Ali Smith’s Gliff, Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days, Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, and Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered all feature among February’s best reviewed books.
1. Gliff by Ali Smith
(Pantheon)
14 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Gliff here
“A tricksy masterwork that straddles formal lines while reimagining Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel … Gliff’s language is sparer than in her famous Quartet, yet she’s still throwing everything—art, literature, social justice, tart humor—against atrocities that damage our moral compasses and cripple our lives … Can art and language shield us from our worst instincts? Smith wrestles with this question, veering from swaggering confidence to quiet resignation as she snaps the pieces of her puzzle into place.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Washington Post)
2. Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
(Catapult)
10 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Theory & Practice here
“Deftly crafted … The excesses of 1980s academia are ripe fodder for de Kretser’s mordant wit, but her aim here is more ambitious—and the results more rewarding. An Australian novelist of the first rank… de Kretser has long been fascinated by the gap between our ideals and our actions … A taut, enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction impossible to disentangle, situates itself firmly in the mess.”
–Emily Eakin (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
(Riverhead)
10 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Stone Yard Devotional here
“Somber, exquisite … The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil … The wrestling in this novel is with the nature and meaning of penance, atonement … Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another.”
–Lauren Christensen (The New York Times Book Review)
4. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
(Knopf)
9 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“A svelte, finely constructed novel … In my carping youth, I regarded the recurrent elements of Anne Tyler’s stories as a flaw. But I’ve grown to see her decades-long focus on quirky families and wounded people as no more limiting than the rules for writing a sonnet. With a sufficiently powerful microscope, a drop of water reveals the ocean.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
5. Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
(Random House)
8 Rave • 3 Positive
“It is hard to find fault with what is a bravura collection. Sittenfeld may demonstrate more creative risk-taking in her novels…but what she displays in her expertly crafted and hugely engaging short-form fiction is, quite simply, supremely accomplished storytelling.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)
**
1. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
(Viking)
13 Rave • 2 Positive
“Intensely intimate and candid … Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other … Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller … Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days … A book that is meant to be read slowly.”
–Lauren LeBlanc (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
(Ecco)
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret—for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life … Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself … We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
3. Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison
(Random House)
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“Morrison…has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show…merits such treatment … That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, Lorne is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile—something I mean almost entirely as praise.”
–A.O. Scott (The New York Times Book Review)
4. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
(Knopf)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming … Passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read.”
–Dina Nayeri (The Guardian)
5. No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek
(Viking)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“Thoughtful and elegantly equivocal … Devoid of both dogmatism…and heroine-ism…in a way not always true of its predecessors … Reading her book can feel like sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an unmarshaled welter of artifacts. There is richness here, and exhilaration, if not quite a thesis about what divorce means either in general or to her … Disinclined to give either a firm narrative of Mlotek’s own divorce or a theory of the meaning of contemporary marriage. Firm narratives are precisely what people love to confect and clutch at the end of a marriage, or indeed any relationship … [A] highly intelligent writer.”
–Hermione Hoby (Bookforum)
