Lydia Millet’s collection of Los Angeles-set interlinking stories, Fight No More, is our Best Reviewed Fiction Book of the Week, with one reviewer writing that it “takes the connected story model to a pure and higher form.” Hot on Millet’s heels is Jim Crace and his fantastical tale of music, celebrity, local intrigue, and lost love by the Mediterranean Sea: The Melody, and Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers: a poignant novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago. Life in the Garden, Booker Prize-winner Penelope Lively’s beautiful celebration of the horticultural life, takes the Best Reviewed Nonfiction Book crown for this week, with celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter’s Old in Art School—a memoir of returning to school in her sixties to earn a BFA and MFA in painting—and Alex Perry’s The Good Mothers—a feminist saga of true crime and justice—also putting in a strong showings.
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1. Fight No More by Lydia Millet
(7 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Is there a writer more profound and less pretentious than Lydia Millet? In her novels and story collections, a dozen in all, Millet deals out existential questions like playing cards, and like any good casino dealer, her hands never shake. Her newest book, Fight No More, could easily be her most philosophically confident and complex work yet … Even by her own high standard, Millet is exceptional in these moments of possibility. She writes them with equal parts wildness and straightforwardness, certainty and the certainty of impermanence.”
–Lily Meyer (NPR)
Read an essay by Lydia Millet here
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2. The Melody by Jim Crace
(5 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…the book he did not expect to write…which takes its place among his finest work. The Melody is to make these chimes of domesticity, warmth and plenty sound in a mobile, infinitely changeable relationship to that other metallic sound, the crashing of the bins. Crace is a polemical writer, but his writing is too subtly strange to feel like preaching. Crace builds his own laboratories, where he is free to bring his elements of interest into new configurations…with incantatory linguistic power.”
–Alexander Harris (The Guardian)
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3. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“The Great Believers brings a whole era back into view…with the the book’s 1985 narrative..offering a grand fusion of the past and the present … Makkai is a wily, seductive writer…who brings sympathy to these vivid and varied personalities … it’s remarkably alive despite all the loss it encompasses.”
–Michael Upchurch (The Chicago Tribune)
Read an essay by Rebecca Makkai here
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4. The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton
(5 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Winton wraps up his tale with some heightened tension and visceral thrills. Far more gripping, though, is Jaxie’s full-bodied narrative voice, which is the driving force of the novel. As with compatriot Peter Carey, Winton is a master ventriloquist of Australian vernacular … Equally impressive is Winton’s depiction of place—whether bland wheat belt or barren salt lands, a prospector’s shack or a shepherd’s hut. With the roos and euros, mulga and kurrajongs—not to mention the durries and frangers—an entire other world comes vibrantly alive … Winton has triumphed again. This is a terrifying, electrifying novel charged by a singular voice and expert storytelling.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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5. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori
(2 Rave, 6 Positive)
“…a compelling novel about conformity in society, and the baffling rules applied in work and life. Murata’s protagonist is likable, if a bit baffling herself. Ginny Tapley Takemori’s translation feels just right for the slightly off-kilter reality of this thought-provoking story … This brief, brisk novel is an engrossing adventure into an unusual mind. Is it a subversive, satiric criticism of societal norms? Is it a surrealist take on extreme workplace culture? Or simply the perspective of a woman wired a little bit differently? Murata holds the reader rapt, wondering what Keiko will do next.”
–Julia Kastner (Shelf Awareness)
Read an essay by Sayaka Murata here
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1. Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively
(6 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Lively has been a voracious gardener her entire adult life, and it shows in her nearly encyclopedic knowledge of gardening. Yet this is not a traditional gardening book. You won’t find tips for slug removal, growing roses or mulching. And thank goodness for that, because Lively has so much more to say about the relevance of gardens … Lively’s trademark British wit makes several delightfully acidic appearances, but Life in the Garden is also at times almost unbearably poignant, coming as late as it does in the life of the wonderfully prolific author.”
–Amy Scribner (BookPage)
Read an excerpt from Life in the Garden here
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2. Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Irvin Painter
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…candid and cheerfully irreverent … bringing new energy and insight to questions that have long preoccupied the art world. As Painter puts it: ‘What counts as art? Who is an artist? Who decides?’ Painter gets more playful with these questions than she initially lets on. One of the most enjoyable aspects of Old in Art School is seeing her relax her historian’s grip on social meaning and open up to new ways of seeing.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
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3. The Good Mothers by Alex Perry
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Perry’s account is thorough and wrenching. It is difficult for an outsider to comprehend the ferocity of the Ndrangheta or the gruesome demands it makes of its constituents. While Cerreti’s work has made an indelible mark on the Ndrangheta, Perry leaves no doubt that securing any long-lasting gains will require much more than an enterprising prosecutor and her devoted team of attorneys and law enforcement professionals. The real healing begins when a society, even a small part of it, demands that the rotting appendage is not welcome within the body politic any longer.”
–Jackson Holahan (The Christian Science Monitor)
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4. Frenemies by Ken Auletta
(3 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“It’s a comment on the currency of data … a brightly readable, cinematic tour through the seismic changes currently altering the face and the very nature of the marketing and advertising professions … all these wheeling and dealing men and women come alive like characters in a novel … Auletta has this formula down to a science, although in a book as data-heavy as Frenemies the formula sometimes feels like a distraction from the main subject; less color and more data might have been the wiser course for this kind of topic. But Frenemies is nevertheless the most vivid account to date of what may be the most crucial moment in advertising history— the moment when data went from servant to master.”
–Steve Donoghue (The Christian Science Monitor)
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5. Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
(1 Rave, 5 Positive)
“In her lyrical and fact-packed investigative effort, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush successfully attempts to bridge the gap between the scientific and a terrifying aesthetic … Climate change literature is notoriously dry and pessimistic. Rush does her best to avoid these pitfalls by weaving data into personal tales that don’t shy away from doubts … This honest vulnerability is Rush’s best narrative approach … The author’s largely successful lyrical approach to environmental writing is complemented by the structure of her storytelling … Rush’s effort to make scientific journalism digestible is also at times bogged down by esoteric language that might inadvertently distance the reader … Rush makes her writing part of the reader’s journey to actively seek out the unfamiliar.
–Rafaela Bassili (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
Read an excerpt from Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore here
