Sally Rooney’s all-conquering sophomore novel, Isabella Hammad’s exquisite debut, and a new mystery from Alexander McCall Smith all feature among the week’s best reviewed titles.
1. Normal People by Sally Rooney
19 Rave • 15 Positive • 3 Mixed
“… a compulsive, psychologically astute will-they-or-won’t-they love story involving two of the most sympathetic people you’re liable to meet between covers. Although hailed as a voice of millennials, Rooney offers plenty to appeal to readers across genders and generations … Rooney’s dialogue, like her descriptive prose, is slyly ironic, alternately evasive and direct, but always articulate. It cuts to the heart. She seems remarkably comfortable writing about sex—even uncomfortable sex—and she seamlessly integrates well-crafted texts, emails, and Facebook posts into her narratives like the digital native she is. Yet while Rooney may write about apparent aimlessness and all the distractions of our age, her novels are laser-focused and word-perfect. They build power by a steady accretion of often simple declarative sentences that track minuscule shifts in feelings … Although frequently heartbreaking, Normal People isn’t bleak. The brave determination of Rooney’s characters to reach out and try to catch each other with no guarantee of success—and to open themselves to ‘moments of joy despite everything’—is ultimately hopeful.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
Read Emily Temple’s essay, “Lets All Stop Pigeonholing Sally Rooney as a ‘Millennial Writer,’ ” here
2. The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
3 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“… one of the most ambitious first novels to have appeared in years … Written in soulful, searching prose, [the book is] a jam-packed epic that sets the life of one man against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman empire, the British mandate over Palestine and the Arab uprising for independence … Hammad’s depiction of the flush of first love is irresistible, a giddy drama of lingering looks and subterfuge that reverberates through the entire novel … Hammad gets under the skin of a huge cast of real and imagined characters … Hammad is a natural social novelist with an ear for lively dialogue as well as an ability to illuminate psychological interiority … Hammad is a writer of startling talent—and The Parisian has the rhythm of life.”
–Johanna Thomas-Corr (The Observer)
Read an excerpt from The Parisian here
3. The Better Sister by Alafair Burke
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“Alafair Burke delivers one hell of a whodunit, wrapped around a brilliant drama about family, relationships, and sister rivalry. Careful not to hit readers over the head with all their backstory at once, Burke’s latest thriller starts fast, pulling readers in from the get-go, before she skillfully and slowly pulls the curtain back a little more with each passing page … And just when you think you have this one figured out, she lands her best twist yet. Burke brings her A-game here … the real magic lies in the mystery at the heart of this powerful family drama that packs a major twist and an ending that’ll leave readers stunned.”
–Ryan Steck (The Real Book Spy)
4. My Coney Island Baby by Billy O’Callaghan
1 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“At his best, O’Callaghan creates characters who live with the reader … examines the scaffolding of middle age: duty, the fading of passion, the erosion of choices, looming mortality…If this all sounds very sad, that’s because it is. The novel is a meditation on an often disappointing time and O’Callaghan doesn’t shy away from his subject … In the closing pages, O’Callaghan’s prose reaches a pitch of emotional intensity that ensures these characters will linger with you long after the book is closed.”
–Claire Kilroy (Guardian)
5. The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith
1 Rave • 6 Positive
“McCall Smith now extends his gift for comic situations and insightful commentary to a projected series set in Sweden … McCall Smith uses these cases to shine a revealing light on human nature, including the foibles and heartaches of the investigators … Detective Varg promises to be a complex series character, and the department itself looks certain to deliver more oddball yet poignant cases.”
–Connie Fletcher (Booklist)
Read an excerpt from The Department of Sensitive Crimes here
1. Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy
3 Rave • 6 Positive
“..[a] meticulously researched, balanced and brilliantly written biography … For MacCarthy, answering the question is as much about telling the story of Gropius as it is about sifting through the layers of noise that have built up around his name over the years. MacCarthy’s poetic archeology restores Gropius to his rightful place—carefully sifting through the complex topography of an anything-but-simple life … MacCarthy refuses the often ill-researched reductionist characterisations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist. Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential reading for anyone studying architecture and design.”
–David Capener (The Irish Times)
2. Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“… a wonderfully readable, passionately partisan biography … In the course of making the case for Algren’s neglected work, Asher does something else nearly as valuable, which is to reframe—and to free from myth and obfuscation, much of it Algren’s own—the life: a life not just entertainingly full of incident but also inspiring and exemplary in a time when questions of art’s role in resisting the enemies of democracy and economic justice are newly immediate … Asher devotes less real estate to critical analysis of the fiction itself than another literary biographer might … In Asher, [Algren] gets the biographer any writer dreams of: thorough, smart, literate, and unabashedly on his subject’s side—a disciple, a role that puts him, as the book itself lays out, in excellent, even august company.”
–Jonathan Dee (The New Yorker)
Read an excerpt from Never a Lovely So Real here
3. Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells by Pico Iyer
2 Rave • 5 Positive
“… a vivid meditation on the year after his father-in-law’s death: a conscious transition from grief glimpsed through the prism of his pedestrian daily routines and tested by the changing Japanese seasons … It’s Iyer’s keen ear for detail and human nature that helps him populate his trademark cantabile prose with his (seemingly boring) daily routines and the (never boring) people who populate them … Each player offers a unique navigation through these comes-to-all autumn years; and how clever of Iyer to make their commotions a metaphor for how the world paddles forward.”
–Janet Kinosian (The Los Angeles Times)
Read an excerpt from Autumn Light here
4. The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein
2 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The book functions more as an intellectual biography than a standard history … There’s an entire chapter focused on authors, most notably Cicero, who influenced 2 and 6 (borrowing from how the Bushes have referred to themselves as 41 and 43) … At the heart of the book are essays…wrestling with the idea of democracy: what form governments should take; what sort of men should serve or even vote; and how much of a buffer should exist between governing and popular opinion … While the book spends a bit too much time inside the heads of 2 and 6…it still does an excellent job capturing how those institutions fell into place over the long scope of the father’s and son’s careers.”
–Scott Detrow (NPR)
Read an excerpt from The Problem of Democracy here
5. Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich
1 Rave • 5 Positive
“… gripping, depressing, revelatory … Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime—a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.”
–John Lanchester (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from Losing Earth here
