Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower Than the Angels, David Szalay’s Flesh, and Elaine Pagels’ Miracles and Wonder all feature among April’s best reviewed books.
1. Flesh by David Szalay
(Scribner)
14 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Flesh here
“A gentle yet deeply affecting novel about a taciturn man who overcomes abuse and loss early in life to stumble into transitory contentment—if not quite true happiness—as an adult … Fascinating and unexpected … If you’ve ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you’ll likely find Flesh all too human.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
2. Audition by Katie Kitamura
(Riverhead)
12 Rave • 4 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Katie Kitamura here
“A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace … Kitamura…writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance … A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted … Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
3. Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Perspective(s) here
“Seriously enjoyable … The epistolary novel can be a stodgy form, but in Sam Taylor’s translation from the French the letter writers here are brightly charismatic … From this delectable book’s clamor of voices and versions, Mr. Binet arrives at the truth of the crime.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
4. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
(Harper)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an essay by Louise Hegarty here
“Terrific … A witty, knowing homage to classic detective fiction, but also a deeply sensitive examination of the loneliness and confusion of grief … Readers will enjoy the Easter eggs hidden in the underbrush … Serve[s] as a bracing meditation on the different ways we perceive death (and fiction).”
–Sarah Lyall (The New York Times Book Review)
5. The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Austin Kelley here
“It’s a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity … One of the novel’s charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments—wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants—of an increasingly ‘Big Box Manhattan.’”
–Alexander Jacobs (The New York Times)
**
1. Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch
(Viking)
6 Rave • 7 Positive
Read an excerpt from Lower Than the Angels here
“A superb history of Christianity’s 2,000-year relationship with our animal instincts … Masterly … MacCulloch deals candidly with the clumsy and often cruel way in which churches in the post-second world war period dragged their feet on contraception, gay and lesbian rights and the ordination of women.”
–Kathryn Hughes (The Guardian)
2. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne
(Scribner)
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“By acknowledging the form’s limitations, Dunthorne’s iteration rises to something genuinely, searingly meaningful … Poignant … In Dunthorne’s hands, these disparate moments of bearing witness—sometimes in the most literal way—add up to a remarkable, strange and complicated story, full of the shame and humor a lesser memoir might have avoided.”
–Emma Brockes (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel
(Scribner)
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“A definitive and ideal biography—pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read. He’s latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps … Nadel…is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive … There are a lot of road trips in this biography … Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb’s influence on a long line of cartoonists.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
4. Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels
(Doubleday)
4 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Some of the passages in this illuminating and essential work are tough going … But it’s worthwhile hanging in: As the chapters unfold, the plot thickens … I realized that while I knew a great deal more about the origins of Christianity than when I began, the mystery of Jesus himself had deepened. Perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be. But the moral of the story is clear: Christ’s story is an iconic tale of hope emerging from darkness.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
5. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
(Pantheon)
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Vara hasn’t lost her journalist edge, as she shows throughout this book … Searches is as discomfiting as it is entertaining, with Vara exercising playful technique as a writer while also laying down dire warnings about a tech-dominated future. It’s also a clear reminder that, at least for now, nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind.”
–Hannah Bae (The San Francisco Chronicle)
