Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, Deborah Levy’s August Blue, and Frieda Hughes’ George: A Magpie Memoir all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
(New Directions)
10 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Kairos here
“A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early … If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory … She is writing more closely to her own unconscious … I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did … Profound and moving.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. August Blue by Deborah Levy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
10 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections … August Blue, which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.”
–Heller McAlpin (The Wall Street Journal)
3. Open Throat by Henry Hoke
(MCD)
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Check out Henry Hoke’s annotated nightstand here
“[A] slim jewel of a novel … Propulsive … This act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception. At its best, fiction can make the familiar strange in order to bring readers and our world into scintillating focus. Open Throat is what fiction should be.”
–Marie Helene-Bertino (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
(Avid Reader Press)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from George here
“In her new memoir, Frieda Hughes rarely mentions her famous parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But their absence—in life and art—underscores this poignant and often funny story about, of all things, her relationship with a magpie … Part of the charm of this book is that the author doesn’t dwell on her pain or her past or the reasons why. On a spectrum of people-animal memoirs, the book falls closer to Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk than John Grogan’s Marley and Me. Still, it is not especially cerebral or didactic, and that is not meant as a criticism. It’s a passionate book about unconditional love and commitment. It’s also fast-paced and suspenseful, full of amusing anecdotes, poems and Hughes’s sweet drawings of George.”
–Nora Krug (The Washington Post)
2. Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World by John Vaillant
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Searing … Vaillant’s exploration of fire draws on physics and chemistry, philosophy and symbolism … His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading.”
–Tony Miksanek (Booklist)
3. The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach
(Legacy Lit)
3 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“In this smart and gripping debut, Leach refreshes a familiar heartbreak by weaving the stories of these three lost young women into a larger, more complicated and ultimately tragic narrative of a nation not so much losing the war on drugs as on a death march every bit as doomed as the last battles in Sparta … Leach moves the book beyond this fearless and thorough inventory of a complicated friendship … [Has] the inevitability of a dark fairy-tale ending.”
–Dominica Ruta (The New York Times Book Review)
