness, Gun Love provides a glimpse of people who dwell every day knee deep in the toxic waste of our gun culture. They may be America’s forgotten children, but after reading this novel, you are not likely to forget them.\

Tom Rachman

Rave The Washington Post He has a deft way of describing atrocious behavior without damning his characters, without suggestions that they’re entirely circumscribed by their worst acts. His comedy is tempered by a kind of a gentleness that’s a salve in these mean times ... At several points, in fact, I was reminded of Peter Carey’s brilliant little novel Theft (2006), about a complicated trio of art forgers. But Rachman brings his own, warmer touch to the crime, transforming it into a surprising act of defiance that’s both deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.

Ned Beauman

Positive The Washington Post I have to confess that as the pages of Madness Is Better Than Defeat furled on toward 400, I wasn’t always entirely sure what was happening (I was never sure why it was happening), but it’s all so weirdly delightful that I kept racing along after him ... This is a novel that never takes a breath, that works for our attention like a stand-up comic in front of a firing squad ... I spent far too long flipping back and forth trying to figure out who was who and where we were before I just gave up and let the river of Beauman’s genius sweep me along.

Peter Carey

Mixed The Washington Post The early chapters, set in postwar Australia, feel like the setup for a rom-com road race … Prescient readers might catch sounds here and there of the drama that lies ahead, but everyone else will probably jump out of this slow-moving plot before it reaches the main event. That’s too bad because Carey eventually arrives at a profound and poignant story, though it has little to do with the zany car race … The action in these latter chapters is often oblique, obscured further by elliptical conversations, partly in dialect. But that’s an intentional and rather brilliant representation of Willie’s plight. He’s a man determined to unearth the richness of Aboriginal culture even while respecting its secrets. Those conflicting goals ultimately find perfect expression in Carey’s strange narrative.

David Mamet

Mixed The Washington Post Although the characters in David Mamet’s new novel, “Chicago,” never sound like real people, they always sound like David Mamet people, which is a strange indication of his success ... There’s a lot of that winking playacting. If only Mamet had taken the city editor’s advice: 'We require bold, clear words and gruesome pictures.'

Matt Haig

Positive The Washington Post \"...a quirky romcom dusted with philosophical observations ... Haig brings a delightfully witty touch to this poignant novel. His hero is just like us, an ordinary 439-year-old guy trying to figure out \'how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?\'\

Kristin Hannah

Mixed The Washington Post Kristin Hannah’s new novel makes Alaska sound equally gorgeous and treacherous — a glistening realm that lures folks into the wild and then kills them there … We experience this harrowing tale from the point of view of their teenage daughter, Leni. She’s a book-loving girl, toughened by years of frequent moving, and a close student of her father’s capricious moods...While Ernt and Cora play out the captivating disaster of their union, Leni remains an irresistibly sympathetic heroine who will resonate with a wide range of readers … The weaknesses of The Great Alone are usually camouflaged by its dramatic and often emotional plot. It all skates along quickly, but slow down and you’re liable to crack through the thin patches of Hannah’s style. No Alaskan trail is marked as clearly as the path of this story, which highlights every potential danger.

Tayari Jones

Rave The Washington Post \"Each character speaks directly to us, alternating chapter by chapter, as though Roy and Celestial are pleading for our understanding — and our forgiveness. But Jones offers no clear lines of culpability here, which is what makes An American Marriage so compelling ... These are punishing questions, but they’re spun with tender patience by Jones, who cradles each of these characters in a story that pulls our sympathies in different directions. She never ignores their flaws, their perfectly human tendency toward self-justification, but she also captures their longing to be kind, to be just, to somehow behave well despite the contradictory desires of the heart.\

Leni Zumas

Rave The Washington Post \"The ordinariness of the world that Zumas imagines is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Red Clocks … As much as Red Clocks is about the repressive legal proposals that threaten women’s lives in America, the novel is equally astute on the cultural constraints that women contend with — and enforce on each other. They’re all subjected to grinding, fruitless competition over their careers and their sexuality … Her prose sports a kind of rawness that’s really the fruit of subtle artfulness. She’s flexible enough to reflect each woman’s differing concerns and personality, from the high schooler’s fear and earnestness, to the mother’s conflicted depression and the hermit’s earthy insight. Her phrasing stays exquisitely close to these minds, not quite stream of consciousness, but shadowing the confluence of anxiety and rationality they all harbor.\

Gregory Blake Smith

Rave The Washington Post Gregory Blake Smith’s staggeringly brilliant new novel luxuriates in those demarcations of time. It is an extraordinary demonstration of narrative dexterity. Moving up and down through the strata of history, Smith captures the ever-changing refractions of human desire ... Separately, their stories are captivating, flush with peril and sexual tension ... What’s even more remarkable are the chameleon shifts in tone and style as Smith jumps from story to story with perfect fidelity to each era. Open to any page at random, and you’ll know exactly where and when you are ... The cumulative effect of this carousel of differing voices is absolutely transporting. The novel grows richer as we hear echoes among their stories ... Looking up from this remarkable novel, one has an eerie sense of history as a process of continuous erasure and revision. You’ll start The Maze of Windermere with bewilderment, but you’ll close it in awe.

Thomas Pierce

Positive The Washington Post \"Thomas Pierce approaches the interplay of technology and immortality with...subtlety in his debut novel … [Pierce] wanders wherever the spirit moves him, which may frustrate readers looking for drama, but I was enchanted by his thoughtful ruminations and wry comments about church and spirituality. Intercalary chapters about the haunted house’s original residents vibrate with ectoplastic energy.\

Jillian Medoff

Rave The Washington Post The cover of her [Medoff's] new novel, This Could Hurt, is an employee termination checklist ... Together, Rosa and her team of desperate middle-managers are charged with guiding the company’s 'human relations'... While the recession grinds on, This Could Hurt rotates through these characters, one per chapter, sometimes showing us the same meeting or conversation from different points of view ... Medoff exploits that structure to illustrate how delusional Rosa’s staff can be, how willfully they misinterpret what’s happening ...plays lightly with the conventions of corporate discourse ... As smart as Medoff’s critique of corporate inanity is, it’s tempered by compassion for these people, who are ultimately tender with each other, too.

Chloe Benjamin

Rave The Washington Post In the prologue, four young siblings in New York City scrape together their money to see a fortune teller who reveals each child’s eventual death-date. That spooks the kids, of course, but the only real magic here is Benjamin’s storytelling. What follows is a poignant quartet of linked novellas: one for each sibling as an adult. Despite the novel’s whimsical opening, this is largely a story of sadness and smothered hope.

Rachel Joyce

Rave The Washington Post “The Music Shop is an unabashedly sentimental tribute to the healing power of great songs, and Joyce is hip to greatness in any key. Her novel’s catalogue stretches from Bach to the Beach Boys, from Vivaldi to the Sex Pistols. Crank up the turntable and let these pages sing ... you’ll want to file this book right between Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue ... Given the general melody of romantic comedy, you can probably guess how this tune develops, but there’s real delight in hearing variations on a classic form ... Joyce’s understated humor around these odd folks offers something like the pleasure of A.A. Milne for adults. She has a kind of sweetness that’s never saccharine, a kind of simplicity that’s never simplistic. Yes, the ending is wildly improbable and hilariously predictable, but I wouldn’t change a single note.

Nora Roberts

Mixed The Washington Post After publishing more than 200 novels, Roberts knows exactly how to spellbind an audience. And Year One barrels along for a couple hundred pages with heartbreaking losses, hair-raising escapes and gruesome attacks ... Once the cast of likable human and Uncanny survivors starts rebuilding society, the plot shifts down from the thrill of apocalyptic disaster to the tedium of inventory control ... Unfortunately, having concocted a worldwide calamity, Roberts seems unwilling to imagine just how radically civilization would react to such historic decimation — and the arrival of magical creatures.

Elif Shafak

Rave The Washington Post Elif Shafak’s new novel reveals such a timely confluence of today’s issues that it seems almost clairvoyant. Sexual harassment, Islamist terrorism, the rising tension between the faithful and the secular, and the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor — all play out in the pages of Three Daughters of Eve ... an ingenious act of compression that works several decades into a single evening ... the story that develops keeps circling around that struggle, moving from her parents’ domestic squabbles to the central conundrum of theodicy: the challenge of reconciling an all-good, all-powerful God with an often-evil and chaotic world. Peri is such a fascinating heroine because she remains intensely engaged in this debate but resolutely disinterested ... in the process, Shafak explores the precarious state of Turkish politics, the evolving position of women in Islam, the sexual ambiguities of college life, and the most profound questions of faith. There are novels you want to cherish in the sanctity of your own adoration, and then there are novels you feel impatient to talk about with others. Press Three Daughters of Eve on a friend or your book club for a great conversation about this flammable era we live in now.

Sarah Waters

Rave The Washington Post \"Sarah Waters ain\'t afraid of no ghost. Her new novel, a deliciously creepy tale called The Little Stranger, is haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe … The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish … Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story\'s sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages.\

Bill McKibben

Mixed The Washington Post The early parts of the novel are taken up with Vern’s podcast monologues...We get whole pages of explanation about the evils of industrial farming, the sources of modern alienation and the highlights of Vermont’s proud history. That could be tiresome, for sure, but McKibben, who lives in Vermont, has re-created on the page the pleasures of a good old radio voice: a lulling mixture of curious detail, dignified outrage and self-deprecating humor ... To say this is a small novel would be no offense to the author, who praises smallness throughout, but I wish McKibben sounded a little more anxious about the sinister trappings of secession movements ... Given the current reign of chaos in the White House, it must feel tempting to give up on America and go your own inspired way, but we need everybody now more than ever. Don’t run away, Vern. Stay and help us.

David Wroblewski

Rave The Washington Post Here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed … Most of the story comes to us through a masterful, transparent voice: The author, the narrator, the pages -- everything fades away as we're drawn into this engrossing tale. But there are also a few inventive variations. Once in a while, we see events from a dog's point of view, in a strangely humane but inhuman perspective. Another chapter is made up of Edgar's first memories as a baby and toddler, and there's a chilling section told from the murderer's perspective … The final section gathers like a furious storm of hope and retribution that brings young Edgar to a destiny he doesn't deserve but never resists.

Glen David Gold

Rave The Christian Science Monitor In the tradition of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Gold weaves the rich history of this period through his own stagecraft, creating a novel worthy of the hype that announced those great Vaudeville magicians. This was, after all, a time of perpetual gasping at new scientific and consumer miracles … In a book full of conjurers, Gold emerges as the best magician of all, pulling surprises out of his hat throughout this wildly entertaining story, which captures America in a moment of change and wonder. The third and final act alone is worth the price of admission, but I'd rather face the devil himself than reveal any details about that part of the show.

Vikas Swarup

Mixed The Washington Post Vikas Swarup provides a strange mixture of sweet and sour in this erratically comic novel … The theme here couldn't be any more obvious if Vanna White spelled it out for us, but what Q & A lacks in subtlety it makes up for in charm and melodrama. While Ram's interrogators are torturing him, a mysterious young defense attorney bursts into the cell and demands a private interview with her client. Almost the entire novel consists of their conversation … Through murders, robberies, rapes and close scrapes, Ram speaks in a voice that turns from wide-eyed innocence to moral outrage.

Louise Erdrich

Pan The Washington Post ...the political and environmental context is only vaguely and rarely hinted at in Future Home. Erdrich is not so much tantalizing as miserly with the details of her fantastical conceit. 'Nobody knows exactly what is happening,' Cedar says, and neither do we. Throughout the novel, we’re kept largely in the dark with her as she hides or flees from people out to capture her and steal her unborn baby. Her plight is intermittently exciting. Whom can she trust? Who might betray her next? But the novel remains weirdly depth-resistant ... Perhaps the problem stems from this novel’s abnormally long and then rushed gestation period. Maybe it suffers from the conflicting motives of wanting to make a point but knowing that polemical novels are a drag. Or maybe if Future Home weren’t sitting next to Erdrich’s masterpieces, such as The Plague of Doves and The Round House, along with Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, it wouldn’t seem so slack and minor.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Washington Post Following the form Erdrich developed in her first novel, Love Medicine, other narrators take over parts of this book, either shading events Eve understands only vaguely or adding whole new branches to the community's history. Some of these discontinuous episodes — from the arrival of white settlers to the social problems of the 1970s — relate tangentially to each other, but the connections among many parts of the novel are invisible until much later … What marks these stories...is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy, tragedy and slapstick in a peculiar dance. As horrific as the crimes at the heart of this novel are, other sections remind us that Erdrich is a great comic writer.

Isabel Allende

Mixed The Washington Post In the Midst of Winter is a light tragedy, an off-kilter mix of sweetness and bleakness held together only by Allende’s dulcet voice … Allende is following the classic rom-com structure: a vivacious woman and a dyspeptic man who claims he’ll never love again. And In the Midst of Winter develops that late-in-life romance between Lucia and Richard with all the humor and charm one could ask for … It’s as though Allende has shifted from magical realism to magical feelism, some kind of synthetic hopefulness that asks us to brush off the agonies that her novel’s alternate chapters so indelibly portray.

Gregory Maguire

Positive The Washington Post ...there’s barely a nutshell of music or magic in Hiddensee. Maguire has a style glazed with a patina of Old World formality. Don’t look for the passion and color of Tchaikovsky here; this is a novel with its own palette of darker, woodland tones ... like Dirk, the novel feels suspended between realism and fantasy ... But this remains very much a study of a man who left the forest of fairy tales and never fully joined the world of getting and spending. Dirk doesn’t really belong anywhere, a condition that eventually causes him a certain amount of tightly repressed anguish. Maguire explores this theme most sensitively over Dirk’s long friendship with a gay musician ... Maguire suggests that we all pine for some vaguely recalled but tantalizing moment from childhood.

Elizabeth Strout

Positive The Washington Post The broad social and political range of The Burgess Boys shows just how impressively this extraordinary writer continues to develop … Having set up this triangle of unequal siblings, Strout immediately places them under stress that will reshape their long-settled relationships to one another … Strout is something of a connoisseur of emotional cruelty. But does anyone capture middle age quite as tenderly? Those latent fears — of change, of not changing, of being alone, of being stuck forever with the same person. There seems no limit to her sympathy, her ability to express, without the acrid tone of irony, our selfish, needy anxieties that only family can aggravate — and quell.

Colm Tóibín

Mixed The Washington Post The Testament of Mary was originally presented as a monologue, first performed last year in Dublin, and the story still shows the imprint of that form: It’s dramatic and poetic rather than analytical and expansive. And it’s not so much a testament of faith as a confession of guilt … Her insistence on the truth becomes the book’s central concern and flavors this moving drama with an acrid polemic taste. The Gospel writers caring for Mary (or keeping her locked up) have ‘outstayed their welcome’ while interrogating her about what happened to her son … Devoid of any inspirational motive, Mary’s descriptions of long-hallowed events are jarring, inserting psychological details into the Gospels’ lacunae. Tóibín isn’t so much interested in denying the miraculous as he is in placing that question in the background to focus, instead, on Jesus’ disruptive presence, the political and social chaos he fomented.

Roddy Doyle

Rave The Washington Post [Doyle] is the Irish master of crumpled hope — and no country provides stiffer competition in that category. His new novel offers a deceptively languid plot laced with menace. Paced more like a short story than a novel, Smile creates contradictory feelings of poignant stagnation and accelerating descent ... This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away. It’s like watching a building collapse in slow motion ... Doyle draws adolescence with such crisp empathy and humor that Victor’s memories feel as real as photos of your own childhood. His Catholic schooling under the brothers is charged with excitement and the possibility of violence ... as the novel reaches its crescendo, Doyle shatters the natural structure of his narrative and manages to disorient us despite our weary confidence that we know the dimensions of the molestation tale. It’s a daring move, an attempt to trace the penumbra of abuse across a shattered psyche. For one horrible moment, we get a sense of the victim’s unspeakable confusion, the terror that diverts a life and wrecks a mind.

Kevin Powers

Mixed The Washington Post The Yellow Birds reads like a collection of 11 linked short stories. Except for one that takes place in Germany, they move back and forth between Iraq in the fall of 2004 and the United States from 2003 to 2009. The narrator is John Bartle, a pensive, guilt-ridden vet recalling his friendship with another young soldier he calls Murph … The first chapter demonstrates what Powers can do so well, and anthology editors should be fighting over the rights to excerpt it from the novel...Throughout The Yellow Birds, amid the gore and the terror and the boredom, you can hear notes of Powers’s work as a poet … Frankly, the parts of The Yellow Bird are better than the whole. Some chapters lack sufficient power, others labor under the influence of classic war stories, rather than arising organically from the author’s unique vision. Murph risks being a hick cliche, and moments of recycled Hemingway sound glib.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Washington Post ...should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation 'genius,' wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about Zone One is how subtly he reanimates those old body parts for a post-9/11 world ... Readers who wouldn’t ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry ... That grim humor slithers through most of this novel, along with touches of Whitehead’s topical satire... Mark’s soul-weariness infects the tone and pace of the novel, too, which offers more eulogy than suspense ... Everything comes to life in this perfectly paced, horrific, 40-page finale shot through with grim comedy and desolate wisdom about the modern age in all its poisonous, contaminating rage.

Michael Ondaatje

Rave The Washington Post It’s a charming mixture of eccentricity, serendipity and impish fun. ‘Twenty-one days is a very brief period in a life,’ the narrator admits, but Ondaatje folds all the boys’ escapades into the human comedy … The tone grows darker, the drama more treacherous. Wisps of rumor that Michael and his friends have breathlessly collected erupt in a climax that outstrips their childish fantasies. How frighteningly the pieces of this puzzle snap into place, and we’re left staring just as dumbstruck as young Michael at a melodramatic tableau … On the powerful waters of Ondaatje’s prose, The Cat’s Table finally arrives at a deeper destination than we could have anticipated when the voyage began.

Naomi Alderman

Rave The Washington Post \"Alderman has written our era’s Handmaid’s Tale, and, like Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Power is one of those essential feminist works that terrifies and illuminates, enrages and encourages ... Alderman’s greatest feat is keeping this premise from settling toward anything obvious as she considers how the world would adjust if women held the balance of energy and could discharge it at will ... That globe-spanning ambition could easily have dissipated the novel’s focus, but Alderman keeps her story grounded in the lives of four characters who are usually sympathetic, sometimes reprehensible ... In her acknowledgments, Alderman thanks Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler and Ursula Le Guin — possibly the most brilliant triumvirate of grandmothers any novel has ever had. That lineage shows in this endlessly surprising and provocative story that deconstructs not just the obvious expressions of sexism but the internal ribs of power that we have tolerated, honored and romanticized for centuries.\

Julie Otsuka

Mixed The Washington Post No story in the conventional sense ever develops, and no individuals emerge for more than a paragraph...Each chapter focuses on some general aspect of Japanese immigrant life — sex, employment, children — and the great variety of their experiences is blended, often sentence by sentence … The very best sections of the novel reminded me of the poetic catalogues in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but periodically the rhythm turns flat and the lists betray a kind of pedestrian pattern … As the internment demanded by Executive Order 9066 approaches, the book’s communal voice again becomes more appropriate to the paranoia and confusion these women feel. Their voices mingle, and isolated images, so precisely captured by Otsuka, deliver an explosion far beyond their size. And yet I’m troubled by the friction between this novel’s theme and its style.

Dan Brown

Pan The Washington Post Dan Brown is back with another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff ... All the worn-out elements of those earlier books are dragged out once again for Brown to hyperventilate over like some grifter trying to fence fake antiques ... Brown may not have discovered a secret that threatens humanity’s faith, but he has successfully located every cliche in the world. Some sentences are constructed entirely of hand-me-down phrases ... All right — I get it — this is cotton candy spun into print, but why then must every reference, no matter how pedestrian, be explained in a Wikipedia monotone that Siri would pity? ... All this might be worth enduring if the story’s infinitely hyped revelations didn’t finally show up at the end of a trail of blood sounding like an old TED Talk. Kirsch’s posthumous answers to the big questions — Where did we come from? Where are we going? — will surprise no one technologically savvy enough to operate a cellphone. Darwinians, fundamentalists, atheists and believers: Pray that this cup pass from you.

Jennifer Egan

Positive The Washington Post All the harbor details — from the dangerous mechanics of underwater work to the irritating chauvinism of Navy officers — feel dutifully researched. The whole novel, in fact, boasts its tweedy historical accuracy...But there’s something predetermined about this story of a spunky young woman breaking through gender barriers in wartime. Far more engaging are the shadowy actions swirling around Anna. Her crafty father kept the family fed and clothed through the Depression by working for a racketeer named Dexter Styles ... Manhattan Beach may not offer the brilliant variety of forms found in Goon Squad, but Egan is still blending a jazzy range of tones in these chapters, from Tennessee Williams’s apartment-trapped despair to Herman Melville’s adventures at sea ... All these strong currents — from noir thriller to family drama to wartime adventure — eventually return to the private moment that opens Manhattan Beach. If that ending is surprisingly hopeful, it’s never false, and it dares to satisfy us in a way that stories of an earlier age used to.

Stephen King & Owen King

Pan The Washington Post Although Sleeping Beauties offers glimpses of trouble around the world — riots in Washington, a downed jet, etc. — the story stays focused on Dooling, particularly the women’s penitentiary where prisoners are quickly succumbing to the Aurora Flu. But before these inmates go gentle into that gooey night, we get to know several of them: lonely souls, abused girlfriends, unstable killers with hearts of gold. It’s a very special edition of 'Orange Is the New Black Death' ... The story is flecked with the gossamer wings of fairy tales that fall awkwardly in this contemporary setting. More than 70 characters rage and snore through these pages. They’re all listed at the front of the book, a feature that has the unintentional effect of making the cast feel even more bewildering ... Stephen King, the author of more than 50 best-selling novels, and Owen, whose debut novel, Double Feature appeared in 2013, can be wonderful writers, but this yawning collaboration doesn’t bring out the best in either of them. The pacing in the first 300 pages is deadly — and not in a good way.

Ian McEwan

Mixed The Washington Post The novel opens in 2000 in the final, agonizing months of Beard's fifth marriage, with a section that brandishes everything that makes McEwan such a terrific writer. His satire snaps wittily, his interweaving of scientific research and romantic intrigue is startlingly clever, and his psychological insights feel both genuine and comic. For the first time in Beard's life, he's desperate to win back an estranged wife, but this one won't have it … But the novel's fortunes sag from this point forward. Solar remains focused myopically on Beard, the self-pitying snob who grows more corpulent while all the other characters remain thin and faint. What's worse, the plot seems allergic to itself, constantly arresting its own progress with not terribly pertinent flashbacks or abrupt jumps forward.

Justin Cronin

Pan The Washington Post Now, finally, comes the long-awaited second volume, and as much as it pains me to say it, The Twelve bites … What’s truly bizarre is that a novel so burdened with exposition manages to provide so little necessary explanation. Don’t even think about starting this volume if you haven’t committed the first one to memory … Again and again, suspense is drained away by the book’s choppy structure, as though the dastardly government virus that caused vampirism also caused attention deficit disorder. When the various parts of this ramshackle plot finally came together, I couldn’t tell if I were truly grateful or just suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Gabrielle Zevin

Rave The Washington Post \"Her novel comes to us in five distinct parts, each focusing on a different woman affected by Avivagate. That structure rotates the scandal in curious ways, and it also shows off just what a clever ventriloquist Zevin is ... The most radical chapter is constructed as a choose-your-own-adventure story. This sort of super-duper-cleverness can start to feel like you’re being force-fed eight pounds of cotton candy, which makes Zevin’s success all the more impressive. Her narration in the second person insists that we stop peering down at this young woman and begin, instead, to imagine ourselves as her.\

Barbara Kingsolver

Positive The Christian Science Monitor Despite its uneven quality, The Poisonwood Bible is a vessel that holds our attention and some powerful ideas ...story rotates through a series of monologues by the wife and four daughters of a ferocious Baptist preacher from Bethlehem, Ga., who's determined to bring his version of salvation to the incendiary Congo in 1960 ... The daughters react in strikingly different ways, but Kingsolver's success at portraying them is uneven ... It's weakest when the family splits apart and the characters become mouthpieces for not particularly fresh statements about the abuses of colonialism ...this exciting story will make for particularly good discussion.

Nicole Krauss

Pan The Washington Post Those who enter this dark forest are fated to wander through a thicket of esoteric reflections on Jewish mysticism, Israel and creation. Krauss can sometimes sound like a modern-day Ralph Waldo Emerson, so long as you don’t push too hard on her orphic pronouncements...Indeed, much of this material feels more essayistic than novelistic, except that an essay is meant to deliver us to greater understanding of something besides the author’s pathos. Eventually, a subplot involving Franz Kafka scurries into the story and offers a bit of cerebral intrigue — along with Krauss’s illuminating commentary on Kafka’s life and work. But that still leaves a lot of room for Nicole to moan about imposing form on the formlessness of narrative. Such writerly consternation may send students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop into fits of ecstasy, but most readers will be more moved by Nicole’s reflections on the loss of love, on that indeterminate moment when romance evaporates ... Nothing in these pages discourages the assumption that Krauss is revealing her own laments about the failure of their marriage, which makes Forest Dark feel uncomfortably passive aggressive: an act of relationship revenge with deniability built into its fictive frame.

Salman Rushdie

Pan The Washington Post Speaking of Trump’s unlikely election, Rushdie recently told an interviewer, 'This thing that is very bad for America is very good for the novel,' but that sounds like fake news. In any event, Trump’s election is not very good for this novel, in which Rushdie pokes through the story whenever he wants to pop off about America’s poisonous political culture ... The story of Nero and his golden house is told by a handsome young neighbor named René, a far more involved and, alas, far less poetic narrator than Nick Carraway...Everything about this family spreading its influence and then crashing like the House of Usher comes to us in René’s confidential but bland voice ... Perhaps it wouldn’t feel so arduous to plod through this pile of worn phrases if the plot moved more quickly. There are elements of intrigue, including a bizarre sexual bargain on which the story hinges, but the most exciting revelation erupts late in the book, long after the mystery of Nero’s origins has cooled. Then, finally, we have to endure René nattering on about the loss of innocence, a theme we can smell like mildew as soon as we enter this airless novel.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave The Washington Post Ward employs several strangely tethered narrators and allows herself to reach back in time while keeping this family chained to the rusty stake of American racism ... These are people 'pulling all the weight of history,' and Ward represents those necrotic claims with a pair of restless ghosts, the unburied singers of the title. Readers may be reminded of the trapped spirits in George Sanders’s recent novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, but Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a more direct antecedent ... If Sing, Unburied, Sing lacks the singular hypnotic power of Salvage the Bones, that’s only because its ambition is broader, its style more complex and, one might say, more mature. The simile-drenched lines that sometimes overwhelmed Ward’s previous novel have been brought under the control here of more plausible voices. And the plight of this one family is now tied to intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking out to the yard, Jojo thinks, 'The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves.' Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted nation.

Wally Lamb

Pan The Washington Post The story comes to us as a series of soliloquies delivered — chapter by chapter — by the distressed members of the Oh family. The patriarch is Orion Oh, an affable psychologist descended from a Chinese grandfather with ‘inscrutable eyes.’ Orion has endured a rough year: He’s been forced into early retirement by a sexual harassment claim, and his wife has left him for a woman … Eventually, we hear soliloquies from the Ohs’ three unhappy adult children, a couple of neighbors and even Annie’s old sexual abuser. Together they present an exhaustive inventory of woe … The problem with We Are Water, though, isn’t an excess of trauma, it’s a dearth of immediacy and subtlety. The present-day action of the novel is overwhelmed by recollections.

Anthony Marra

Rave The Washington Post A Constellation of Vital Phenomena opens in a tiny, blood-soaked village of Chechnya, that part of the world that drifts into our consciousness only briefly — when, say, the Russians crush it again or, more recently, when young zealots detonate pressure cookers in Boston. But the unforgettable characters in this novel are not federalists or rebels or terrorists...these are just fathers and mothers and children — neighbors snagged in the claws of history … On one level, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena covers just five days in 2004. But these are people shaken from the linear progress of time. Their experiences come to us in pungent flashbacks of trauma and joy — meals and games, marriages and affairs, offenses small and shocking that knit their lives together.

Richard Ford

Rave The Washington Post Canada may strike recent fans as a departure, but it’s actually a return to the plains of his first celebrated story collection, Rock Springs … Ford can be sympathetic and yet clear-eyed about the limits of these poor, mismatched people. His delineation of their characters is insistent without seeming relentless, moving further and further into the conflicted desires and misimpressions that motivate them … Always a careful craftsman, Ford has polished the plainspoken lines of Canada to an arresting sheen. He’s working somewhere between Marilynne Robinson (without the theology) and Cormac McCarthy (without the gore). The wisdom he offers throughout these pages can be heard in the hushed silence that follows this harrowing tale.

Barbara Kingsolver

Mixed The Washington Post The book’s success stems from Kingsolver’s willingness to stay focused on a conflicted young woman and her faltering marriage, while a strange symptom of the degraded environment overwhelms her remote Tennessee town … Flight Behavior is never dull, but the energy leaks out of the story, which sometimes seems allergic to its own drama. And for a heroine reputed to have a wandering eye, Dellarobia has a remarkably low libido. This may be the saintliest novel ever predicated on the persistent temptation of adultery … Kingsolver has written one of the more thoughtful novels about the scientific, financial and psychological intricacies of climate change. And her ability to put these silent, breathtakingly beautiful butterflies at the center of this calamitous and noisy debate is nothing short of brilliant.

Daniel Handler

Pan The Washington Post Now that the entire catalogue of pornography is accessible on every cellphone and laptop, Handler’s novel isn’t nearly filthy enough. And — major buzzkill — it’s an ironically pious tale ... All his adventures — straight, gay and solitary — are conveyed in the novel’s spindly structure, not so much impressionistic as elliptical. With most of the narrative flesh stripped away, we’re left with just snippets and moments, dialogue and thought freely mixed and undifferentiated ... That his Lotharion ways eventually bring him low is not so surprising — after all, even creeps can get their hearts broken. But what’s strange is that Cole enjoys so little pleasure along the way. Where’s the thrill of sexual passion? The earth-moving excitement? The mind-blowing arousal? For some reason, despite all the sexual mechanics, All the Dirty Parts includes none of the good parts. Handler says he hates all the finger-wagging moralism in most YA lit, but if you’re a certain kind of uptight parent, this may be just the depressing and joyless novel you want your horny son to read. Good luck with that.

Peter Carey

Mixed The Washington Post Tocqueville, recast here in garish tones as Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, strolls out of his famous Democracy in America and into the pages of this kaleidoscopic story along with the whole grasping, bragging, bargaining cast of our ravenous nation. It's another feat of acrobatic ventriloquism, joining Carey's masterpieces … Parrot & Olivier starts poorly, particularly for a novel by Peter Carey, who usually sells his work hard in the opening chapters. We don't even reach America for well over 100 pages, and while the section on Parrot's childhood in England as a printer's devil contains the book's most inflammable scenes, Olivier's early, whiny section in France is tedious...There are engaging, funny scenes throughout this picaresque tale, but the travelogue grows rickety and stalls too often.

Claire Messud

Mixed The Washington Post If you remember the fevered fury of The Woman Upstairs, you’ll be surprised by the muted, reflective voice of The Burning Girl. Julia views her adolescence through a scrim of remorse. It’s also a shock to learn that she’s supposedly a junior in high school; she sounds 35. The plot, despite its thriller gloss, seems captured in amber, cloudy and still. Julia keeps turning over events, trying to comprehend the end of her 'defining friendship,' the failure of her own compassion. 'Everybody wanted a story,' Julia says, 'a story with an arc, with motives and a climax and a resolution.' If The Burning Girl demonstrates anything, it’s that the sorrows of adolescence don’t fit that familiar archetype.

Karen Joy Fowler

Positive The Washington Post We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves isn’t just about an unusual childhood experiment; it’s about a lifetime spent in the shadow of grief. Clearly, something traumatic happened when Rosemary was 5, something that turned her from a loquacious little girl into a quiet young woman. But unearthing the details of that event means digging in a mental landscape strewn with psychological land mines … Although there’s little doubt where her sympathies lie, Fowler manages to subsume any polemical motive within an unsettling, emotionally complex story that plumbs the mystery of our strange relationship with the animal kingdom — relatives included.

Alice Hoffman

Mixed The Washington Post The Dovekeepers is an enormously ambitious, multi-part story, richly decorated with the details of life 2,000 years ago. What’s more, as Anita Diamant showed so popularly with The Red Tent, the world of ancient Judaism provides fertile ground for exploring the challenges of women’s lives, and, fortunately, this time Hoffman treats her favorite issues without throwing up much of the fairy dust that too often clogs her work…The result is a high-minded feminist story of unassailable seriousness … Many of the incidents these women relate — family conflicts, cruel assaults, romantic trysts, difficult births, jealous conflicts, magical incantations — are dramatic and engaging, but their sheer number eventually feels relentless, a tiresome delay of the bloodbath we know is coming.

David Mitchell

Mixed The Washington Post This new novel offers up a rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation, stretching around the world from the Margaret Thatcher era of the 1980s to the Endarkenment of 2043 … We climb this steep mountain expecting that we will be rewarded with the wizardry of The Night Circus, The Magicians or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — but somehow, as The Bone Clocks winds up for its long-anticipated climax, Mitchell abandons his exploration of character, sexuality, class and politics for an old warlock’s sack of cliches. In the words of one of the book’s courageous, jargon-laden soldiers, the ‘psychovoltage is low.’

Philip Roth

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Clearly Roth's real target isn't an anti-Semitic aviation hero who died 30 years ago. It's an electorate he sees as dazzled by attractive faces, moved by simple slogans, and cowed by ominous warnings about threats to our security. The result is a cautionary story in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, a stunning work of political extrapolation about a triumvirate of hate, ignorance, and paranoia that shreds decency and overruns liberty … In a voice that blends the tones of the author's nostalgia with the boy's innocence, Phil describes the national crisis through its effect on his own family. It's a narrative structure fraught with risks, particularly the danger of making this 7-year-old boy look cloying or inappropriately sophisticated, but Roth keeps his bifocal vision in perfect focus.

David Mitchell

Rave The Washington Post Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses … Mitchell is working within a literary tradition stained by Western slurs about the inscrutable ways of orientals, their seductive mysticism and occult sensuality, but he represents and deconstructs those racist stereotypes with a shipload of fascinating domestic and imported characters … Even as the forces of evil ramp up, this remains a resolutely thoughtful novel about a country wrenched into the modern age. Carefully controlling all contact with the West, Japan reveres its official translators, its only windows on the world. And so language serves as Mitchell's central subject throughout The Thousand Autumns.

Helen Simonson

Rave The Washington Post This thoroughly charming novel wraps Old World sensibility around a story of multicultural conflict involving two widowed people who assume they're done with love. The result is a smart romantic comedy about decency and good manners in a world threatened by men's hair gel, herbal tea and latent racism … The gentle, reticent affection that develops between these two older people from different worlds is immensely appealing. They continue to call each other ‘Major Pettigrew’ and ‘Mrs. Ali,’ and for most of the novel their simmering passion leads them into nothing more unseemly than reading Keats together, but even that familiarity rubs up against the prejudices of local busybodies. For all the pride Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali take in being independently minded, they share a deep regard for decorum and respectability that's not easily assuaged.

Nicole Krauss

Pan The Washington Post Four main narrators, thousands of miles apart, deliver somber testimonies of their lives and their interactions with this errant piece of furniture. How are these narrators related? Where did the desk come from, and what are its ‘hidden meanings’?…The dispiriting punch line to this complicated novel is that these mysteries are the least interesting thing about it. The desk turns out to be rather incidental, and the obscure relationships among some of these characters are merely accidental. The riddles that soak up so much attention are distractions from the moving stories that these disparate narrators have to tell … Despite these several narrators and their widely differing stories, a kind of tonal monotony lies across the novel, which is devoid of the charming humor that leavened The History of Love. Great House remains unrelentingly serious, even dreary in its portrayal of ‘extreme solitude’ coalescing into remorse.

Justin Cronin

Rave The Washington Post The Passage, the first volume of a planned trilogy, doesn't have any interest in pursuing ol' Count Dracula; it's all about stitching together the still-beating scraps of classic horror and science fiction, techno thrillers and apocalyptic terror. Although a clairvoyant nun plays a crucial role, Cronin has stripped away the lurid religious trappings of the vampire myth and gone with a contemporary biomedical framework … Cronin proves himself just as skillful with the dystopic future as he is with the techno-thriller that opens The Passage. This second section sinks deep into the exotic customs of these beleaguered survivors. We meet a vibrant cast of citizen warriors, who have to ask themselves each day if it's worth fighting against the dying of the light.

Jonathan Dee

Positive The Washington Post The Locals feels attuned to the broader currents of our culture, particularly the renewed tension between competing ideals of community and self-reliance ... there are lots of unhappy characters, all elegantly choreographed in a dance of discontent ... With this little town, this idyllic-looking version of America, Dee has constructed a world — harrowing but instructive — where no one feels content ... You don’t have to be a Pollyanna to believe that there is such a force as love in the world, and graciousness and selflessness, too. But those qualities are missing in these characters, as though they were suffering some kind of moral vitamin deficiency. Hardly any of these people are allowed even a moment of inspiration or elevation ... Amid the heat of today’s vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.

Patrick deWitt

Rave The Washington Post At first, nothing the brothers do or encounter is particularly unusual for this time and place: starving children in the woods, men driven insane by solitude, noisy whorehouses and dirty saloons … It’s all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters, who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness. He’s a reluctant murderer — he’d rather be a shopkeeper — but assassination is a job, the only one he’s ever had, and it keeps him close to his brother, which is nice. He describes their progress toward Sacramento with deadpan sincerity flecked with earnestness and despair … DeWitt catches Eli’s patter just right, the odd formality and naked candor of a man who’s tired of killing, who longs for ‘a reliable companion.’

DBC Pierre

Pan Christian Science Monitor Broad as this comedy is, Pierre takes his toughest shots at American media. Even before the police descend, ‘Lally’ Ledesma, a CNN reporter, is already lurking in the yard, greasing his way into Vernon's confidence, seducing his mother, and flattering her chubby friends. He's a fount of journalistic clichés and faux sympathy … Vernon God Little ultimately descends to the same simplistic level it rails against in American culture. Psychologists, religious leaders, law enforcement officers, educators, and parents have sweat blood trying to fathom the dark forces that motivate these rare but terrifying acts of school violence. But here, we learn that it's all perfectly simple: The murderer was publicly humiliated as the victim of a gay porn ring. Ah hah! This is the sort of psychological depth we might expect from one of Vern's favorite made-for-TV-movies.

Richard Flanagan

Rave The Washington Post The story casts its roving eye on 77-year-old Dr. Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated war hero whose life has been an unsatisfying string of sterile affairs and public honors. He loved a woman once, but tragedy intervened, and since then each new award and commendation only makes Dorrigo feel undeserving and fraudulent … For many pages, the novel shimmers over the decades of Dorrigo’s life, only flashing on the horrors of war and the ghosts who haunt him. But soon enough, that unspeakable period comes into focus in a series of blistering episodes you will never get out of your mind … The novel doesn’t exonerate these war criminals, but it forces us to admit that history conspired to place them in a situation where cruelty would thrive, where the natural responses of human kindness and sympathy were short-circuited.

Ali Smith

Rave The Washington Post The two novellas make frequent references to each other, but how you interpret those references will depend on whether they’re looking forward or backward...As one character says, it’s a lesson in ‘how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it’ … It’s a fascinating bricolage of history and speculation enriched with Francescho’s audacious patter, often comically incongruous with the Renaissance. Freely mixing genders and pigments, the young artist distinguishes herself early as a magician with paints — and she knows it … This sounds like a novel freighted with postmodern gimmicks, but Smith knows how to be both fantastically complex and incredibly touching. Just as Francescho’s story is laced with insights about the nature and power of painting, George’s story offers its own tender exploration of the baffling and clarifying power of grief.

Tom Perrotta

Pan The Washington Post \"Perrotta is an affectionate comic writer, but to his own detriment, he has mastered the art of suburban titillation — and he rests on it. Although lusty subjects thrum through this novel, they’re often blanched. The effect can feel like reading the essays of Camille Paglia printed on slices of Wonder Bread ... In the libidinous groves of academe, Brendan finds his romantic thrusts blunted by women more sophisticated, enlightened and aggressive than his pliant high school sweetheart. And yet his story never develops the psychological depth or satiric edge to make these scenes sufficiently moving, witty or arresting ... Without a more discerning narrative voice and a greater willingness to explore the complexity of desire, there’s nothing to disturb the comfortable patter of Mrs. Fletcher. The novel hovers awkwardly between farce and psychological realism. Its neat checklist of sexual experiences — Lesbians! MILFs! Three-ways! — starts to feel like a weird session of Wednesday night bingo.\

Howard Jacobson

Positive The Washington Post Although there is a plot, The Finkler Question is really a series of tragicomic meditations on one of humanity's most tenacious expressions of malice, which I realize sounds about as much fun as sitting shiva, but Jacobson's unpredictable wit is more likely to clobber you than his pathos … No other book has given me such a clear sense of the benevolent disguises that anti-Jewish sentiments can wear. And no one wears them more attractively than Julian Treslove, the handsome, middle-aged gentile at the center of The Finkler Question … Even while we're trying to disentangle what's so disturbing about Julian's special regard for Jews, the book pursues (and belabors) another line of comedy, this one about self-loathing Jews...Jacobson has stirred this pot before (and Philip Roth stirred it before him), but the novel's real depth develops slowly beneath the satire, as anti-Semitic attacks begin to filter into the story from around London and the world.

Shirley Hazzard

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Add Shirley Hazzard's new novel to the shelf of haunting post-war stories. The Great Fire smolders in the aftermath of World War II, when the ashes of that calamity threatened to flash back into flame or choke estranged survivors … Her story comes into focus two years after the destruction of Hiroshima. The war is over, but the peace is hardly satisfying, leaving a world grimy, lame, and troubled by rumors of resuming conflict … Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time, moving around the world to gather fleeting but arresting impressions of fascism in Italy, battle in Germany, and defeat in Japan – all the shattering chaos that through a million permutations has brought Leith into the company of these two ethereal siblings.

Peter Carey

Rave The Christian Science Monitor With this remarkable novel, Carey has raised a national legend to the level of an international myth. If the world thinks of America through the voice of Huck Finn, from now on they'll think of Australia through the testimony of Ned Kelly … Ned's good nature isn't enough to spare him from the assaults of English injustice. At school, he endures a barrage of dispiriting prejudice. The police harass his family relentlessly. ‘All my life all I wanted were a home,’ he sighs, but the authorities are determined to catch his relations stealing or lying or fighting or drinking – anything to put one of them away in the ‘gaol’ and encourage the remaining clan to move out … In this bracing narrative, Carey has given Kelly back his tongue with a style that rips like a falling tree. The Australia-born author is something of a genius in these acts of literary ventriloquism.

Andrew Sean Greer

Rave The Washington Post ...[a] thoroughly delightful novel ... Greer is an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy ... Greer is brilliantly funny about the awkwardness that awaits a traveling writer of less repute ... Whether he’s pining after an old lover or creeping along a ledge four flights up, hoping to climb through the window of his locked apartment, this is the comedy of disappointment distilled to a sweet elixir. Greer’s narration, so elegantly laced with wit, cradles the story of a man who loses everything: his lover, his suitcase, his beard, his dignity.

Andrew Miller

Positive The Washington Post Into this pungent historical setting wafts Miller with a grave story about a man charged with emptying the cemetery and tearing down the church. It’s Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth in reverse. Miller’s hero, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, is a work of fiction, but the 1785 country Miller describes is redolent of real life … Jean-Baptiste is an endearing fellow, serious and earnest, torn between his ambitions and his good nature. He’s so committed to rational self-improvement that every night in bed he recites a little godless affirmation about his devotion to reason. He prides himself ‘on possessing a trained and shadowless mind,’ but just wait till the miasma of the graveyard begins to work on him. Not exactly a country bumpkin, he’s still dazzled by Paris. The early scenes of him stumbling around the city — trying to buy the right suit, trying to hold his liquor — are delightful.

Geraldine Brooks

Rave The Christian Science Monitor [March] promised to write to his beloved Marmee every day, but he admits privately in the opening chapter, ‘I never promised I would write the truth.’ So begins a double helix of entwined narratives – cheery letters to his little women about the noble fight against slavery and searing descriptions for us of the ghastly defeats of war … What becomes increasingly fascinating in this novel is the complicated nature of idealism in the real world and the way that stress twists March's conscience and warps his once pure relationship with the woman he loves. Again and again, March does everything possible to save others but, failing that, can only berate himself for the shame of surviving … In this highly sympathetic portrayal, Brooks nonetheless suggests that there's a narcissistic quality to the drive for perfection that can lead a man to ignore the common but no less pressing needs of those who depend on him.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave The Washington Post Kingsolver neatly weaves this quiet, watchful man through tumultuous events that rocked two countries, and one of the most impressive feats of The Lacuna is how convincingly she tracks his developing voice, from when he's a sensitive teenager in 1929 until he becomes a national celebrity in the early 1950s … A ‘permanent foreigner,’ not at home in the United States or Mexico and aware that his budding homosexuality must not be expressed, young Shepherd quickly develops an outsider's detached perspective, tinged with loneliness. He has a sharp eye for the beauty of Mexico, its lush tropics and its colorful towns, and Kingsolver convincingly positions him near some of the era's larger-than-life figure.

Joshua Cohen

Rave The Washington Post Granta recently named Cohen one of the best young American novelists, and his new book, Moving Kings, is a svelte comic triumph that concentrates his genius ... The clash of expectations between a rough American businessman and an Israeli innocent abroad provides the basis for some smart comedy, and Cohen is particular adept with moments of silly absurdity ... As subtly as water seeps into sand, the comedy drains from this story, and we’re left in the stark moral desert where Yoav is stranded.

Matthew Klam

Rave The Washington Post This is an irresistible comic novel that pumps blood back into the anemic tales of middle-aged white guys. Klam may be working in a well-established tradition, but he’s sexier than Richard Russo and more fun than John Updike, whose Protestant angst was always trying to transubstantiate some man’s horniness into a spiritual crisis ... In paragraphs that flow like conversation with a witty, troubled friend, Klam captures Rich’s squirrelly consciousness, swinging from lust to despair, turning his comic eye on others and then on himself ... But for all its wise gender comedy, Who Is Rich is also a brilliant rumination on the trap of cannibalizing one’s life for art.

Susanna Clarke

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is no Harry Potter knockoff. It's altogether original — far closer to Dickens than Rowling ... Clarke has concocted a thoroughly enchanting story of the early 19th century when Gilbert Norrell tried to bring 'practical magic' back to England ... In Clarke's wry, slightly arch tone, they provide faux bibliographic references and fill out England's magical history with myths and legends of the Raven King, who once ruled both human and faerie kingdoms ... Mr. Norrell is a wonderfully odd character in what's practically an encyclopedia of wonderfully odd characters ... Either by instinct or design, Clarke drops supernatural elements into the plot slowly and sparingly, luring fantasy readers along, while acclimating skittish newcomers to this genre gradually ... Move over, little Harry. It's time for some real magic.

Susan Sontag

Rave The Christian Science Monitor The novel opens with a daring, almost mystical chapter in which Sontag imagines herself conceiving of her characters at a lavish dinner in Russian-occupied Poland in 1875. It's like watching a projectionist trying to bring the film into focus. This kind of self-referential, post-modern trick could be annoying, but Sontag is a brilliant writer who doesn't gauge her intelligence by how confused she can make her audience … Maryna hopes to reincarnate her former theatrical glory. But she discovers painfully that the costs and rewards of being a great European actress are not the same as being an American celebrity. The result is a fascinating exploration of what's real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality … Sontag is so comfortable spinning these big ideas through the details of her novel that they never seem heavy or intrusive. In In America we discover the country as the curtain rises on the modern age.

Richard Russo

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Empire Falls holds the fading culture of small-town life in a light that’s both illuminating and searing. It captures the interplay of past and present, comedy and tragedy, nation and individual in the tradition of America’s greatest books … Just as the past lingers around Empire Falls, italicized chapters rise up in the main story to trace the strange involvement of Miles’s family with the Whitings. These episodes, tinted with gothic motifs and punctured with tragedy, emphasize the tremors of will and affection that continue to quiver in the survivors … The pressure that directs the Knox River to dump debris along the banks of Empire Falls is no more powerful than the urges of these alienated people to wreak havoc on those nearby. Throughout this mammoth book, Russo describes the politics of town, school, and family with a sense of moral outrage, tempered by comic appreciation of the grotesque.

Alan Hollinghurst

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years. Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page … It's also an explicitly gay novel. Not just a novel with some gay characters, comfortably on the side or reduced to floppy antics, à la Will and Grace. Hollinghurst rarely strays far from his protagonist's sexual fantasies and exploits … As AIDS ravages the gay community and scandal rocks the Fedden household, Nick finds himself as abandoned as he ever feared, and the compensation of beauty seems heartbreakingly tragic.

Jonathan Lethem

Mixed The Christian Science Monitor … a novel of boundless energy and startling insight about the conundrum adults impose on children by demanding that they live the ideal of integration that we've been unable to demonstrate ourselves … This is daring stuff, as dazzling for its style as for its politics. And it's packed full of enough pop culture references to send Dennis Miller scrambling to the encyclopedia … Lethem's sentences can just barely contain all he makes them accomplish as he spins ‘the ironized, reference-peppered palaver which comprises Dylan's only easy mode of talk.’ In fact, almost inevitably the book's structure begins to creak and break apart … The novel never regains the breathtaking verve of its childhood section. Then again, Dylan never regains the breathtaking verve of his childhood either, and that ultimately is the tragedy of The Fortress of Solitude.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Positive The Washington Post Despite the dramatically contemporary subject of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer hasn't invented something new as much as shifted the plot of his spectacularly successful Everything Is Illuminated … Journeys like this are dangerous – a little boy could get mugged; an author could get mawkish – but Foer is an extraordinarily sensitive writer, and Oskar's search for a missing parent scratches one of our first anxieties … This novel and his first one effectively trace the smoke from one horror to the next, from New York to Dresden to Hiroshima to the gulag – to every baffled survivor whose happiness was burned away by conflations of politics and hatred that were entirely irrelevant to his life.

Margaret Atwood

Positive The Christian Science Monitor The title of [Atwood’s] latest book, The Blind Assassin, announces its recklessness right up front. It's a killer novel, all right, but it can see exactly where it's going, even when we can't … In fact, for the first 30 self-consciously oblique pages, The Blind Assassin drags us through a pawn shop of incongruous objects … It's a wild ride, but if you can hang on through this opening, you'll be hooked till the whole tragic story finally comes to rest in the most surprising place … Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton – but don't forget that side order of comic-book science fiction.

Claire Messud

Rave The Washington Post This may be rage, but it’s fantastically smart rage — anger that never distorts, even in the upper registers...Wherever she digs, she hits rich veins of indignation … Anger provides the heat, but the novel’s real energy comes from its intellectual fuel, its all-consuming analytical drive … Between the heaves of storm, Nora can be an engaging commentator on everything from aesthetics to international relations to aging … Even as that psychological drama races toward a dark climax, Nora seduces us with her piercing assessment of the way young women are acculturated, the way older women are trapped.

Erin Morgenstern

Positive The Washington Post But even if you’re not ready for clown shoes, you’ll enjoy escaping into Erin Morgenstern’s enchanting first novel, The Night Circus ... more than merely re-creating the Greatest Show on Earth, Morgenstern has spun an extravaganza that makes P.T. Barnum look smaller than Tom Thumb ... Echoing the immense pleasure of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell ... In ominous, atmospheric chapters of just a few pages each, Morgenstern moves quickly through the children’s supernatural preparation ...In fact, there’s probably too much going on here, even for a three-ring circus, and so many colorful characters that the protagonists can seem a bit underdeveloped ...Indeed, one of the most enthralling aspects of this novel is watching two lovers unfettered by the laws of nature or physics cast secret tokens of their affection to each other.

Claire Messud

Rave The Washington Post The three wunderkinds at the center of Messud's engrossing satire are friends from Brown, strutting through life with élan but also with a sense of floundering that chafes at them like a new pair of Christian Louboutin shoes … Yes, they're spoiled, they're self-absorbed, and they're whiny, but above all else they're irresistibly clever and endowed with the kind of hyper-analytical minds that make them fascinating critics of each other and themselves … Beneath the rich surface of this comedy of manners runs Messud's attention to ‘authenticity’: its importance, its elusiveness and the myriad tricks of self-delusion we pursue to imagine we possess it in greater degree than our friends and family.

Roxane Gay

Positive The Washington Post Owing to the power of Gay’s prose, the immediacy of the narrator’s voice and the graphic nature of this ordeal, it’s some of the most emotionally exhausting material I’ve ever read … In An Untamed State, she considers questions of class, parental responsibility and especially sex as a weapon of terror in a fantastically exciting novel … it’s easy to imagine An Untamed State pleading for the moral innocence of desperately poor people who have no options except crime and extortion … But the boundless savagery of Mireille’s kidnappers soon makes any kind of sociological apology for their behavior sound obscene. Despite the beatings she receives for talking back, she shreds her captors’ pompous class-warfare cant, refusing to let them imagine that the injustices they’ve suffered absolve them.

Marilynne Robinson

Rave The Washington Post These three exquisite books constitute a trilogy on spiritual redemption unlike anything else in American literature … Lila crawls into Gilead from another world altogether, a realm of subsistence living where the speculations of theologians are as far away — and useless — as the stars … Robinson has constructed this novel in a graceful swirl of time, constantly moving back to Lila and Doll’s struggles with starvation, desperate thieves and vengeful relatives. We see that dark past only intermittently, as a child’s clear but fragmentary memories or a trauma victim’s flashbacks.

Tracy Chevalier

Positive The Washington Post At first, that setting might sound infantile for the adult machinations of Shakespeare’s play, but give it a moment, and the anachronisms of this mash-up start to feel oddly appropriate. In Chevalier’s handling, the insidious manipulations of Othello translate smoothly to the dynamics of a sixth-grade playground, with all its skinned-knee passions and hopscotch rules ... How Chevalier renders Iago’s scheme into the terms of a modern-day playground provides some wicked delight. She’s immensely inventive about it all ... Of course, Othello works better, but that’s inevitable. Shakespeare’s highly stylized language accommodates equally artificial actions on the stage, while that harmony is thrown out of whack in Chevalier’s novel. Her realistic prose and naturalistic characters eventually clash with the melodrama that overtakes the plot. But by that time, the story of O has reached such a disturbing pitch that you can’t do anything but stand stock still in the sand and watch this poor boy’s life crash.

Eowyn Ivey

Positive The Washington Post A childless couple forms a girl from snow and, in answer to their longing, she comes to life. That’s essentially what happens in Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, but the author has transported the story to her native Alaska and fleshed it out with an endearing set of characters ... Whether she really exists or not, Faina, as they eventually call her, will capture your imagination just as she captures Jack and Mabel’s...[Faina is] another in the growing crowd of fiercely independent girls we’ve seen in recent fiction including Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones ... Although Ivey teases us with surreal elements, they remain an elusive scent in these pages, which are grounded in the deadly but gorgeous Alaskan landscape ... Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy. That isn’t a feeling literary fiction seems to have much use for, but Ivey conveys surprising moments of happiness with such heartfelt conviction.

Marilynne Robinson

Rave The Washington Post Robinson has constructed a plot so still that it seems at times more a series of tableaux than a novel. The tension in Home is palpable but invisible … Even more than their stylistic beauty, what's miraculous about Gilead and Home is their explicit focus on spiritual affliction, discussed in the hard terms of Protestant theology. Robinson uses the words ‘grace,’ ‘salvation’ and ‘prayer’ frequently and without embarrassment and without drifting into the gassy lingo of ecumenical spirituality. Her characters cower in the shadow of perdition … As a disquisition on the agonies of family love and serial disappointment, Home is sometimes too illuminating to bear.

Marilynne Robinson

Rave The Christian Science Monitor This quiet new novel from Marilynne Robinson couldn't be less compatible with the times – or more essential … Ames's narrative is a mixture of wry commentary on the ministerial life, heartfelt reflections on God, and passing observations on what's happening that day. He makes a good effort to keep the preachy inflection out of his voice, but when it comes through, you can hear what fine guidance he must have given over the course of 2,250 sermons … There are passages here of such profound, hard-won wisdom and spiritual insight that they make your own life seem richer.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Mixed The Washington Post Among other things, this multigenerational story is about ‘the intimacy of siblings’...but The Lowland has complicated the ancient story of sibling rivalry by infusing it with real affection, capturing the way these two brothers need and rely on each other … Given the trauma Subhash and Gauri have experienced, their whispered lives are perfectly understandable, and Lahiri renders them in clear, restrained prose. But are catatonic grief and alienation enough to sustain a novel?...Although writing this fine is easy to praise, it’s not always easy to enjoy. And there’s something naggingly synthetic about this tableau of woe … If parts of The Lowland feel static, it’s also true that Lahiri can accelerate the passage of time in moments of terror with mesmerizing effect.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave The Washington Post On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy … [Ward’s] description of the storm, the blind terror, the force of wind and water, is filled with visceral panic. What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Washington Post The question of who is and who isn’t an Indian gradually becomes the heart of the matter as the crime gets caught in the tangled branches of family and retribution, ‘the gut kick of our history’ … Joe is an incredibly endearing narrator, full of urgency and radiant candor. Looking back over a distance of many years, he describes his wrenching passage from innocence to experience … Beyond the rape and the investigation and any possible retribution, Joe’s sobering evaluation of his relationship with his parents is the most profound drama of the novel.

Eimear McBride

Mixed The Washington Post McBride writes in a stream-of-consciousness style that reflects her narrator’s fragmented and damaged psyche. It’s a method as clever and effective as it is opaque and confusing … In some sections, the novel’s halting, elliptical style conveys confusion and terror more honestly than coherent paragraphs ever could. McBride has perfected a language commensurate with the scrambled strains of shame, pain and desire felt by a girl being raped by her uncle. Her garbled sentences capture the lacunae of intoxication … I appreciate the stylistic theory behind her tortured style, but I also couldn’t help but wish that these linguistic shenanigans would get out of the way once in a while and let this plaintive story come through unimpeded.

Dave Eggers

Pan The Washington Post This relentless broadside against the corrosive effects of the connected life is as subtle as a sponsored tweet. Make no mistake: Eggers has seen the Facebook effect, and he does not ‘like’ it. His parable of technological madness reads like a BuzzFeed list of ‘Top 10 Problems With the Web.’ … Given how self-evident these satiric points are, though, it’s a shame Eggers can’t trust his readers more. We hardly need Mae’s ex-boyfriend to look directly into the novel’s webcam and hector us like some Luddite preacher … Part of respecting privacy might be leaving readers space to draw their own interpretations.

Zadie Smith

Rave The Washington Post … a big, challenging new novel about the forces that poison our dreams of economic ascendancy. The title is the only thing abbreviated about NW. Everything else is luxuriously spun out, pulled and examined from various angles by an author who, like London, seems to have a camera on every street corner … [Felix’s] section — really a masterful novella in its own right — seems at first like a lengthy aside from the story of Leah and Natalie, but nothing is accidental in this tale of collision and ambition … The impression of Smith’s casual brilliance is what constantly surprises, the way she tosses off insights about parenting and work that you’ve felt in some nebulous way but never been able to articulate.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Positive The Washington Post This is a story about romance and novels — and the bright young people who read them. Or misread them … Eugenides’s love affair with fiction embraces all those contradictions: the novel’s potential to confuse and enlighten, to teach what love is really like even while confusing us with impossible ideals … The novel’s first section, a 127-page masterpiece that takes place on graduation day, twists and soars through one witty, erudite, perfectly choreographed sentence after another...These later sections are not as compelling, although the portrayal of life with a manic-depressive is distressing enough to shred anyone’s 19th-century illusions of romance. Eugenides is frighteningly perceptive about the challenges of mental illness.

Johnathan Franzen

Mixed The Washington Post This finely fanged tale of neighborly spite and camouflaged jealousy lets you relish your own superiority – if you don't recoil at the narrator's smugness, which is perhaps what always separates Franzen's fans from his detractors … Unfortunately, the novel doesn't offer its themes so much as bully us into accepting them with knife-to-the-throat insistence. The word ‘freedom,’ for example, beats through the book frequently enough for a frat-house drinking game. As the characters attain the freedom they craved – from children, from spouses, from work – they inevitably discover that it's unsatisfying and self-destructive … The point to remember is that Freedom is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers.

Sarah Perry

Rave The Washington Post ... irresistible ... an absorbing story told in a style that’s antique without being dated, rich but never pretentious. The narrative sometimes shifts into an interchange of intimate letters, a bittersweet reminder of what we gave up to send each other emoji and self-destructing snapshots. Raised on the classics and the Bible, Perry creates that delicate illusion of the best historical fiction: an authentic sense of the past — its manners, ideals and speech — that feels simultaneously distant and relevant to us ... By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature 'from the illuminated margins of a manuscript': friendship.

Cormac McCarthy

Positive The Washington Post The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don't want to go, forces us to think about questions we don't want to ask. Readers who sneer at McCarthy's mythic and biblical grandiosity will cringe at the ambition of The Road. At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard. Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy's prose and the simple beauty of this hero's love for his son … The book's climax – an immaculate conception of Pilgrim's Progress and 'Mad Max' – is a startling shift for McCarthy, but a tender answer to a desperate prayer. ·

Arundhati Roy

Rave The Washington Post Truly, this is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinent’s most brutal villains. It will not convert Roy’s political enemies, but it will surely blast past them. Here are sentences that feel athletic enough to sprint on for pages, feinting in different directions at once, dropping disparate allusions, tossing off witty asides, refracting competing ironies. This is writing that swirls so hypnotically that it doesn’t feel like words on paper so much as ink in water. Every paragraph dares you to keep up, forcing you finally to stop asking questions, to stop grasping for chronology and just trust her ... [it] will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion.

Philipp Meyer

Rave The Washington Post What a range Meyer has: He can disembowel a living soldier with just as much color and precision as when he slights a preppy debutante at a sleepover. He shows us Texas evolving from cattle to oil, from hardscrabble grassland to unimaginable opulence … I could no more convey the scope of The Son than I could capture the boundless plains of Texas. With this family that stretches from our war with Mexico to our invasion of Iraq, Meyer has given us an extraordinary orchestration of American history, a testament to the fact that all victors erect their empires on bones bleached by the light of self-righteousness.

Emma Donoghue

Rave The Washington Post While the story is sometimes terrifying, Donoghue consistently de-emphasizes Old Nick, a strategy that reflects Jack's limited perspective but also demonstrates that she has no intention of trafficking in the sexual charge of abduction thrillers. Instead, the novel stays focused on Jack's elemental pleasures and unsettling questions … For such a peculiar, stripped-down tale, it's fantastically evocative … Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him -- whatever that would mean.

Karen Russell

Positive The Washington Post With a mixture of comedy, terror and nostalgia, [Russell] conjures up a run-down theme park 30 miles off the Gulf Coast of Florida, a tourist trap run by a family of phony Indians named the Bigtrees … On this almost make-believe island, the Bigtree children home-school themselves with moldy books from a Library Boat abandoned in the 1950s. They speak with preternaturally mature knowledge without realizing how little they know of the real world. One wrong move and the novel's poignancy could slip into cuteness … She's charted out a strange estuary where heartbreak and comedy mingle to produce a fictional environment that seems semi-magical but emotionally true.

Rachel Kushner

Rave The Washington Post The Flamethrowers is a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, she strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated … Kushner’s seductive prose is never truly surreal, but she doesn’t present Reno’s adventures in chronological order, which reflects the dreamlike flow of her experiences … The breadth of Kushner’s historical and critical knowledge could be oppressive if this weren’t such an alluring performance. What really dazzles, though, is her ability to steer this zigzag plot so expertly that she can let it spin out of control now and then.

Tom Perrotta

Rave The Washington Post Saints and sinners, Christians and Muslims, even atheists and homosexuals have all been gathered up indiscriminately by the Son of God. Or something. It’s impossible to say … What we have is a novel soaked in mourning from its very first pages: a survivor’s tale, like a story of 9/11 without any ashes or anyone to blame, which, of course, is a recipe for self-mutilation in the dark minds of the inconsolable … Leavened with humor and tinged with creepiness, this insightful novel draws us into some very dark corners of the human psyche. Sad as these people are, their sorrow is absorbing rather than depressing.

Téa Obreht

Rave The Washington Post Obreht\'s swirling first novel, The Tiger\'s Wife, draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can\'t touch … Her thoughtful narrator must navigate the land mines – literal and political – that still blot the countryside. Natalia\'s world is a steampunk mingling of modern technology and traditional tools – cellphones and antibiotics alongside picks and poultices … Its sentiments are refreshingly un-American. Anxiously youth-obsessed, we\'ve always been awkward and weird about death; our rituals for grieving and commemorating are still chaotic and ad hoc. But The Tiger\'s Wife never strays far from the desire of desperate people to do right by the dead, no matter how much time has passed.

Edan Lepucki

Rave The Washington Post This is a story packed with wicked and wickedly funny confessions about a host of hallowed subjects ... Woman No. 17 tastes like a juice box of suburban satire laced with Alfred Hitchcock. Lepucki’s witty lines arrive as dependably as afternoon playtime, but her reflection on motherhood and women’s friendships is deadly serious ... Despite the novel’s persistent humor, Lepucki captures the cocktail of love, desperation and guilt that can sometimes poison parents of children with special needs. This is, among many things, a story about the ways we imagine we hurt our children and the ways we imagine they hurt us ... The disclosures that Lepucki engineers in this smart novel are sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, always irresistible.

Jennifer Egan

Rave The Washington Post If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. Her new novel, is a medley of voices -- in first, second and third person -- scrambled through time and across the globe with a 70-page PowerPoint presentation reproduced toward the end. I know that sounds like the headache-inducing, aren't-I-brilliant tedium that sends readers running to nonfiction, but Egan uses all these stylistic and formal shenanigans to produce a deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing. And what's best, every movement of this symphony of boomer life plays out through the modern music scene, a white-knuckle trajectory of cool, from punk to junk to whatever might lie beyond. My only complaint is that A Visit From the Goon Squad doesn't come with a CD.

J. Courtney Sullivan

Rave The Washington Post ...[a] quiet masterpiece ... In a simple style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys and, in the rare miracle of fiction, makes us care about them as if they were our own family ... Indeed, the ferocious discipline of these two sisters is matched only by the author’s. Sullivan never tells too much; she never draws attention to her cleverness; she never succumbs to the temptation of offering us wisdom. She trusts, instead, in the holy power of a humane story told in one lucid sentence after another.

Dave Eggers

Rave Christian Science Monitor There are so many reasons to dislike this super-hip, self-consciously ironic autobiography that it's something of a disappointment to report how wonderful it is...Of course, his book isn't for everyone (people who don't speak English will find it particularly oblique), but this may be the bridge from the Age of Irony to Some Other As Yet Unnamed Age that we've been waiting for.

Ian McEwan

Rave The Christian Science Monitor The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do … McEwan's knowledge of the inner workings of these characters is so piercing that you can't help feeling sorry for them; only God should have such intimate knowledge … These disparate parts, alike only in their stunning effectiveness, combine to produce a profound exploration of the nature of guilt and the difficulty of absolution. As she clears the fog of adolescence, Briony must confront the destructive power of her fiction, even while pursuing its redemptive possibilities … We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives. And in those stories we can illustrate ‘the simple truth that other people are as real as us ... and have an equal value.’

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The Christian Science Monitor The Corrections represents a giant leap for Jonathan Franzen – not only beyond his previous two novels, but beyond just about anybody else's … The book is wildly brilliant, funny, and wise, a rich feast of cultural analysis... Franzen's powers of description are exhaustive but unfailingly witty. His vision is at once enormous and minute, scanning the whole world but still attending with remarkable sympathy to the challenges of this one family … Despite its hooting comedy, The Corrections is ultimately the tragedy of people who believe that their minds, their very thoughts, are essentially chemical. Franzen diagnoses the empty horror of this notion with searing precision.

Donna Tartt

Rave The Washington Post While the world has been transformed over the past decade, one of the most remarkable qualities of The Goldfinch is that it arrives singed with 9/11 terror but redolent of a 19th-century novel … This is, among many other things, a novel of survivor’s guilt, of living in ‘the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden’ … While grief may be the novel’s bassline, Theo’s wit and intelligence provide the book’s endearing melody … Free will and fate, pragmatic morality and absolute values, an authentic life and a dutiful one — those fusty old terms spring to life in an extended passage of philosophical trompe l’oeil as Theo expounds with the authority of a man who has suffered, who knows why the chained bird sings.

Colm Tóibín

Rave The Washington Post This isn’t just a captivating retelling; it’s a creative reanimation of these indelible characters who are still breathing down our necks across the millennia. And far from feeling constrained by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Tóibín ventures into the lacunae of the old legends and pumps blood even into the silent figures of Greek tragedy ... Despite the passage of centuries, this is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender ... Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range, not just in tone but in action. He creates the arresting, hushed scenes for which he’s so well known just as effectively as he whips up murders that compete, pint for spilled pint, with those immortal Greek playwrights.

Omar El Akkad

Rave The Washington Post The American War he creates is an unsettling amalgam of 19th-century hatred and 21st-century technology: the War Between the States amplified by the wonders of modern engagement to claim tens of millions of victims ... El Akkad demonstrates a profound understanding of the corrosive culture of civil war, the offenses that give rise to new hypocrisies and mythologies, translating terrorists into martyrs and acts of despair into feats of heroism ... this story is always Sarat’s. El Akkad has done nothing less than reveal how a curious girl evolves into a pitiless fighter. Her change appears subtle month to month, but shocking by the end ... perhaps most relevant is the way El Akkad re-creates the rhetoric of factional righteousness, the self-validating claims of the aggrieved that keep every war fueled.

Stephanie Powell Watts

Rave The Washington Post Surprise: Watts’s novel is unfairly freighted with this allusion to its distant, white ancestor. If you know Fitzgerald’s story intimately, it might be interesting, in some minor, academic way, to trace the lines of influence on her work, but in general that’s a distraction. Watts has written a sonorous, complex novel that’s entirely her own ... [the] plural narrator, knowing and wry, is just one of the novel’s rich pleasures. Without yoking herself to some cumbersome Greek chorus, Watts has invented a communal voice that’s infinitely flexible, capable of surveying the whole depressed town or lingering tenderly in a grieving mother’s mind ... Little happens in this novel in any traditional sense, but it seems constantly in motion because Watts is so captivating a writer ... All of this is conveyed in a prose style that renders the common language of casual speech into natural poetry, blending intimate conversation with the rhythms of gossip, town legend, even song lyrics ... What Watts has done here is more captivating than another retread about the persistence of a crook’s dream. She’s created an indelible story about the substance of a woman’s life.

Hannah Tinti

Rave The Washington Post This is the ancient myth of Hercules — the plot of all plots — re-engineered into a modern-day wonder. Tinti knows how to cast the old campfire spell. I was so desperate to find out what happened to these characters that I had to keep bargaining with myself to stop from jumping ahead to the end ... a master class in literary suspense. Hercules himself might feel daunted by the labor of writing tales for 12 bullets, but Tinti is indefatigable. Each one of these stories drops us into a different setting somewhere in the country, establishes a tense situation in progress and then barrels along until slugs start tearing into flesh. Given the repetition, you would think we would come to anticipate Tinti’s methods and grow weary with these near-escapes, but each one is a heart-in-your-throat revelation, a thrilling mix of blood and love ... This would all be empty calories if Tinti weren’t also such a gorgeous writer, if she didn’t have such a profound sense of the complex affections between a man wrecked by sorrow and the daughter he hoped 'would not end up like him.'”

Ron Currie

Pan The Washington Post In these latter days of 'alternative facts,' the idea of someone fearlessly dedicated to total, literal honesty sounds awfully appealing. I only wish I could say that this absurd story feels more subtle in execution than in summary. Alas, the plotting is sketchy, the social satire clunky. K.’s Socratic assault on the illogical, racist and shortsighted beliefs of his fellow citizens raises not a single surprisingly or truly provocative moment ... [Currie] knows what surprising havoc the persistence of grief can wreak on the heart. He doesn’t need a gimmicky plot premise; human life is strange and existential enough.

Dan Chaon

Rave The Washington Post Before beginning his exceptionally unnerving new book, go ahead and lock the door, but it won’t help. You’ll still be stuck inside yourself, which for Chaon is the most precarious place to be ... Chaon, who lost his own wife — the writer Sheila Schwartz — in 2008, captures the obscuring effects of grief with extraordinary tenderness. But he sows that misery in the soil of a literary thriller that germinates more terror than sorrow. There’s something irresistibly creepy about this story that stems from the thrill of venturing into illicit places of the mind ... Chaon’s great skill is his ability to re-create that compulsive sense we have in nightmares that we’re just about to figure everything out — if only we tried a little harder, moved a little faster ... Chaon’s novel walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. By the time we realize what’s happening, we’ve gone too far to turn back. We can only inch forward into the darkness, bracing for what might come next.

Sam Shepard

Mixed The Washington Post Fans of his short stories and autobiographical writings will hear echoes of the playwright’s life all across this familiarly bleak landscape ... much of the book’s contemporary story has the substance of an extended, self-pitying sigh...There’s an awful lot of wandering around the house, looking for the dogs, feeling bereft. He thinks about suicide, mulls his dreams, considers the smell of his urine ... insights, often evocatively phrased, are the erratic rewards of reading this fitful book. Sometimes, they come in a single phrase, such as Shepard’s appraisal of T.S. Eliot: 'essential ideas redolent of stale gin and suicide.' But the best parts of The One Inside are those least hobbled by its fractured structure and mannered dialogue. When he stops letting vagueness masquerade as profundity, when he actually tells a story about a real man caught in the peculiar throes of a particular moment, he can still make the ordinary world feel suddenly desperate and strange.

J. M. Coetzee

Pan The Washington Post The details of these novels cannot be matched up in any schematic way with the events of Jesus’ life. Some readers may find this dissonance freeing. To me, it’s irritatingly coy. Like the bystanders in the Gospel of John, I’m left asking: 'How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly' ... The most satisfying parts of the novel come early as Simón struggles to provide David with the love and direction the boy needs. Coetzee has an impeccable ear for the tender patter between a curious child and a conscientious father figure who never wants to lose his patience ... There’s no denying the haunting quality of Coetzee’s measured prose, his ability to suspend ordinary events in a world just a few degrees away from our own. But to what end? Although The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus are presented as allegories, they never yield any interesting allegorical meaning. The result is a story that suggests more profundity than it ever incarnates.

Margaret Drabble

Rave The Washington Post Margaret Drabble has written a novel about aging and death, which for American readers should make it as popular as a colostomy bag. That’s a pity because Drabble, 77, is as clear-eyed and witty a guide to the undiscovered country as you’ll find ... The irony of Fran’s perpetual motion — and a source of the novel’s humor — is that she’s annoyed by the way her fellow senior citizens resist their golden years, years that now stretch on further for more people than ever before ... There’s nothing schematic about the range of these characters, but eventually it becomes clear that they make up a kind of catalogue of doom ... Running through all these aging lives are recurring references to a London revival of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Although less famous than his Waiting for Godot, it’s the perfect complement to Fran’s manic efforts to stay above the ever-rising grains of sand collecting around her. Drabble never sinks to the level of Beckett’s despair, but she’s refreshingly frank about the tragicomedy of aging. Remembering one of her dearly departed friends, Fran thinks, 'She never said a dull word.' The same might be said of Margaret Drabble.

George Saunders

Positive The Washington Post ...a strikingly original production, a divisively odd book bound either to dazzle or alienate readers ... This is a book that confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like. It seems at first a clever clip-job, an extended series of brief quotations from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, personal testimonies and later scholars, each one meticulously attributed...But quickly Lincoln in the Bardo teaches us how to read it. The quotations gathered from scores of different voices begin to cohere into a hypnotic conversation that moves with the mysterious undulations of a flock of birds ... Indeed, the ghosts threaten to overtake the novel. Clearly, Saunders enjoys their macabre antics — but the heart of the story remains Abraham Lincoln, the shattered father who rides alone to the graveyard at night to caress the head of his lifeless boy...It’s at this point in the novel that Saunders’s deep compassion shines through most clearly.

Joyce Carol Oates

Rave The Washington Post As the Republican Congress plots to cripple Planned Parenthood and the right to choose hinges on one vacant Supreme Court seat, American Martyrs probes all the wounds of our abortion debate. Indeed, it’s the most relevant book of Oates’s half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning’s tweets but infinitely more illuminating. For as often as we hear that some novel about a wealthy New Yorker suffering ennui is a story about 'how we live now,' here is a novel that actually fulfills that promise, a story whose grasp is so wide and whose empathy is so boundless that it provides an ultrasound of the contemporary American soul ... They are American families so separated by opportunity and ideology that they could be living in different countries, but Oates’s sympathetic attention to the dimensions of their lives renders both with moving clarity ... Oates has mastered an extraordinary form commensurate to her story’s breadth. The book is written in a structure fluid enough to move back and forth in time, to shift from first to third person without warning, sometimes breaking into italics as though this febrile text couldn’t contain the fervency of these words ... To enter this masterpiece is to be captivated by the paradox of that tragic courage and to become invested in Oates’s search for some semblance of atonement, secular or divine.

Robert Coover

Rave The Washington Post Is this resurrection something to celebrate, like the boys showing up at their own funeral? You may be tempted to sigh, 'I been there before,' but you ain’t been here before, not like this anyways ... Coover sustains that magical act of literary ventriloquism for 300 pages, preserving Twain’s raggedly, tall-tale patter spiced with the same accidental aphorisms. But Coover’s feat of transformation is ultimately more interesting than his imitation ... despite a rich vein of slapstick humor, Huck Out West is a more melancholy novel than Twain’s original. 'All stories is sad stories,' Huck says, and we come to see that his “desperate low-spiritedness” stems from the trauma of witnessing so much of the human slaughter that federal expansion demanded ... f the story meanders as much as the Mississippi River, it also gathers considerable force as Huck struggles to stay out of trouble, avoid Gen. Hard Ass and resist Tom’s increasingly malevolent friendship.

Aravind Adiga

Rave The Washington Post Adiga’s wit and raw sympathy will carry uninitiated readers beyond their ignorance of cricket ... There’s nothing boring here, though. Adiga’s paragraphs bounce along like a ball hit hard down a dirt street. One gets the general direction, but the vectors of his story can change at any moment as we chase after these characters ... What’s uncomfortable about this story begins like an itch, but for a time, the zaniness of Adiga’s novel camouflages its darker themes ... Selection Day evolves into a bittersweet reflection on the limits of what we can select ... Adiga’s voice is so exuberant, his plotting so jaunty, that the sadness of this story feels as though it is accumulating just outside our peripheral vision.

Michael Chabon

Rave The Washington Post Moonglow is a wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory ... [The] fusion of history, slapstick and menace sets the trajectory for the rest of this lovable novel ... This is Chabon at his magical best, stitching his grandfather into the fabric of the 20th century in a way that seems either ludicrous or plausible depending on how the light hits ... a thoroughly enchanting story about the circuitous path that a life follows, about the accidents that redirect it, and about the secrets that can be felt but never seen, like the dark matter at the center of every family’s cosmos.

Amos Oz, Trans. by Nicholas de Lange

Rave The Washington \"Plotless novels about lost young men represent a tedious subgenre of contemporary literature, but, naturally, Oz rises above that by rendering his hapless hero so comically sympathetic ... depends entirely on the complexity of Oz’s themes and the tender elegance of his style ... Although a certain degree of familiarity with mid-20th-century political history is helpful, Oz gracefully weaves that exposition into this novel of ideas. And although the story certainly involves arguments about the Israeli-Arab conflict that Oz has made in his nonfiction work, it never reads like an allegory of the author’s political views.\

Zadie Smith

Rave The Washington Post ...a story at once intimate and global, as much about childhood friendship as international aid, as fascinated by the fate of an unemployed single mother as it is by the omnipotence of a world-class singer ... The grade school scenes are small masterworks of storytelling in which the child’s innocence is delicately threaded with the adult’s irony. If the style of Swing Time is less exuberant than her previous work, Smith’s attention to the grace notes of friendship is as precise as ever ... Swing Time may be the most perceptive one I’ve read about the distortion field created by fame and wealth ... Swing Time uses its extraordinary breadth and its syncopated structure to turn the issues of race and class in every direction.

Ha Jin

Rave The Washington Post ...a strange, intense novel from Ha Jin about the glories and limits of the freedom of the press ... one of the most unsettling books about the moral dimensions of modern journalism ... Aside from a delicious satire of book publicity — an industry so unhitched from reality that it’s hard to parody its exaggerations — The Boat Rocker also dramatizes the vast shadow world of Internet news.

T.C. Boyle

Pan The Washington Post ...how a writer as exciting as Boyle could produce such a dull novel remains a mystery. As it drags on for more than 500 pages, The Terranauts inspires a sense of tedium that could only be matched by being trapped in a giant piece of Tupperware ... like watching The Bachelor: Terrarium Edition. The adolescent souls in these adult bodies are numbingly petty — and the novel offers no relief from their flat voices, their obvious confessions, their poisonous jealousy.

Francine Prose

Positive The Washington Post Fertile as the play is for drama and satire, Prose’s novel leaps out beyond the circle of theater people ... this [elderly widower] chapter — a masterful short story, really — is almost too good, in that it casts a shadow over the others, which don’t attain the same level of complexity or poignancy ... a lovely tribute to the transformative value of imagination.

Jonathan Lethem

Mixed The Washington Post Lethem adopts just the right tone for this handsome rake, who can hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near ... Lethem’s reflections on faces and identities would enlist more interest if we could feel a stronger pulse in Bruno — or if the concept of a man without a self were developed to more harrowing existential effect ... Lethem’s wit germinates and blooms within single sentences, which makes him a pleasure to read. And he’s a master at letting the weirdness of situations slowly accrue. But too many of the strange elements in A Gambler’s Anatomy merely bleed away.

Margaret Atwood

Mixed The Washington Post Atwood gives over several chapters to Felix’s discussions of The Tempest, and despite the essentially academic content of these scenes, they’re delightful ... Although Atwood acknowledges this painful issue in passing, it never attains the emotional weight one expects given her cast of prisoners and the racial taint of modern incarceration. Instead, this is, weirdly, a revision of The Tempest in which the monster-slave is even more defanged than in the original story ... And the book’s erratic tone is exacerbated further by a tragedy that Atwood has inserted into Shakespeare’s plot ... an exercise like this volume feels limited to teachers and students of The Tempest. Others are likely to find that for all its clever echoes and allusions, the whole production melts into air, into thin air.

Ann Patchett

Rave The Washington Post ...very soon, we’re thoroughly invested in these families, wrapped up in their lives by Patchett’s storytelling, which has never seemed more effortlessly graceful. This is minimalism that magically speaks volumes ... Drawing us through this complex genealogy of guilt and forgiveness, Patchett finally delivers us to a place of healing that seems quietly miraculous, entirely believable.

Ian McEwan

Rave The Washington Post Ian McEwan’s preposterously weird little novel, is more brilliant than it has any right to be ... surprisingly suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound ... Nutshell offers the unmatched pleasure of McEwan’s prose, inflected with witty echoes of Shakespeare.

Nathan Hill

Positive The Washington Post ...we’re in the presence of a major new comic novelist ... The Nix presents that strain of gigantism unique to debut novelists who fear this will be their only shot. The book practically tears off its own binding in its desperation to contain every aside, joke, riff and detour ... hundreds more pages could have been sliced away from The Nix. And yet there’s no denying what a brilliant, endearing writer Hill is.

Imbolo Mbue

Rave The Washington Post ...illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse ...Mbue is a bright and captivating storyteller, inflecting her own voice with the tenor of her characters’ thoughts and speech. She can enjoy the comedy of their naivete without subjecting them to mockery ... There’s a persistent warmth in this book, a species of faith that’s too often singed away by wit in contemporary fiction. For all its comedy, Mbue’s social commentary never develops that toxic level of irony.

Jacqueline Woodson

Positive The Washington Post ...a short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper ... It’s as much as a compliment as a complaint to say that I wish the story were fuller. There’s enough material here for a much longer novel, and, though Woodson’s prose is always carefully constructed, she’s sometimes so elliptical that complicated issues are illuminated only obliquely ... But that’s the real attraction of this novel, which mixes wonder and grief so poignantly.

Jay McInerney

Mixed The Washington Post McInerney has long been a distinctly New York novelist, but Bright, Precious Days looks downright myopic in its focus on the rarefied concerns of a certain class of New Yorkers ... Still, as a social satirist, McInerney can be so spot-on that you want to call your housekeeper upstairs and read her some of the funny bits ... despite the dazzlingly smart style of McInerney’s prose, there’s a wavering tone in this novel, a sense that the author is still lusting after the very things he’s mocking.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Washington Post ...a book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era ... [the railroad] gains real heft as a symbol of bravery and perseverance, a subterranean force in the story, which usually remains strikingly realistic ... The canon of essential novels about America’s peculiar institution just grew by one.

Stuart Stevens

Mixed The Washington Post Clearly, Stevens has assembled all the accoutrements for a crazy political novel, but it suffers from a disappointing lack of satiric courage ... Pining for a satire fit for our times, we get instead a perfectly reasonable Romneyesque comedy that probably has binders full of uproarious incidents stuffed away in a drawer somewhere.

Jennifer Close

Positive The Washington Post The Hopefuls is a hilarious gripefest about what it feels like to be caught in the gravitational pull of Washington ... [the] winking humor and especially the real affection between Beth and Matt make The Hopefuls a pleasure to read. Close has a light, precise touch about the way a young marriage works when the partners are caught between old ideals and new realities ... Unfortunately, leaving D.C. robs the novel of its rich satirical milieu — the Texas setting is not as entertaining — and it cramps the story into the narrow confines of a souring friendship ... The Hopefuls offers a welcome mixture of humor and wisdom about the good people who run this country — or, for some reason, want to.

Annie Proulx

Rave The Washington Post Barkskins is an awesome monument of a book, a spectacular survey of America’s forests dramatized by a cast of well-hewn characters ... such is the magnetism of Proulx’s narrative that there’s no resisting her thundering cascade of stories. By drilling deep into the woods that enabled this country to conquer the world, Proulx has laid out the whole history of American capitalism and its rapacious destruction of the land ... With its dozens of characters spread over hundreds of years, Barkskins could easily have collapsed into a great muddle of voices, but each of them is so distinct and so brilliantly choreographed that they never blur ... a towering new work of environmental fiction.

Yaa Gyasi

Rave The Washington Post [Gyasi is] asking us to consider the tangled chains of moral responsibility that hang on our history. This is one of the many issues that Homegoing explores so powerfully ... [the] structure — essentially a novel in linked stories — places extraordinary demands on Gyasi. Each chapter must immediately introduce a new setting and new characters making fresh claims on our engagement. (The family tree at the front of the book is an invaluable reader’s crutch.) But the speed with which Gyasi sweeps across the decades isn’t confusing so much as dazzling, creating a kind of time-elapsed photo of black lives in America and in the motherland ... Gyasi, who is just 26 and reportedly received more than $1 million for this book, has developed a style agile enough to reflect the remarkable range of her first novel ... truly captivating.

Emma Cline

Rave The Washington Post The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline’s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that’s gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager’s consciousness. The adult’s melancholy reflection and the girl’s swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together...[F]or a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that’s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror.

Justin Cronin

Mixed The Washington Post ...before anybody does any leaping, The City of Mirrors”slows down so much you can barely find a pulse. There’s even a 100-page novella dumped in here about a lonely kid who goes to Harvard, falls in love with his buddy’s girlfriend, and eventually gets jilted as he waits for her in Grand Central Terminal ... But at least from this point onward, The City of Mirrors is a flesh-ripping terror-fest ... It’s all deliciously exciting — right up until the epilogue, which zooms ahead 900 years to a world that seems as alien as last Thursday.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Washington Post Louise Erdrich’s new novel, LaRose, begins with the elemental gravitas of an ancient story: One day while hunting, a man accidentally kills his neighbor’s 5-year-old son. Such a canyon of grief triggers the kind of emotional vertigo that would make anyone recoil. But you can lean on Erdrich, who has been bringing her healing insight to devastating tragedies for more than 30 years...The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists that there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West’s best efforts to snuff them out.

Richard Russo

Positive The Washington Post Three dead — and we’re just getting started. But that’s the abiding wonder of Russo’s novel, which bears down on two calamitous days and exploits the action in every single minute. From the cemetery, this ramshackle plot quickly starts grabbing at mudslides, grave robbery, collapsing buildings, poisonous snakes, drug deals, arson, lightning strikes and toxic goo. North Bath is a sleepy little town that never sleeps...That’s a testament to Russo’s narrative skill, which keeps all of these characters careening through a long book devoted to a very short period of time. His success stems largely from the fact that no tangent ever feels tangential in these pages, even if Russo sometimes leans too heavily on his sad-sack shtick.

Adam Johnson

Rave The Washington Post The six stories in Adam Johnson’s new collection, Fortune Smiles, will worm into your mind and ruin your balance for a few days ... Johnson’s style is quiet and unassuming, a gentle reflection of the muted people he usually writes about. But restraint only increases the intensity of these stories and makes their visceral effect more surprising. His characters are cramped by circumstance or weakness, struggling to make sense of situations they can’t entirely understand or even believe.

Toni Morrison

Pan The Washington Post Because her latest work offers curious reflections of where she began in The Bluest Eye, it’s tempting to read God Help the Child as a capstone of her jeweled career. Once again, we have a young woman whose life is overdetermined by the pigment of her skin in a culture torn with sexual violence. But unfortunately, God Help the Child carries only a faint echo of that earlier novel’s power ... [Morrisson] leaves these people no interior life, a problem that grows more pronounced as the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma, throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling. While attempting to create a kind of fable about the lingering effects of maternal neglect and racial self-hatred, Morrison ends up instead with characters who keep phasing between skimpy realism and overwrought fantasy.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Rave The Washington Post Watkins is a master of tantalizing details, the unspoken tensions and disappointments of these lovers scraping around in the arid opulence of scorpion-infested bathrooms and empty swimming pools ... But the real genius of Gold Fame Citrus is its speculation about the isolated colonies that might survive in this aboveground hell. How might laggards, wanderers, fanatics and thieves coalesce? Once civilization decamps to the relatively moist East Coast? Watkins conjures the mythologies and mores that might sprout in such infertile soil.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Rave The Washington Post ...surely a new classic of war fiction. Nguyen has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. Startlingly insightful and perilously candid ... The contemporary relevance of [the] devastating final section can’t be ignored, but The Sympathizer is too great a novel to feel bound to our current soul-searching about the morality of torture. And it’s even more than a thoughtful reflection about our misguided errand in Southeast Asia. Transcending these historical moments, Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy.

Graham Swift

Positive The Washington Post Next to Swift’s previous novels, such as Last Orders or his emotionally devastating Wish You Were Here, Mothering Sunday feels elliptical, even minor. But it’s an elegant reflection on the impulse to tell stories. For Jane, he writes, 'it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling.' Surely, Swift is describing himself, too.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Pan The Washington Post As a long game of literary Mad Libs, Eligible is undeniably delightful. Sittenfeld’s cleverest move may be working a reality-TV dating show into her story. What might seem like a bit of pandering to pop taste is really a feat of metafictional satire ... It helps tremendously that Eligible moves along so breezily, but changing the scenery and the props isn’t sufficient to modernize Pride and Prejudice, even if such a thing could (or should) be done. We crave a witty vision of our culture commensurate with Austen’s of hers. Too often Eligible delivers humor that’s merely glib or crude.

Stephen O'Connor

Rave The Washington Post ...a colossal postmodern novel that’s often baffling, possibly offensive and frequently bizarre ... With its magically engineered collection of fiction, history and fantasy, and particularly with its own capacious spirit, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings doesn’t just knock Jefferson off his pedestal, it blows us over, too, shatters the whole sinner-saint debate and clears out new room to reconsider these two impossibly different people who once gave birth to the United States. It’s heartbreaking. It’s cathartic. It’s utterly brilliant.

Dana Spiotta

Positive The Washington Post Any summary is bound to lay a heavy hand on [the book's] jumbled structure, the way peculiar characters and strange events are introduced only to be identified and tied together in surprising ways much later. I wouldn’t blame you for assuming the book contains more reels of weirdness than you’re willing to sit through. But, honestly, while the novel’s form is promiscuous, its moral dimensions feel vast. Once Spiotta has her disparate storylines in motion, they resonate with each other in ways you can’t stop thinking about.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Positive The Washington Post For all the acerbic humor that Sweeney wrings from this family’s self-absorption, she maintains a refreshing balance of tenderness. Rather than skewering the Plumbs to death, she pokes them, as though probing to find the humanity beneath their cynical crust. And because we need some relief from the Plumbs — lest they grow intolerably annoying — the book expands to explore their far more mature friends, relations and victims.

Edna O'Brien

Rave The Washington Post In the end, what leaves one in humbled awe of The Little Red Chairs is O’Brien’s dexterity, her ability to shift without warning — like life — from romance to horror, from hamlet to hell, from war crimes tribunal to midsummer night’s dream. And through it all, she embeds the most perplexing moral challenge ever conceived in the struggles of one lonely, middle-aged woman who just wanted a baby but now wanders the earth along with so many others, 'craving the valleys and small instances of mercy.'”

Peter Manseau

Positive The Washington Post [A] haunting little book ... While acknowledging that his compendium of mayhem may read like a political argument against guns, that wasn’t his intention. The people he’d really like to reach are gun owners. Their adaptation of smart guns, which electronically limit who can fire them, is our best chance for progress, he says.

Sunjeev Sahota

Rave The Washington Post “The Year of the Runaways is essentially The Grapes of Wrath for the 21st century: the Joads’ ordeal stretched halfway around the planet, from India to England. By following a handful of young men, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean. If you’re willing to have your vague impressions of the dispossessed brought into scarifying focus, read this novel.

Ethan Canin

Rave The Washington Post “A Doubter’s Almanac is a long, complex novel about math, which sounds like the square root of tedium, but suspend your flight instinct for a moment. Ethan Canin writes with such luxuriant beauty and tender sympathy that even victims of Algebra II will follow his calculations of the heart with rapt comprehension.

Mary Rakow

Positive The Washington Post Not everyone will take this little book and eat it up. Readers who treat the Scriptures as fragile goblets of orthodoxy may find This Is Why I Came upsetting or distasteful. And yet, an unmistakable glimmer of faith radiates from these biblical reimaginings, even though they’re presented as the work of a woman who “can’t believe in God.” What the novel demands is a willingness to enter the lacunae of the familiar Bible stories and wrestle with the angel of Rakow’s poetic vision.

Yann Martel

Positive The Washington Post With Martel’s signature mixture of humor and pathos, these three stories explore the rugged terrain of grief. But they also contain the author’s reflections on the connection between storytelling and faith ... Martel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic.

Garth Greenwell

Rave The Washington Post This is a novel of aggressive introspection, but Greenwell writes with such candor and psychological precision that the effect is oddly propulsive. The sustained tension between the narrator and Mitko will remind some readers of Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room ... [a] perfect articulation of despair that anyone with a heart will hear.

Sunil Yapa

Rave The Washington Post By following the attenuation of moral responsibility that political leaders depend on, Yapa demonstrates the grotesque process that encourages otherwise good, reasonable people to perfect methods of maiming and blinding peaceful protesters.

Karen Olsson

Positive The Washington Post With its wry humor and gentle insights into the way we draw away from one another at exactly the wrong time, All the Houses is more than just an illuminating story about the nameless victims of political scandal. It’s a story about how our insecurities encourage us to smother our affections — and a reminder that we’re running out of time to make amends.

Mary Gaitskill

Positive The Washington Post Through this storm of female voices gallops that fierce mare, the object of Velvet’s affection, the subject of her dreams, the creature that could deliver her from turmoil — or kill her. Gaitskill’s ability to control all this energy, all this yearning, is just one of the many rewards of her brave novel.

Samantha Hunt

Positive The Washington Post Hunt refuses to let any conclusions solidify in her wry prose...Turned around and around in these woods, you won’t always know where you are, but there’s a rare pleasure in this blend of romance and phantoms.

Tessa Hadley

Rave The Washington Post Readers hoping for a British telenovela will be disappointed. But for anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural. If the surface of her stories is lightly etched with charm and humor, darker forces burrow underneath.

Isabel Allende

Positive The Washington Post The Japanese Lover feels, at first, as nutritious as Grandma’s freshly baked sugar cookies. But there’s nothing cloying about this unabashedly sweet story — and nothing unambitious about it, either.

John Irving

Positive The Washington Post The novelist’s reflections on his life and work attain a sweet profundity that should win over anyone who follows his journey to the end.

Leila Aboulela

Positive The Washington Post ...a rich, multilayered story, a whole syllabus of compelling topics. As a novelist, Aboulela moves confidently between dramatizing urgent, contemporary issues and providing her audience with sufficient background to follow these discussions about the changing meaning of jihad, the history of Sufism and the racial politics of the war on terror.

Colum McCann

Rave The Washington Post The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways.

David Mitchell

Positive The Washington Post That structure sounds repetitive, like five identical tombstones lying in a row...But the sticky web of repetitions and parallels in these stories grows increasingly ominous and, yes, ghoulishly funny.

Lauren Groff

Rave The Washington Post \"Swelling with a contrapuntal symphony of passions, Fates and Furies is that daring novel that seems to reach too high — and then somehow, miraculously, exceeds its own ambitions.\

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December 17, 2024