Paul Yoon’s Run Me to Earth, Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime, Caroline Moorehead’s A House in the Mountains, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon
8 Rave • 4 Positive
“… richly layered … simple explanations give way to deep nuance … Throughout the novel, beauty and violence coexist in a universe that seems by turns cruel and wondrous. Caught in desperate situations, the characters often resort to desperate measures that become almost instinctive, as if they have ingested so much of the war that savagery is now a way of life … Alisak is haunted by the loss of his friends and his homeland and the loose ends of his life, and from his story and that of the other characters, Yoon has stitched an intense meditation on the devastating nature of war and displacement.”
–Tash Aw (The New York Times Book Review)
Paul Yoon on 5 Novels That Take Place Over 48 Hours
2. Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery
4 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The eight stories in the collection have a snappy, wry humour to them. Think early Lorrie Moore, or here at home, the stories that launched Anne Enright’s career. Flattery has a similarly sharp sense of humour and justice, and a writing style that uses contrast to great effect … Flattery’s ability to switch, sometimes in the same line, from sorrow to comedy gives the collection depth and momentum. There is an international scope to her writing that recalls contemporary American authors such as Laura van den Berg and Kristen Roupenian … Flattery’s style…is bold and bracing and has no bones about it … ‘Track’, which won the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize, is set in New York city as a young Irish woman charts her relationship highs and lows with a famous comedian. A startling tale of loneliness and degradation, it is also a bitingly funny account of talent on the wane. The opposite is true for the Mullingar author herself, whose debut collection heralds a rising star.”
–Sarah Gilmartin (The Irish Times)
3. The Truants by Kate Weinberg
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
“… lavishly laced with references to disappearances and vanishings, from the image of Amelia Earhart on the wall of Georgie’s dorm room, to the oft-told tale of Agatha Christie squirreling herself from sight when her husband told her he had fallen for another woman … positively reverberates with echoes of deceit, both purposeful and self-inflicted … emulates a nigh-on perfect slow burn, generating a pace that makes room for unexpected tragedies as well as silly student antics, drawing out multiple threads of deceptions and lies and a nearly unending river of narrative twists … is also generously peppered with lively and evocative details … The primary characters are so acutely drawn that, even those with the most irritating traits become intriguing enough to spend time with, and Weinberg brings otherworldly landscape of East Anglia to beautifully bleak and eerie life … a stark reminder that storytelling, so often considered a magical form of communication, can just as easily represent a far less positive departure from the truth.”
–Daneet Steffens (The Boston Globe)
Read Kate Weinberg on Agatha Christie’s greatest mystery here
4. A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“His characters are as meticulously crafted as Highsmith’s, his plots as thrillingly constructed, and his meditations on loneliness and alienation as compassionately rendered … What makes A Beautiful Crime work so well is how much empathy Bollen affords his characters. They do unspeakable things, but they suffer. They manipulate, steal and lie, but they are also fearful and hope for understanding. Bollen doesn’t let them off the hook. He is critical of them and makes them pay for their undeniably selfish deeds. No matter, we continue to care about them … Most disarming is how smoothly Bollen tells his story. His language is simultaneously inviting and forbidding—accessible, playful, and then suddenly, shockingly brilliant. His characters, despite their cruelty and barbarism, are developed enough to feel real, honest and even (gasp) likable.”
–Brian Alessandro (Newsday)
Read an excerpt from A Beautiful Crime here
5. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“One of the funniest books of the year has arrived, a delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire … This stripped-down format is the perfect delivery system for the satire of Interior Chinatown. Ridiculous assumptions pop … While sticking to the screenplay form, Yu bends it enough to go deeper—long descriptive passages become mini short stories … Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Tom Stoppard’s famous play, the characters see and comment on the artifice of their creation … It’s mind-bending storytelling, not easy to pull off. Yu does it with panache.”
–Carolyn Kellogg (The Washington Post)
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1. A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy From Fascism by Caroline Moorehead
3 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… meticulous research and eye for human detail … This is a rich telling of some complex but fascinating history, not solely addressing the female story, but including it within the whole … It is, however, Moorehead’s sensitive use of the inspiring if sometimes harrowing stories of Ada and her female comrades, Frida Malan, Silvia Pons and Bianca Serra, and the Jewish and partisan circles around them, including that of Primo Levi, that really brings new insight to this account of the liberation of Italy. A useful chronology and list of the principal characters, of which there are many, helps readers to keep track … This brilliant book restores women to the heart of the Italian resistance story, making clear that they performed all the same activities as the men, while facing precisely the same dangers, if with supplementary goals … This, at last, is their powerful story.”
–Clare Mulley (The Spectator)
Read an excerpt from A House in the Mountains here
2. Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
4 Rave • 5 Positive
“…a harrowing, heartfelt memoir about life in the interstitial spaces between countries, languages, cultures and identities … The beauty of Children of the Land is that it’s a unique, personal narrative that is also universal. Hernandez Castillo writes candidly about his struggle to get a green card, the process of learning to cope with perpetual displacement … This memoir is as timely as it is uncomfortable to read. Hernandez Castillo places readers on unstable ground and keeps them there. He writes bluntly and poetically … Children of the Land bravely and honestly illuminates a world rarely written about with such liveliness.”
–Gabino Iglesias (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Read an excerpt from Children of the Land here
3. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“Kim Ghattas has not only drawn the big picture of how those events shaped the region but offers timely and thought-provoking insights into their continuing destructive influence. The weaponisation of sectarianism, women’s rights, the frustrated hopes of the Arab spring, the rise of Al-Qaida and Islamic State are all richly contextualized and illustrated … Ghattas spent a successful career as a journalist for the BBC. It shows in her wonderfully readable account. Intellectuals, clerics and novelists are highlighted because they represent ideas and suffering in the face of repressive regimes and intolerant ideologies … Ghattas has an enviable gift for going beyond politics. Arabic dialects, the music of the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum, Beirut restaurants serving caviar during ceasefires and witty anecdotes about Hezbollah all serve as a backdrop … Whatever happens next in this long-running, oppressive and dangerous Middle Eastern drama, Black Wave will be a vivid, indispensable guide to the story so far.”
–Ian Black (The Observer)
4. The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood by Donna Rifkind
2 Rave • 7 Positive
“There have been other books about the immigrant diaspora that providentially landed in Los Angeles and enriched American culture for decades, but Donna Rifkind’s idea to use Viertel (1889-1978) as the focus for a moving, mournful new biography, The Sun and Her Stars, was a particularly brilliant idea. Viertel was the best representation of both her country and her sex imaginable—a combination of mother hen, chef, career counselor, referee and, in her own right, artist … performs an act of spiritual as well as cultural resurrection … a feat of daunting research and appropriately passionate writing. Translating quantities of letters and diary entries from the German would put off many biographers, but Ms. Rifkind sailed ahead. It’s the story of a valiant earth mother who transcended an emotionally nomadic existence and devoted her energy to providing for others while managing to write Queen Christina in what seems to have been her spare time. Like the multitudes who came to 165 Mabery Road, you’ll be glad you met her.”
–Scott Eyman (The Wall Street Journal)
5. The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan
2 Rave • 6 Positive
“…revealed with bracing clarity … [a] rich and surprisingly entertaining history of how nuclear weapons have shaped the United States military and the country’s foreign policy … In less skillful hands, this could be a slog. But Kaplan has a gift for elucidating abstract concepts, cutting through national security jargon and showing how leaders confront (or avoid) dilemmas.”
–Justin Vogt (The New York Times Book Review)
