Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith, Sam Kean’s Dinner With King Tut, and Helen Schulman’s Fools for Love all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
(Random House)
9 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Vera, or Faith here
“Times like these demand great comic novels and thank God we have Gary Shteyngart to provide. His shortest, sweetest and most perfectly constructed novel ever, Vera, or Faith is here to save the day … This is probably the most endearing book about anxiety ever written … More heart, but as funny as ever.”
-Marion Winik (The Star Tribune)
2. Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie
(Doubleday)
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Charlotte Runcie here
“This is a smart, sharp and compulsively readable first novel that provides food for thought on a variety of complex topics … A novel isn’t carried by its big ideas alone. It needs strong characters to convey them and react to them. Fortunately, Runcie’s creations are forceful presences, all the more so because they are intriguingly multifaceted and resist cut-and-dried classification … All of which sounds serious and thought-provoking. This is only partly true, for the novel is also fun and frequently witty.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)
3. Fools for Love: Stories by Helen Schulman
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Smart and often witty … Schulman creates an engaging cast of characters struggling to balance their desire for stable relationships with the allure of sexual adventure … Schulman’s characters make enough foolish and self-indulgent choices to fill a volume twice the size of this slim one. But that’s the stuff of enjoyable fiction, and she delivers it with style here”
–Harvey Freedenberg (Shelf Awareness)
**
1. A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
(Riverhead)
10 Rave • 2 Positive
“When Elmhirst comes close to breaking the fourth wall, that contribute to the pleasure of this exciting book. You know as a reader that you are in very capable hands … A fascinating narrative … She doles out the adventures, such as they were, and tells them vividly … So much more than a shipwreck tale. It’s a story of love and strength, a portrait of a marriage that—for all its oddities—is a true partnership.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)
2. Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations by Sam Kean
(Little Brown and Company)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“Sharp … It’s all wildly entertaining, and Kean makes a powerful case for how vital the experimental archaeologists’ work is in giving us a better understanding of the past.”
–Kristine Huntley (Booklist)
3. Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Table by Will Potter
(City Lights Books)
3 Rave
Read an excerpt from Little Red Barns here
“Impassioned and deeply researched … Little Red Barns isn’t a depressing litany, though it may well change your mind about buying industrial meat … A lucid indictment … One chapter, titled Poop Tours, offers a particularly vivid portrait of the far-reaching and vile pollution produced by mega-farms.”
–Lydia Millet (The Washington Post)
