Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance all feature among September’s best reviewed books.
1. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
(Knopf)
10 Rave • 6 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Brash and busy … It’s a piece of late-career showmanship…from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing … I’m hesitant to call What We Can Know a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
(Hogarth)
9 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Not so much a novel as a marvel … Here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent—a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness—might take time … Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? … One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters … Among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
3. Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin
(Knopf)
8 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Masterly … Quiet, devastating lucidity is a hallmark of Schweblin’s prose, captured with magnificent precision in a long-standing collaboration with translator Megan McDowell … We have the impression of a writer absolutely and entirely in control, as Schweblin’s meticulous clarity is never compromised by the horror of her subjects. But if we trust her to take us to the bottom, almost always she will reward us with a glimmer.”
–Francesca Segal (The Financial Times)
4. The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
(Mariner Books)
6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Wilderness here
“Expansive and intimate … This is not your generic book club selection, celebrating four friends living, laughing, loving. But if you want a ruminating, clear-eyed look at friendship as a means of survival, this is it … The rigorous work of authentic friendship asks us if we’re doing all we can for ourselves and the world we live in. Flournoy holds this mirror up to her characters and shows how modern life distorts those images despite everybody’s best intentions … Galvanizing and sustaining.”
–Lauren LeBlanc (The Boston Globe)
5. One of Us by Dan Chaon
(Henry Holt & Company)
7 Rave
“It works! As One of Us gleefully samples multiple registers—comic, tragic, satiric, elegiac, poetic—its mesh of archaic and contemporary styles becomes something quite arresting, a joy to read … Chaon’s beautiful novel insists on answers. We must not look away.”
–Hamilton Cain (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
(Scribner)
8 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Roy’s stunning, dramatic, funny, far-ranging, and complexly illuminating chronicle portraying two strong-willed women fighting for justice and truth is incandescent in its fury, courage, and love.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
2. Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt
(W. W. Norton & Company)
9 Rave • 2 Positive
“The book teems with the erudition and wonder that permeates Greenblatt’s Will in the World and The Swerve … Less a straightforward biography, more an evocation of Marlowe’s milieu, swimming in lush detail, immersing us in England’s social ferment at a hinge moment.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Boston Globe)
3. Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel by Frances Wilson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Electric Spark here
“A deeply intelligent, captivating and passionate work that reminds us of everything a literary biography can and should be … Wilson has the utmost respect for Spark, but more important for a biographer, she has fervent curiosity about her … Who was the real Muriel Spark? We may never know, and that’s the joy and delight of this book.”
–Jessica Ferri (The Washington Post)
4. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
(Liveright)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“May be [Lepore’s] best yet, a capacious work that lands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water. She’s not here to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic; she’s here to convey—in vigorous, crystal-clear sentences—what we’re losing, and why … Lepore senses peril but also a whiff of democratic revival. Asymmetries lie at the foundation of our government; as this gifted scholar reminds us, it’s our duty to tend to them.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Los Angeles Times)
5. Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
(Simon & Schuster)
6 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Pollack-Pelzner is at his strongest when he delves into the fascinating nitty gritty of the collaborations that help productions come together … But this is not a hagiography. Pollack-Pelzner is frank about Miranda’s shortcomings … Pollack-Pelzner uses these details to treat Miranda as the creator he is—enthusiastic, vulnerable, ambitious, innovative, fallible—instead of as a mere celebrity. A different biographer might have used this as an occasion for dishy name dropping.”
–Jennifer Vanasco (NPR)
