1. Lanny by Max Porter
8 Rave • 8 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Having achieved so much success, Porter’s second book has a weight of expectation behind it, but he hasn’t disappointed, for Lanny is a fine follow-up, perhaps more accessible than his first while still embracing his unique writing style … After reading Lanny, I did something I’ve never done before: I read it again. I felt that I would both understand and appreciate it better the second time around and was keen to study how the author managed to lure me in, even spellbind me, with such a magical and singular story … I suspect Lanny will be a novel I will return to again, simply to absorb the strangeness of the story, the cleverness of the structure, the authenticity of the dialogue and the ethereal mystery that surrounds the book’s titular character. For those who are put off by experimental fiction, and I confess to being one, this is a novel to shatter your prejudices, for Max Porter understands that even the most complex idea must have a decipherable meaning if it is to be of any worth to a reader.”
–John Boyne (The Irish Times)
Read an excerpt from Lanny here
2. Orange World by Karen Russell
9 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“…ingenious, reality-warping, darkly funny, and exquisitely composed story collection rooted in myth and horror … Russell writes with mischievous clarity, wit, and conviction, grounding the most bizarre situations in the ordinary … Heir to Shirley Jackson and a compatriot of T. C. Boyle, virtuoso Russell, gifted with acute insights, compassion, and a daring, free-diving imagination, explores the bewitching and bewildering dynamic between ‘the voracious appetite of nature and its yawning indifference’ and humankind’s relentless profligacy and obliviousness.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
Read Karen Russell on America’s housing crisis here
3. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
9 Rave • 2 Positive
“…[an] absorbing and extraordinarily well crafted debut novel … a complex portrait of clashing cultures—both white and indigenous — that have a common denominator in misogyny … Phillips makes an inviting and subtle guide … Phillips draws intricately detailed characters, most of them female, and we quickly come to know them intimately. Yet her primary interest is in social forces—especially those that nurture dangerous men while devaluing girls and women who seem too independent, too headstrong, too sexual. … Ambiguity…allows room for both hope and dread, and Phillips skillfully spins out that suspense…Phillips knows that imagined danger can be fun. But she pokes around beneath it, too, to ask why we thrill at female peril, and just exactly what our problem is …”
–Laura Collins-Hughes (The Boston Globe)
Read an excerpt from Disappearing Earth here
4. Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif
6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Pan
“…the closest relative to Heller’s classic satire of the second world war … Hanif’s observations of the camp are precise and hair-raising, and one forgives the accidental Britishisms that pepper Major Ellie’s speech … Hanif is at his most entertaining when he is deep in the farce, and some characters are no more than that … The true brutalities of war are shown in quick, moving strokes … Red Birds is full of dark comedy and witty eviscerations of war and the singular way it draws out human ugliness. However, satire relies on a veneer of sincerity: the reader alone observes absurdities that the characters believe in and live by … Hanif is dexterous and ambitious with the literary tools of both east and west … Red Birds is an incisive, unsparing critique of war and of America’s role in the destruction of the Middle East. It combines modern and ancient farcical traditions in thrilling ways.”
–Dina Nayeri (The Guardian)
5. America Was Hard to Find by Kathleen Alcott
3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“…sprawling but absorbing … The emotional heart of the book belongs to their son, Wright, whose childhood Alcott renders with supreme tenderness … As Alcott’s ambitious (if slightly overstuffed) book ranges over three decades of American history, the era’s defining events drift in and out of the lens. The reader can almost imagine leafing through a pile of old Life magazines … the real energy of the novel is not in Alcott’s rendering of these events, but rather in shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience within those larger histories … Some of the book’s most memorable sections offer glimpses of the period through the narrow aperture of everyday human longing, like the way Alcott masterfully captures Wright’s humble wish for the kind of middle-class American childhood his mother rails against.”
–Karen Thompson Walker (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from America Was Hard to Find here
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1. Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
5 Rave • 5 Positive
“Needless to say, it’s heartbreaking. I read much of it through a blur of tears. But Greene’s book is also heartwarming, a valuable addition to the literature of grief … Their story is not just of loss, but of their remarkable love, which helps them through this tragedy … The first section painfully reconstructs the immediate aftermath of the accident, including excruciating hours at their daughter’s hospital bedside … Aware that his story will reliably elicit shock and tears, Greene at one point bitterly calls himself ‘a rock star of grief.’ But he also writes gorgeously of grief … Greene’s writerly skills are in evidence throughout this book. He opens with a lovely memory of the only time his daughter dipped her feet in ocean water, shortly before her death … luminous.”
–Heller McAlpin (The Washington Post)
2. Endeavor: The Ship That Changed the World by Peter Moore
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“Following the ship’s travels gives us a wonderful window onto an age, the Age of Reason and Exploration. Moore shows that Cook’s voyages had nothing to do with exploitation, let alone ‘white supremacy’ (a recent invention), but were thrillingly open-minded, keen for the rewards of trade and the increase of knowledge, and what one contemporary called ‘the general benefit of mankind’ … a dazzling combination of science and adventure, lyrically evocative descriptions of lush tropical landscapes and salt-stung seascapes, and a portrait of an age of ‘magnificent geniality’ … an absolute joy from start to finish, and surely my history book of the year.”
–Christopher Hart (The Times)
3. A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father by David Maraniss
5 Rave • 4 Positive
“… the tale that emerges is fascinating … Maraniss includes an absorbing account of the fighting in Spain…On this and other topics, he builds a thorough foundation, allowing the reader to fully appreciate the motivations of the leftist Americans who eventually would be caught in the net of McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities … In recounting his family saga, David Maraniss has wisely followed the precept his father delivered to the House Un-American Activities Committee: ‘To properly measure a man’s Americanism you must know the whole pattern of a life’ … Maraniss presents the whole pattern of a generation of young, idealistic Americans—and, ultimately, of one brave and stubborn man who refused to give up his belief in what America stands for.”
–John Reinan (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
4. The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton by Rick Atkinson
6 Rave • 2 Positive
“To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing … Lurking behind all the assembled evidence, which Atkinson has somehow managed to read and digest in a remarkably short period of time, is a novelistic imagination that verges on the cinematic. Historians of the American Revolution take note. Atkinson is coming … He brings with him a Tolstoyan view of war; that is, he presumes war can be understood only by recovering the experience of ordinary men and women caught in the crucible of orchestrated violence beyond their control or comprehension … [Atkinson] is not a historical novelist, but rather a strikingly imaginative historian … Atkinson pays only passing attention to this political side of the Revolutionary story, devoting more space to the policymakers in London than their counterparts in Philadelphia … a major addition to that ongoing argument. A powerful new voice has been added to the dialogue about our origins as a people and a nation. It is difficult to imagine any reader putting this beguiling book down without a smile and a tear.”
–Joseph J. Ellis (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Origins by Lewis Dartnell
2 Rave • 6 Positive
“…[an] extraordinary book … Dartnell understands geology, geography, anthropology, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and history. That’s quite an achievement, but what makes him really special is the way he communicates the interconnectedness of these disciplines in a clear, logical and entertaining way. Origins is one of those rare books that dissolves mystery through the steady application of sublime lucidity. While reading it, I kept thinking: ‘Oh, that makes sense’ … Perhaps the most profound lesson of this superb book is that nothing is permanent, or predictable.”
–Gerard DeGroot (The Times)
