Fiction
1. The Late Show by Michael Connelly
“Connelly’s special genius has always been his ability to build character like the most literary of novelists while attending to the procedural details of a police investigation with all the focus of an Ed McBain … Many established crime writers—James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin, Randy Wayne White—have launched new series as their signature heroes age, but few have done it as successfully as Connelly.”
–Bill Ott (Booklist)
*
2. Boundless by Jillian Tamaki
(6 Rave, 1 Positive)
“In Boundless, Tamaki tackles subtle shifts in emotion, identity, and power. Her visual talent has long been obvious. This solo collection now proves her strength as a storyteller in her own right and that, of course, the drawing is central to that process.”
–Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (The Atlantic)
*
3. Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
(5 Rave, 1 Mixed)
“[a] picaresque tour-de-force … Mabanckou’s indignation at times recalls Wizard of the Crow, Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s grotesque satire on dictatorship and kleptocracy – together with its spirit of resistance and hope of salvation. Yet there is also a touching personal homage in this retelling of the lives of some of those unable to escape the asylum.”
–Maya Jaggi (The Guardian)
Read an excerpt from Black Moses here
*
4. Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
(4 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Rachel Khong has managed to create an Alzheimer’s novel that is heartbreaking but also funny, offering a fresh take on the disease and possible outcomes both for the person suffering from it and their caretakers … But the real charm of the novel isn’t the plot so much as the sparkling little details that pop up on every page, illuminating the dark material.”
–Malena Watrous (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Read and excerpt from Goodbye, Vitamin here
*
5. Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne
(4 Rave)
“Osborne is a master at imbuing his text with both dread and inexorability. Beautiful Animals positively drips with this-can’t-end-well … So let’s not mince words. This is a great book. Truly difficult to put down, the novel exerts a sickening pull. Its climax and resolution will not disappoint. The social perspective is sophisticated, smart and uncomfortable, and the story is cracking.”
–Lionel Shriver (The Washington Post)
**
Non Fiction
1.Roots, Radical and Rockers by Billy Bragg
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Bragg, well-known in Britain as a folk-inspired, politically active singer-songwriter, aka the ‘Bard of Barking,’ seeks to restore skiffle to its place at the fountainhead of British pop music. During the course of more than 400 pages of deeply researched, wittily written and persuasively argued prose, he succeeds.”
–Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (The Financial Times)
*
2. The Great Nadar by Adam Begley
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Begley does a masterful job of evoking this milieu, whose members were sympathetic to the ideal of a republic, as the reign of King Louis-Philippe slowly lost its grip on the public imagination … We can be grateful to Begley for capturing some of that quicksilver spirit, that quintessentially Parisian sensibility, which left us with images that are, in their bewitching way, timeless.”
–Thad Carhart (Newsday)
*
3. Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green
(1 Rave, 4 Positive)
“Mr. Green is a talented reporter and a gifted storyteller. The anecdotes he records from the chaotic 2016 Trump campaign are both well chosen (they’re there for thematic reasons, not as gratuitous gossip) and brilliantly told.”
–Barton Swaim (The Wall Street Journal)
*
4. Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
(2 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The author’s enterprise is to reconstitute a body of human understanding from what is left behind, preserved, or found—be it a grainy record of torture, a bit of text, or a work of art … The patchwork form of this book, in the vein of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, invigorates in its dissonance. The amount of white space on the page amplifies the effects of each passage, be they concussive or soothing.”
–Hunter Braithwaite (Guernica)
Read an essay by Sarah Sentilles here
*
5. To the New Owners by Madeleine Blais
(5 Positive, 1 Pan)
“The chapter on formidable Vineyard doyenne and Washington Postpublisher Katherine Graham is the most charming in the book, positively luminous with nostalgic affection. And the broader canvas of Vineyard life – the shops, the storms, the wry local humor – is painted with exactly the kind of skill and evocation readers would expect from the author of the bestselling In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle.”
–Steve Donoghue (The Christian Science Monitor)
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