Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Emmanuel Carrère’s V13, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Scapegoat all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Time of the Child by Niall Williams
(Bloomsbury)
11 Rave • 1 Postive
“Poignant … This novel is steeped in Catholicism, myth, goodness, mercy and love. It is also—lest you worry that it might be sentimental or twee—harshly realistic … Beautifully crafted sentences whipped with humor … Williams portrays his characters fully and with humor … An engrossing read, the dark and the rain and the shabby but hopeful holiday decorations blending with the peat smoke and the love, all coming fully alive on the page. And that is something of a miracle itself.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)
2. The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
(Knopf)
10 Rave • 1 Positive • 4 Mixed • 5 Pan
Read an excerpt from The City and Its Uncertain Walls here
“One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth … A vivid cast of characters … Meditates on the nature and value of fiction, it also feels like Murakami’s reflection on his own art.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
3. Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi, trans. by Caroline Waight
(Grove Press)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Brightly Shining here
“Told with the clear-eyed candor of young Ronja, this beautifully crafted novel explores the challenges of a child’s unpredictable life with an alcoholic father and the band of kind people who try to help, including an older neighbor and the tree-stand worker about to become a father himself. This moving tale, with not a single wasted word, asks how we keep going when hope fades and life’s burdens become too much to bear, leaning on the power of imagination and connection to find a way forward.”
–Bridget Thoreson (Booklist)
**
1. The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
(Harper)
8 Rave
“Adorable and frankly adoring … Extremely well-researched and never balks from the many darker or seedier aspects of 17th-century life. But it’s persistently, almost weirdly a happy book. It’s the biography of a climber and a royal favorite, often a duplicitous and always a dangerous place for those daring enough to hold it. And yet, somehow, the book itself arrives accompanied by fiddles.”
–Steve Donoghue (Open Letters Review)
2. V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, trans by John Lambert
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Moving and masterful … Magnificent … I wept many times reading V13, for wildly different reasons. Sometimes I was touched … Gutting … Carrère commits everything to the page, omitting nothing, however unbearable.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
3. Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Stranger Than Fiction here
“A rattling heritage railway train of history and criticism by Edwin Frank that seems especially attractive at this post-election moment, when many are worried that America is about to run right off the tracks … One closes the rousing and fully committed Stranger Than Fiction not really closing it—which I think is Frank’s intention—but feeling hunger for a big new novel that confronts today’s America.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
