Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)
6 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an interview with Sigrid Nunez here
“Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception … This one comes across as a Covid diary, with a light scaffolding of incident to hold its meditations up. The narrator’s interactions with the parrot are funny and moving … I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. But Nunez is a closer observer than most, and she is wittier … Like certain storms, this novel churns intensely in one place. There is a bit more plot … I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny—good and strong company … You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
(Biblioasis)
3 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from How to Build a Boat here
“Feeney effortlessly combines the overwhelming ebb and flow of life with her boat-building plot … Feeney’s prose is both careful and relaxed—detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling, the point of view shifting throughout scenes … the difficult winter carries the reader into a hopeful spring. Life is random; our connections are as essential and uncontrollable as the tides, the book seems to say. All we can do is learn how to float.”
–Sophie Ward (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park
(Random House)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“Park’s follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams, arrives a full decade and a half later [after Personal Days], with all the heft, complexity and ambition such a lengthy interim suggests. The author has greatly expanded his literary scope and complicated his narrative technique, though certain fundamentals remain … Braids three plots together in a bewilderingly layered structure … Absurdly complex … Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make Same Bed Different Dreams succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.”
–Jonathan Russell Clark (The Los Angeles Times)
**
1. A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Paul Caruana Galizia
(Riverhead)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
“Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are … This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.”
–Christina Patterson (The Sunday Times)
2. Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop
(W. W. Norton & Company)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score … Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronom.”
–Isabel Hamilton (The Financial Times)
3. My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
(Viking)
3 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“A 970-page victory lap … Details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame …but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table … Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
