The Economist ran its summer fiction list on June 26. Eight titles. A murder mystery, two Irish and Italian family sagas, a Bangladeshi rebellion, a Mississippi Depression story, a slim Ben Lerner puzzle box, and a Patchett reunion. All eight are new this year. Below is what each one is and why it earns a place on the summer stack, with nothing given away.
The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett
Seventeen years after The Help, Stockett’s second novel. Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Prohibition is fading, the Depression is biting. An eleven-year-old orphan, an unmarried woman down from the city, and a stranger with little left to lose cross paths. What follows is a story about women taking back agency in a place built to deny it. Two narrators, two timelines, one long-awaited return.
The Kindness of Strangers, by Emma Garman
A debut, and a good one. London, 1953. A boarding house in Chelsea, a widow who runs it, and a stranger who arrives one foggy night and unsettles everyone under the roof. The book opens with a man dying on the drawing room floor. Everything after works backward and forward from that. Compared to Christie and Kate Atkinson, but the voice is its own. Postwar London rendered in smoke and food shortages. The Economist called it sharp and full of period detail.
Land, by Maggie O’Farrell
Her tenth novel, and her most ambitious. Ireland, 1865, a decade after the Great Hunger. A mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey has an epiphany at an ancient spring and abandons the official map for an unofficial one, told in the native language. A family saga that stretches from one life span to the age of the land itself. Colonization, displacement, folklore. The kind of book you live inside rather than read.
Other People’s Children, by Ben Faccini
Faccini’s third novel, and his first in nearly twenty years. A man named Tommaso holds his life together: a job that sends him abroad, a partner with two unruly sons, and an aging Italian grandmother, Alma, whose memories are turning strange. The past reaches back to the Italian resistance in the Second World War and forward into the chaos of modern London. A quiet, precise book about inheritance and the long shadow of what families keep hidden.
The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout
A new standalone from the author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books. Strout does what Strout does: ordinary people, subtle emotional weather, the things left unsaid between them. If you have read her before, you know the register. If you have not, this is a fair place to start.
Transcription, by Ben Lerner
Slim. Formally unstable, as the New Yorker put it. Lerner’s follow-up to 10:04 and The Topeka School, a novel that blends fiction, memoir, and essay, shot through with humor and anxiety. A meditation on memory, fatherhood, and the devices we use to store or erase experience in a digital age. It reads fast and settles slow. Winner of the Orwell Prize.
Uprising, by Tahmima Anam
Inspired by the real women of Banishanta, Bangladesh. On a sinking island off the coast, a community of women live under a madam who was once sold into slavery herself. Their children narrate. When an educated young woman is forcibly brought to the island and refuses to yield, complacency turns to defiance. A fierce, slim, feminist novel of resistance and female power. Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Whistler, by Ann Patchett
Her tenth novel, and by several accounts her best. It opens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a woman in her fifties notices an old man following her and her husband through the galleries. He is her former stepfather, whom she has not seen since she was nine. What binds them is a single winter day decades earlier and a story he once told her. Quieter than Bel Canto. A mystery of the heart rather than a body on the floor. Reconciliation, memory, and the small moments that define a life.
Eight books, one summer. Pick one, pick all of them. If you have read any, tell me where the rest of us should start.
from Risk Premium https://ift.tt/yf6Rno2
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment