The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, and Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy: A Life all feature among October’s best reviewed books.

*

Fiction

1. Partita by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Barbara Kingsolver here

“A hallmark of the decorated novelist’s work is her flair for pithy sentences that illuminate the human experience, giving voice to our private longings and secret vulnerabilities … Kingsolver brings the full weight of her experience and her other work to the page in this entirely new story. It hits the same chords, but it is full of discovery and insight. She’s different, and we’re different too.”

–Heather Scott Partington (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
Listen to an interview with Yiyun Li here

“Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores.”

–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)

3. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus
(Scribner)

5 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Bonnie Garmus here

“It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count.”

–Claire Clark (The Guardian)

4. The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson
(William Morrow and Company)

8 Rave
Listen to an interview with T. Geronimo Johnson here

“The book is doing a lot, but for good reason … A book for readers seeking wild, ambitious literature … Even with occasional misfires, The Occidental Book of the Dead just might be something the literary world needs to see more of: It’s ambitious, creative and, most important of all, unapologetic … It will not be a novel for everyone. It doesn’t want to be. And that’s a large part of why it succeeds.”

–Jason Mott (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 2 Positive

“Astonishing … Luna, Phoenix, Queen brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms, and the relief that can only come in telling a story for oneself.”

–Meg Wolitzer (The New York Times Book Review)

**

Nonfiction

1. Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry
(Mariner)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“As Kafka once wrote, ‘a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.’ This book, and this author, are that ax … Much is laid before us, with great precision: finely tuned metaphors, graceful repetitions. Facts are faced, faults are noted, death and life are seen and held. That is all—and that is truly plenty, this valuable and beautiful account a gift to the reader, grieving or not.”

–Amy Bloom (The New York Times Book Review)

=2. On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman
(Catapult)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Cathartic and often wondrous … Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity’s most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure.”

–Publishers Weekly

=2. Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O’Gieblyn
(Doubleday)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“A remarkable memoir … Complex and surprising … Brave in its disclosures but more so in its demands, its spiritual rigor, and its ardent intellectualism … Eloquent, intelligent … Remarkably honest … Alarmingly open and unfinished.”

–James Wood (The New Yorker)

4. Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty
(St. Martin’s Press)

6 Rave • 2 Mixed

“Engrossing … Daughterty…deftly separates the writer from the myth, capturing McCarthy’s evolution from a Southern writer to a Western one with a biography that pulls you along like a novel. But he doesn’t shy away from the troubling details.”

–Bill Heavy (The Wall Street Journal)

5. Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes by Lindsey Fitzharris
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

4 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from Sleuth-Hound here

“Fitzharris rescues Bell from the periphery of the Holmes story and restores him to his rightful position as the inspiration and model for the great consulting detective.”

–David Pitt (Booklist)