Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, and André Aciman’s Roman Year all feature among October’s best reviewed books.
1. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
(Random House)
14 Rave • 2 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Languorous, elegant … No page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures … That rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language.”
–Hamilton Cain (The New York Times Book Review)
2. The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
(Harper)
12 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Mighty Red here
“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?”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon
(Doubleday)
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“The stories in this splendid new collection are inspired by an eclectic variety of sources … The work of a consummate storyteller, the brilliantly conceived Dogs and Monsters illuminates a variety of species, both real and mythical, including our own.”
–Hilma Wolitzer (The New York Times Book Review)
4. Blood Test by Charles Baxter
(Pantheon)
7 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Listen to an interview with Charles Baxter here
“As with any successful knockout punch, part of its force is that you don’t see it coming … By announcing itself a comedy, Blood Test isn’t wrong, but it undersells itself. It is a profound and unsettling—and, yes, frequently funny—snapshot of our current tribulations, cast in relief against the stubborn peculiarities of the American character.”
–Adam Sternbergh (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
(MCD)
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“VanderMeer has outdone himself … Area X does strange things to the bodies, and perhaps more importantly to the consciousness, of deserving and undeserving alike. VanderMeer has similar ambitions; he seeks to broaden his readers’ horizons and expand their sense of the possible. Maddening, haunting, and compelling, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the boundaries of speculative fiction. Just as Lowry finds it difficult to think without his swear words, many readers will find it near impossible to discuss Absolution without superlatives.”
–Matthew Keeley (The Boston Globe)
**
1. Roman Year: A Memoir by André Aciman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
9 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Roman Year here
“This is not, in style or spirit, a sad book. It’s filled with canny adaptiveness and invention … Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume’s packed with human incident … A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle.”
–Joan Frank (The Boston Globe)
2. My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
8 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from My Good Bright Wolf here
“Full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom … A lesser writer would overdo these refrains. But Moss wears them lightly, subtly using the doubting voice and the heroic wolf to tangle preconceptions of reality as she forges her own way of writing memoir.”
–Ellen Peirson-Hagger (The Observer)
3. Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny
(Knopf)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
“Honest, full of penetrating wit and with a nice ear for mockery, he was nonetheless as cheerful and empathetic as Putin is malevolent and threatening. He wielded cheerfulness as a weapon and never lost faith that the right side must eventually prevail, even if he might no longer be around to see it.”
–Will Englund (The Washington Post)
4. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Aaron Robertson on Black utopias here
“Elegant, vigorous … The author dodges the pitfalls of nostalgia and sentimentality; his anecdotes crackle with immediacy … His eye on pacing and detail, he charts the intellectual odysseys of his cast, upending our expectations … An extraordinary achievement in narrative nonfiction.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)
5. Sonny Boy by Al Pacino
(Penguin Press)
1 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Discursively soulful … The eccentricity of Sonny Boy is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff … Shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.”
–Chris Vognar (The Los Angeles Times)
