Sarah Hall’s Helm, Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives, Joy Williams’ The Pelican Child, and Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels all feature among November’s best reviewed books.
1. Helm by Sarah Hall
(Mariner)
9 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Virtuosic … Most poignant are the chapters from the perspective of Janni, a mid-20th-century girl who undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, and whose tender, almost romantic bond with Helm is moving and well drawn. Readers will be swept away by Hall’s ambitious and formally daring narrative.”
2. The Pelican Child by Joy Williams
(Knopf)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection … Though now in her 80s, Williams’ imagination clearly hasn’t failed, so hopefully her remarkable stories will keep coming.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Star Tribune)
3. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
(Europa Editions)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Although the canvas of this novel is a relatively small one…The Land in Winter manages to capture something of this era of social upheaval … This is a quiet book about quiet lives; internal turmoil trumping external drama. But the delicate attention Miller affords his characters’ inner lives makes for incredibly satisfying reading. Also notable is his elegant, measured prose.”
–Lucy Scholes (The Financial Times)
4. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
(Scribner)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Benjamin Wood here
“The premise seems humdrum and unpromising, but there is plenty of intrigue … So much of the drama is simply in the tension of Wood’s sentences, which hook you from the beginning … The result is a fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses.”
–Johanna Thomas-Corr (The Times)
5. The Silver Book by Olivia Laing
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed • 2 Pan
Read an interview with Olivia Laing here
“Sublime … The beating heart of The Silver Book is Nicholas and Donati’s love story. Laing affectingly renders this mentor-apprentice relationship, exploring the complexity of its vulnerabilities, jealousies and petty frustrations. But where the book really soars is in its visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking … Given the extravagance of this world, it might have been tempting to use a maximalist style to match the material. Instead, Laing’s prose is taut and cleareyed, even at its most sensational.”
–Christopher Bollen (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood
(Doubleday)
13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“[A] tour-de-force … Might as well be one of Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photos and illustrations). It’s a remarkable read. She makes space for everyone. Her engaging voice is populated by a large cast of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid details, all of it grounded by a compelling story line.”
–Robert Allen Papinchak (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 3 Positive
“Leman led a life so rich in incident that only a novel could do justice to its complexities, and a novel, of sorts, is exactly what Ypi has written … An inward-looking rumination but a desperate attempt to conjure a bygone milieu—and a fitting rejoinder to the tendencies it wishes to contradict … Ypi displays a certain audacity as she sets about reconstructing a world she never witnessed, but she is no more presumptuous than the files she is working from … Remarkable and ambitious.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
3. Bread of Angels: A Memoir by Patti Smith
(Random House)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Mesmerizing … Her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes … Losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
4. We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins
(Summit Books)
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Like some of his most memorable characters: quiet and restrained but with some darker stuff going on underneath … There’s minimal name-dropping and only sporadic celebrity gossip but significant honesty and thoughtful reminiscence, resulting in a rich, satisfying read.”
–Kathleen McBroom (Booklist)
5. The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature by Gerald Howard
(Penguin)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“Sensitive, well-reported, and probing … Howard’s book is not a proper biography of Cowley. One of those already exists, though it’s still in progress … Howard is more interested, profitably, in giving us set pieces and in tracing a series of ideas … I wish The Insider were about a hundred pages shorter. It’s more than 500 pages and sometimes places the reader in the weeds without a scythe … My cavils about Howard’s book are mild ones. He’s a sensitive discriminator; he takes a lot of old battles out of their archival plastic and makes them fresh again.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
