Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Jon Ronson’s The Castle, Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party, and Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea all feature among September’s best reviewed books.
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1. The Disappearers by Marlon James
(Riverhead)
17 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read a profile of Marlon James here
“A harrowing, hilarious, magnificent novel that will stand the test of time … He invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes. He jolts the narrative sideways and backwards, thumping his suspense line like an expert bassist … His defiant queer epic belongs to us all.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Boston Globe)
2. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf)
18 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here
“Ambitious and captivating … Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds … feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.”
–Lincoln Michel (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Switzy by Emma Cline
(Random House)
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“What’s hypnotic about this novel is the illusion that we’re watching a mind decaying even as it engineers its own expiration. Cline manages to pull the dramatic irony increasingly tight without letting us see the strings … She holds out her hand to the essential yearning in every human being, to that desire that persists until the very end.”
4. Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Our Noble Selves here
“Atkinson’s lighthearted novel mines delicious humor from this mismatch of grizzled cynicism and national heritage. Our Noble Selves is in part a workplace comedy … Ms. Atkinson deserves to be rated as highly as her countryman Ian McEwan. Like him, she boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
5. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
(Transit Books)
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“…the novel asks us to admit that we can know almost nothing about history, or even about the lives of people with whom we live contemporaneously. To read May We Feed the King is to be richly entertained but forced to sit with frustration: we want clues, we want certainty, we want a story about the King that makes sense, and Perry withholds it, instead making us watch our own minds scrabble about, compulsively putting together the scattered pieces of the past.”
–Melissa Harrison (The Guardian)
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1. The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson
(Riverhead)
7 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“This is his first book in 11 years and it’s as good a read as any of his previous big hits. A Jon Ronson book is never clear-cut, there are no neat finishes or satisfying conclusions. The Castle is no different. But like all of his writing, this book will open new insights for you, and it will linger long after you’ve closed the final chapter … A great attempt to unpick modern masculinity and to see what is prompting a real mental health crisis in men. Only when we understand it will we be able to address it.”
–Sinead Gibney (The Irish Times)
2. American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
(Scribner)
8 Rave • 2 Positive
“I gobbled up every page … A bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason … As ugly and lurid as this saga is, American Scoundrel is consistently riveting, full of astonishing twists, ballsy plots, and eleventh-hour escapes from justice, like the legal version of the exploits of some Old West outlaw who is forever eluding the sheriffs by the skin of his teeth.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
3. Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
(FSG)
8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Said the Dead here
“[An] emotionally charged, genre-bending work of history and fiction … Blending documented history with imaginative reconstruction, Ní Ghríofa reverently portrays women deprived of freedom and agency, caught between a burgeoning women’s rights movement and the quagmire of paternalism.”
–Joelle Egan (Booklist)
4. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature by Emily Wilson
(Liveright)
8 Rave
“Wonderfully spirited … An expert in the ancient world, she nevertheless draws constantly (and productively) from contemporary culture … Wilson elegantly braids together close, line-by-line readings with larger arguments about how much is often at stake … You don’t even have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book, though by the time you finish it you probably will be. Wilson’s excitement for her subject is irrepressibly moving.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
5. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre
(Crown)
7 Rave
“The British writer Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers … He has done it again … The book’s last pages are its saddest.”
–Joseph Finer (The New York Times Book Review)
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