The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party, Ben Macintyre’s Redwood, Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves, and Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

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Fiction

1. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf)

16 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here

“Ambitious and captivating … Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds … feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.”

–Lincoln Michel (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday)

6 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Our Noble Selves here

“Atkinson’s lighthearted novel mines delicious humor from this mismatch of grizzled cynicism and national heritage. Our Noble Selves is in part a workplace comedy … Ms. Atkinson deserves to be rated as highly as her countryman Ian McEwan. Like him, she boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

3. The Rouse by China Miéville
(Del Rey)

4 Rave • 1 Mixed

“Over its 1,200 pages, the novel becomes a haunting of a haunting, a terror echoed and heightened over time. This terror grows familiar but not stale; the reader is allowed to live within it almost calmly and thus catch glimpses of other forces in the darkness. What Miéville has crafted in The Rouse is an intimate epic, a controlled sprawl of history and emotional resonance. I felt it in my bones, the undeniable power of a jagged masterpiece.”

–Jeff VanderMeer (The New York Times Book Review)

4. The Newer World by Sebastian Barry
(Viking)

3 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Part Bildungsroman, part picaresque … It’s an astonishing effect, especially when you consider the near-miracles Barry performs with language. In his hands it attains registers that can only be described as soaring; a vertiginous high wire of prose.”

–Sara Collins (The Guardian)

5. Fallow by Sarah Anderson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

1 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from Fallow here

“Unfolding into an utterly unexpected journey, Anderson’s debut novel is an engrossing commentary on workplace culture, autonomy, and late-stage capitalism.”

–Patricia Smith (Booklist)

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Nonfiction

1. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre
(Crown)

6 Rave

“The British writer Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers … He has done it again … The book’s last pages are its saddest.”

–Joseph Finer (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
(Liveright)

4 Rave • 2 Mixed

“Entertaining, expansive, often surprising, and occasionally horrifying … Enlivened with an occasional touch of snark, Live Laugh Love is both thoroughly researched and provocative as it raises questions about how contemporary American Christianity got where it is and where it may be going next.”

–Margaret Quamme (Booklist)

3. End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

3 Rave • 3 Mixed

“Bold, clarifying … There have been endless academic disputes over whether such a broad definition of fascism is useful. Personally, I think we shouldn’t get too hung up on terminology – the important thing is to write in a way that makes people alive to problems around them and leaves them feeling empowered to respond. The authors succeed on both counts … Their valuable contribution is to map out the frightening new territory in which we find ourselves, and point to an escape.”

–Daniel Trilling (The Guardian)

4. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
(W. W. Norton and Company)

2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Every sentence is worth reading in this compelling book. For readers who are horrified and want to understand how we got here, this book is an absolute must.”

–Ellen Gilbert (Library Journal)

5. The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick
(Henry Holt & Co.)

1 Rave • 2 Positive

“[A] brilliant new study … In the short term, the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done. I suspect we will be hearing much more about their work and its implications.”

–John Lanchester (The New Yorker)