The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among July’s best reviewed books.

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Fiction

1. Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday)

17 Rave • 4 Positive

“A dizzyingly brilliant measure of the versatility and depth of the acclaimed author’s literary talent … The intricacy with which Whitehead details the planning and execution of this caper marks him as a top-tier researcher—he’s drawn on many primary sources to ground this work of fiction in historical fact … A modern masterpiece and an ode to New York, no matter that rats skitter and cockroaches scamper underfoot.”

–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)

2. It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)

10 Rave • 1 Positive
Read a profile of Sigrid Nunez here

“It Will Come Back to You should make you want to imbibe every word Nunez has ever written. In a publishing landscape ravaged by the cult of celebrity and algorithmic shallowness, the fact that such a profound, quirky writer still garners so much acclaim, not to mention a sizeable readership, is similarly a source of hope.”

–Hirsh Sawhney (Times Literary Supplement)

3. Country People by Daniel Mason
(Random House)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Country People here

“Mason favors an elastic, lightly ironic voice that drifts among observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative structure is playful, occasionally intrusive, and permissive; it wanders, doubles back, incorporates fragments that seem, at first, peripheral. The humor—dry, humane, occasionally absurd—is ever-present … The Vermont setting, spare and bracing, acts as a quiet amplifier of these idiosyncrasies, while Mason remains attuned to the natural world. Into this landscape he introduces a thread of the uncanny, a local legend that hovers between conspiracy theory and genuine mystery.”

–Bill Kelly (Booklist)

4. Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Listen to a conversation with Valeria Luiselli here

“Delightful wit … I take some not insignificant degree of comfort in the fact that an artist of Luiselli’s remarkable thoughtfulness and intellect is around to document whatever will come, especially whatever will end.”

–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)

5. Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich
(MCD)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“A boisterous new novel that’s equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness … Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I’ve read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation … Helps us see the actual, earthbound workings of the magical-sounding cloud, and he gets us thinking about the perils of our needing it so badly.”

–John Powers (NPR)

**

Nonfiction

1. You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects the next, as though you were reading a short story told in the third person … No one who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro in the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.”

–Thomas Beller (4Columns)

2. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thompson
(Simon & Schuster)

5 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“So much film criticism is clichéd or unadventurous—he tackles it with a bullwhip, a magnifying glass and a sardonic grin … Is this really his last book? There’s certainly an air of finality and futility in the way he ties things up at the end, or rather unravels them … He still cares and after reading this you will you will too.”

–Ed Potton (The Times)

3. Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“One of the fascinations here is Skalnik’s psychic makeup … Lacking actual cooperation, Colloff instead deploys her prodigious investigative reporting skills … Its unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an engrossing read; the public policy implications make it important.”

–Ted Conover (The New York Times Book Review)

4. They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy by Lauren Collins
(Penguin Press)

6 Rave

“Remarkably successful in its scope and depth, They Stole a City is an urgent argument for reckoning with history in order to understand the present backlash and rising white nationalism.”

–Laura Chanoux (Booklist)

5. Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991 by Mark B. Smith
(W. W. Norton and Company)

5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Mark B Smith, a Cambridge historian, has written a fascinating chronicle of the Soviet Union … No single volume can adequately explain the Soviet state’s collapse, but Exit Stalin is a valiant attempt. Smith provides a teeming, collage-like picture of how ordinary Soviet citizens withstood repression and food scarcities yet clung hopefully to the 1917 revolution’s promise of a better life … Smoothly readable … Though marred at times by a surfeit of information, Exit Stalin offers a superb history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously deluded ideology.”

–Ian Thompson (The Observer)