Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, Richard Ford’s Sorry For Your Trouble, Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease, and Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The finest and most substantial story here is The Run of Yourself. One could say is has the richness and breadth of a novel, but that would be to slight the short-story form, of which Mr. Ford has repeatedly proved himself a master … However understated and oblique, Sorry for Your Trouble—which is what Irish people say to the bereaved at a funeral—is both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class. None of the main characters has to worry about money, which highlights the emotional malaise that underlies their lives and their frequent and almost absent-minded couplings and uncouplings. In the background are wars, financial crises, natural vicissitudes. This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision…the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.”
–John Banville (The Wall Street Journal)
2. Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
3 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… [an] excellent narrative … Thomas does an incredible job with her descriptions here, helping the reader visualize the decay and neglect lingering under the surface … The strength of this debut novel relies on its refusal to adhere to any sort of genre conventions … The descriptions in the book are what really ground the story; from the depiction of the varied buildings of Catherine House to the visceral and constant thoughts about food and drink, Thomas builds a thick atmosphere … Ines never exactly becomes a likable character, but that hardly matters—the reader becomes emotionally invested in her journey regardless. Thomas is trying to show readers what it feels like to not fit into the place you’re supposed to belong, to not even fit inside your own skin. While the book is easy to read—Thomas’s smart prose ensures that—the echoes of discomfort linger long after the last pages are turned.”
–Swapna Krishna (The Boston Globe)
3. The Last Trial by Scott Turow
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Turow has done his homework, and his incremental presentation of the evidence not only illuminates the legal issues involved, but it also offers a thorough, digestible account of the steps—research, development, testing—by which a newly created drug is brought to market. Turow is particularly good at integrating this arcane material into a dramatic narrative. Readers of The Last Trial will find themselves both entertained and painlessly educated … Turow teases out these mysteries with immense skill and deliberation. The result is another intelligent page turner by an acknowledged master. Turow, though, has always been more than a popular entertainer. He is a first-rate novelist for whom the world of the courtroom—a world in which the justice done is only ‘rough and approximate’—becomes the vehicle for intense investigations into the varieties of human frailty … No one tells this sort of story better than Turow. No one has illuminated the human side of the legal profession with such precision and care. The Last Trial is Scott Turow at his best and most ambitious. He has elevated the genre once again.”
–Bill Sheehan (The Washington Post)
Read Scott Turow on the one character who keeps coming back to him here
4. A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“…[an] increasingly horrifying climate-change fable … As bewitching, unflinching, wry, and profoundly attuned to the state of the planet as ever, supremely gifted Millet tells a commanding and wrenching tale of cataclysmic change and what it will take to survive.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
Read an interview with Lydia Millet here
5. My Mother’s House by Francesca Momplaisir
2 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Momplaisir shows how Lucien’s wickedness and perversity allow him to exploit other Haitian immigrants, especially women. In this way, Momplaisir illuminates the darker side of immigrant life, in particular Haitian immigrant life … Still, Momplaisir makes you feel an ember of sympathy for Lucien, whose sole refrain since childhood has been ‘I am nothing’ … In Momplaisir’s novel, cracks of light are always there to penetrate the dark.”
–Arlene McKanic (BookPage)
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1. The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey
6 Rave • 8 Positive
“…novelist Samantha Harvey has produced, in The Shapeless Unease, a slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest … Interrupted sleep is pretty much the norm for our high-velocity 21st-century life, but the miserable bagginess of days on end faced with no respite of oblivion, however brief, is a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humor and—despite the scarcity she is subjected to—a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance … As a writer Harvey gets at not just the heart, but the soul of things … Writing and nature—in particular outdoor swimming, dragonflies skimming over a summer lake—and the realization that ‘no things are fixed,’ are all conveyed in prose that glows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.”
–Catherine Taylor (The Financial Times)
Read an excerpt form The Shapeless Unease here
2. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing
2 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Yes, you’re in for a treat … There are few voices that we can reliably read widely these days, but I would read Laing writing about proverbial paint drying (the collection is in fact quite paint-heavy), just as soon as I would read her write about the Grenfell Tower fire, The Fire This Time, or a refugee’s experience in England, The Abandoned Person’s Tale, all of which are included in Funny Weather … Laing’s knowledge of her subjects is encyclopedic, her awe is infectious, and her critical eye is reminiscent of the critic and author James Wood … To be drawn in a Laingish light is to be considered searchingly but always with a whole heart … Her sensitivity to colour, coupled by her ever sharpening vocabulary leaves the reader scrambling to search for the artwork in question … Her book reviews are, unsurprisingly, radiant … gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe.”
–Mia Colleran (The Irish Times)
3. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“More than anything else, Entangled Life is an ode to other ways of being … I finished the book eager to ferment anything and everything, dig through soil, and go out and sniff mushrooms … full of details, but Sheldrake tends to use those details to reveal broader truths … I have been working on and reading and writing about fungi for a decade. And yet, nearly every page of this book contained either an observation so interesting or a turn of phrase so lovely that I was moved to slow down, stop, and reread … It is easy, as a biologist, to grow numb to nature: numbed by the ones and zeroes of spreadsheets, numbed by emails and virtual meetings. This book rocked me into remembering that nature, especially fungal nature, is big and encompassing and creative and destructive. It reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime.”
–Rob Dunn (Science Magazine)
Read an excerpt from Entangled Life here
4. Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America by David Kamp
1 Rave • 6 Positive
“… a lively and bewitching recounting of a particularly ripe period in television and cultural history … The genesis of [Sesame Street], which celebrated its 50th anniversary on air last year, has been the subject of several insider accounts, but Kamp finds new threads, especially about the socially and politically connected co-creators, Lloyd Morrisett and Joan Ganz Cooney … Beyond grasping the (now terrifyingly astute) media literacy of little kids, these shows and their creators, Kamp says, gave us a huge sense of possibility. In the grimmest times, Sunny Days is a reminder of just how valuable that is.”
–Melena Ryzik (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson
1 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Johnson salvages his subject from the dustbin of history and puts his brief swashbuckling career in the context of the era’s historical currents. It is the perfect book to cozy up to during a pandemic … In addition to providing captivating ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’ action, the author examines the geopolitical and cultural implications of Every’s spasm of violence … Johnson skillfully ushers the reader into the peculiar world of Every and his crew…The author ably documents the radical egalitarianism of pirate culture.”
–David Holohan (USA Today)