Gabriel Byrne’s Walking with Ghosts, George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music, and Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry
(Doubleday)
7 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Barry is particularly impressive as a writer of men’s voices and stories, which means that he has the rare art of being able to convey in sentences what is not said, not even fully thought, by his characters … We know what Séamus is thinking, and we can guess about Katherine. It’s not, exactly, that we need the happily-ever-after which appears to be receding, only that Barry’s writing of silence, of the ways we read silence, is uncomfortably excellent … The ‘heroic path’ is taken by the stories, by the whole collection, as well as by the characters within. Though they all begin more or less in literary realism, there is another tendency pulling towards capital-R Romanticism, towards the suggestion that we are all in the end creatures of landscape, buildings and weather, what we imagine to be our actions directed by dimly seen powers beyond our control … But these playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do.”
–Sarah Moss (The Irish Times)
2. The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell
(Tin House)
3 Rave • 8 Positive
Read a discussion between Paraic O’Donnell and Lee Child here
“… O’Donnell has no intention of serving up a standard Victorian chiller. Instead he has created a gloriously unorthodox confection, part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle, with a generous handful of police procedural and a splash of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. There is even a distinctly Hitchcockian interlude on a train … structurally more satisfying and driven by a more compelling plot. O’Donnell has pulled off with brio something that might, in a lesser writer’s hands, have fallen horribly flat: he has written a coherent and satisfying novel that is both disquietingly eerie and properly funny. It is impossible to read it without laughing out loud … Beneath its spooky exterior The House on Vesper Sands is a paean to the unshowy virtues of determination, diligence and loyalty. It is also a cracking good read. The book ends with an epilogue that could be dismissed as superfluous, except that it plainly lays the ground for a sequel. Regardless of where one ends up filing this novel on the bookshelves, that is excellent news for us all.”
–Clare Clark (The Guardian)
3. The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts
(Catapult)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Madeleine Watts here
“…resplendent and compelling … Without them ever feeling forced, parallels emerge between the figure of the unruly woman—specifically one who is sexually permissive—and the unmanageable natural world … Watts’s prose crackles with electricity in the same way that the world she’s writing about prickles with danger … In magnificently entwining the narrator’s physical unravelling with that of the spiralling climate crisis, The Inland Sea feels both urgent and alive. It’s a lush, original Bildungsroman for a terrifying new world.”
–Lucy Scholes (The Financial Times)
4. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
(One World)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“… vivacious … a book that merrily skewers straight and queer orthodoxy alike. Savvily constructed as a breakout novel, Detransition, Baby is almost certainly the most buzzed-about book in the history of transgender fiction. And it’s terrific: smart, socially generous, a pleasure, a gift … What initially seems like an absurdist Shakespearean gender-play plot isn’t that at all, it turns out. It’s instead a feasible proposition, certainly not the first alternative family structure ever dreamed up, but perhaps the first of its kind to appear in literary fiction. Peters explores the cross-cultural frictions it sparks with meticulous nuance and terrific wit … challenges the anti-reproductive No Futurism of early-twenty-first-century radical queer politics … Peters’s brilliant novel blasts through the gates to claim more space for trans futures in fiction.”
–Megan Milks (4Columns)
5. The Center of Everything by Jamie Harrison
(Counterpoint)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read a discussion between Jamie Harrison and Thomas McGuane here
“How can we know that our memories are true ones, especially when they’re passed down through generations of a family beset by tragedy? The gorgeous new novel from Jamie Harrison…brilliantly tackles that question, along with limning the bonds of family, the pull of the natural world and, oh yes, the distinct pleasures of food … Memory is the real star here, and Harrison writes about it so intimately that it’s hard not to feel the same sense of wonder—and disorientation—that Polly does … Harrison’s writing is as lush as the landscapes themselves, moving from Long Island to Michigan to Montana, with breathtaking descriptions … Harrison’s writing shimmers like light-sparkled water, and it’s full of lush sensory details. Lavish meals are lovingly described from dinner to dessert. Polly’s musings about what happened to Ariel are as haunted as she is … Despite the missing girl, this is no thriller. Instead, Harrison’s novel, as immersive as the Yellowstone River itself, is about another kind of mystery: the ways family connects us through the generations, the stunning secrets we hide to protect others or ourselves, and the shocking truths we must grapple with … a waking dream readers won’t want to wake up from.”
–Caroline Leavitt (The San Francisco Chronicle)
**
1. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
(Random House)
9 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an interview with George Saunders here
“This book is a delight, and it’s about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment … I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching … This kind of reading (one of the best kinds, I’m convinced) tracks the author’s intentions—and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious—so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence … All this makes Saunders’s book very different from just another ‘how to’ creative writing manual, or just another critical essay. In enjoyably throwaway fashion, he assembles along his way a few rules for writing … reading…with this rich, close attention will mulch down into any would-be writer’s experience, and repay them by fertilising their own work eventually … One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story.”
–Tessa Hadley (The Guardian)
2. Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
(Simon & Schuster)
5 Rave 7 Positive
Read an excerpt from Aftershocks here
“For a young woman whose foundations were shaken several times in her life—including numerous moves to locales with literal tectonic rumblings along with the more metaphorical tremors of civil unrest—[Owusu’s] approach effectively portrays the inner angst of individuals who have grown up amid trauma and have learned to be vigilant, to read the slightest shifts as foreboding. Owusu’s narrative deftly demonstrates a keen sense of others’ emotional states … It takes a skillful hand to weave complex concepts so seamlessly into a narrative, and Owusu executes this masterfully. By relating the events of her upbringing, she is also telling the story of her father and the history of the countries that had become home to her … While Owusu displays a reverence for her background, she also addresses some potentially harmful cultural practices … Unable to find stable ground, Owusu centers her narrative on her body, which she brilliantly reclaims in these sections … you will journey across countries, hear numerous languages, and feel how deep a loss can go.”
–Anita Gill (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
3. Walking with Ghosts by Gabriel Byrne
(Grove Press)
7 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an interview with Gabriel Byrne here
“It is sometimes a dreamy book, lyrical, filled with images of things that slipped by and have faded. He writes passionately about his first love and hilariously about his early fame as an actor … At the core of the book, however, is not his fame but something much darker and more elusive. Walking with Ghosts is an attempt to come to terms with the very elements that have created some of Byrne’s best performances, elements that come from pain and have caused pain. Byrne is unsparing of himself in the telling of this story … It is not just unusual for an actor to write about himself in the way Byrne does, but for anyone at all. Thus, it is hard to place Walking with Ghosts in the tradition of Irish memoir. What is striking is the intensity of the introspection. Byrne works with the idea that if you want to know where the damage lies, look inwards, describe the intimate, hidden spaces within the self. There is something fresh and liberating about this, a feeling also that it must have been a challenging book to write.”
–Colm Toibin (The Irish Times)
4. The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene
(W. W. Norton & Company)
3 Rave • 6 Positive • 4 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Unquiet Englishman here
“… insightful … Though the narrative never loses its focus on Greene as an artist, readers will learn much about the daunting ideological barriers that Greene pushed through to craft his art. Readers will particularly benefit from the illuminating scrutiny of the Cold War orthodoxies Greene violated not only in his iconic The Quiet American, but also in later, often-forgotten works, such as Our Man in Havana and The Honorary Consul. A complete portrait of a many-faceted titan.”
–Bryce Christensen (Booklist)
5. Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer
(Scribner)
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a gripping adventure tale that deserves an honored place in the long bookshelf of volumes dealing with arctic shipwrecks, winter ordeals, and survival struggles … On the (icy) surface, the Barents voyages possessed all the virtues of romance a sail into hostile waters on three-masted ships and on a dream of discovery. But like most stories of arctic adventure, there is a more prosaic aspect … Pitzer sets out an ominous tone as Barents’s first mission sets out. On page after page the crew’s adventures and survival ordeals are beautifully rendered[.]”
–David M. Shribman (The Boston Globe)
