1. Milkman by Anna Burns
12 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Burns’s agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterized Troubles-era Northern Ireland; rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood … in its intricate domestic study of a disparate family there are agreeable echoes of Chekov, Tolstoy and Turgenev … it is an impressive, wordy, often funny book and confirms Anna Burns as one of our rising literary stars.”
–Adrian McKinty (The Irish Times)
Read an excerpt from Milkman here
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2. Broken Ground by Val McDermid
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“In Broken Ground, Val McDermid returns to one of my favourite characters of hers, detective chief inspector Karen Pirie, of the Historic Cases Unit … The DCI – ‘a dumpy wee woman with bad hair and terrible dress sense’ who can pull out ‘the kind of smile that makes small children whimper and cling to their mother’s legs’ – is as intuitive, courageous and grumpy as ever, and McDermid’s plotting is top-notch. There is nothing more gratifying than watching a master craftswoman at work, and she is on fine form here.”
–Alison Flood (The Observer)
Read Val McDermid on the Remarkable Rise of Public Noir
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3. The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke, Trans. by Carlos Rojas
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Yan trains his fantastical, satiric eye on China’s policy of forced cremation in this chilling novel about the ‘great somnambulism’ that seizes a rural town …Reports arrive of accidental drownings involving ‘dreamwalkers’, then of a murder with an iron rod. Looting and violence spread as more people begin dreamwalking, until the town is ‘engulfed in the sounds of screams and murderous beatings.’ The interweaving of politics and delusion creates a powerful resonance that is amplified by Tianbao’s borderline mythical plan for how to ‘drive away the darkness,’ leading to an unforgettable ending. This is a riveting, powerful reading experience.”
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4. Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra, Trans. by Achy Obejas
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“Revolution Sunday is a complicated book, and a challenging one. It mixes poetry and prose, autofiction and hyperrealism, intense sensory detail and complete logistical vagueness. It has a plot, but not one that provides much momentum, or even meaning … Achy Obejas does an exceptional job translating Revolution Sunday, especially as the novel turns inward. Her English prose is as intense and reckless as Cleo’s Havana. In a less confident translator’s hands, Cleo would lie flat on the page. Thanks to Obejas, she shimmers with life … Revolutionary Sunday is a dirty novel, full of corruption, deception and betrayal. Guerra is a fearless writer, and she’s lucky to have a fearless translator. Together, they make Revolution Sunday more vivid than life.”
–Lily Meyer (NPR)
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5. At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Offers plentiful reasons to celebrate [Jhabvala’s] brilliance … Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature as she distills to their essence broad expanses of geography, personal history and time. She has a sharp eye for how helplessness can become a weapon in personal relations. She’s also astute on how subtle the shifts in power dynamics between two people can be, and how irrational situations can take on a life and logic of their own … [Jhabvala] has a healthy respect for the riddles of human behavior. She doesn’t explain contradictions or self-destructive impulses away. She simply presents them as they are: strange, real and troublesome.”
–Michael Upchurch (The Seattle Times)
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1. Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it. Dorren has a talent for explaining even the most difficult linguistic concepts in a way that’s easy to understand, and he includes helpful charts at the beginning of each chapter, listing notable facts about the language he’s about to write about … But the great thing about Babel is that you don’t have to agree with Dorren’s conclusions to enjoy it—it’s a book that’s as joyful as it is educational, and above all, it’s just so much fun to read.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
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2. Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, Trans. by Katy Derbyshire
2 Rave • 3 Positive
“Geissler’s aim is to communicate that beneath this abstraction, however, laborers are individuals. In that sense, Seasonal Associate belongs to the long literary tradition of social-problem novels, which includes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—all of which attempt to reveal, in their careful, humanizing treatment of character, fully realized protagonists caught within stultifying and impersonal industrial mechanisms. In a contemporary case like Geissler’s, this kind of project is no less urgent.”
–Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)
Read an excerpt from Seasonal Associate here
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3. Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, Ed. by David Kipen
2 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“…what Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 shows us is that L.A. is a place that can’t be rationalized, explained or excused … Kipen’s new compendium collects fragmentary views of Los Angeles, from nearly 500 years of letters and diaries, turning the City of Angels into a city of angles, glimpses, shards of perception, like a million little slivers of a broken mirror, all reflecting different images of our disparate city back to us … A number of the fragments in Dear Los Angeles are master classes in micro-storytelling.”
–Tyler Malone (The Los Angeles Times)
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4. All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin
1 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“It’s surprising that in the three decades since Hudson’s death, there has been little written about him that could be considered comprehensive. Previous biographies came from past lovers and friends, and each seemed to have an agenda, often salacious. Griffin goes a long way toward rectifying this issue, casting a respectful light on some fresh as well as familiar details. Throughout, [Griffin] provides a balanced, multifaceted view of his subject … An engrossing and carefully documented account of a beloved film icon’s life.”
–(Kirkus)
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5. Victory City by John Strausbaugh
5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Often frustrating in its thoroughness…But if the swirl never clarifies into a nice, clear, good-guys-versus-bad-guys narrative the way the war itself did, count that as a mark of this book’s accuracy … Strausbaugh gives us history as crazy quilt rather than as the foregone conclusion it sometimes seems … getting through Victory City will require either a photographic memory or dexterous use of the index … Yet if not all of the names in this book will stick, the portrait of an amazingly dynamic, chaotic, trepidation-filled time will.”
–Neil Genzlinger (The New York Times Book Review)
