All in Fiction
Sally Rooney faced a huge challenge in writing her next book after Normal People, the bestseller published in 2018 that won the British Book Award for Book of the Year and was made into a mini-series on Hulu in 2020. I think Beautiful World, Where Are You is even better than Normal People.
Mother Daughter Widow Wife is another of this year’s Pen/Faulkner finalists for the fiction award. The novel is a tightly crafted story about a young woman, Lizzie Epstein, who wins a prestigious fellowship to the Meadowlark Institute, a multi-disciplinary lab working on memory research. In short order, Lizzie finds herself the favorite fellow of Dr. Benjamin Strauss, the Institute’s director.
Emergency Contact is one of the first books I’ve read that successfully integrates texting into the narrative in a way that actually furthers the story and is believable, not gimmicky. I remember watching the first season of House of Cardsand feeling that finally someone had figured out how to integrate texting on tv. I felt a similar relief and excitement with this book.
Dear Edward’s premise is horrific and if you are afraid of flying, avoid it at all costs. But if you can stomach the trauma, this book is riveting, tragic and entertaining. The story is split into two alternating parts. The first details the lives of multiple passengers on a giant flight from New York to L.A. The second is the story of the twelve-year-old boy who is the sole survivor when that plane crashes.
Louise Erdrich is a prolific American writer who really hits her stride in The Night Watchman.There’s a reason that this gem won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Louise Erdrich has filled her novel with a cast of memorable characters who live on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota in 1953. Their stories will stay with you long after you finish the novel.
Homegoing is Ya Gyasi’s stunning debut novel which begins in Ghana in the 18th century and follows two Ghanian half-sisters and their descendants through seven generations up to the present in the United States. (The sisters don’t know of each other’s existence.) From this description, you would expect a very long novel. In fact, Gyasi has structured her book so that each chapter is almost a distinct short story.
If you’re a faithful reader of the L&L Review, then you know that crime novels and mysteries are not my go-to types of book. When the Stars Go Dark is both – and it is gripping. McLain’s novel reminded me of Northern Spy by Flynn Berry (reviewed June 17, 2021), perhaps because both books’ main characters work brilliantly to resolve the mystery of crimes, while dealing with the all-too-familiar, but very real, stresses of motherhood and family.
There is no question that Great Circle requires a commitment—at 589 pages. And I read it at a pace slower than any book I can remember reading in my recent past. But while I was reading it, I had five weeks of the delightful company of my L&L co-editor and her two small children. Quiet times for reading were few and far between. Despite the slowness with which I read it, however, I found myself consciously slowing down as I came to the end of the book. I simply didn’t want it to end.
Growing up outside Boston, the Salem witch trials were a staple of history classes, and I was obsessed for many years. Even more so after I found out I was descended from one of the accused on my Dad’s side. So to discover this book that strongly connected the historical facts and my childhood memories, but somehow also made relevant observations about race in America today, was a complete thrill.
If you read only one collection of short stories this year, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies should be the one. This group of nine stories is Philyaw’s debut publication and deserves all of the accolades that it has received, including winning the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
I have found in my limited reading of short story collections that when I find one I really enjoy, I tend to read them even faster than I would a novel. There is something about finishing a story and knowing that the next one holds an entirely new set of characters and problems that keeps me turning pages. Alexia Arthurs drew me in over and over, and I ended up reading the entire collection in about a day and a half.
From the description of this book, I was a bit hesitant to begin reading it. How could a book about an eight-year-old girl dealing with an imaginary friend have enough depth and plot to hold my interest? It sounded more like something I would read to Charlotte. My fears were truly unfounded, however, and I found The Icarus Girl suspenseful and full of emotional depth.
Spy novels and thrillers are not my go-to genres of book. But my trusted friend Jane recommended Northern Spy so I took the plunge. Set in modern- day Belfast, Northern Ireland, Northern Spy deftly lays out the story of Tessa, a single mother and producer at the BBC.
I learned about The Orchardist from one of our L&L Readers, Kathleen, who included it on a list of her top five books of the year that she emailed to us. (Shuggie Bain, reviewed in March 2021, was also on that list.) Thank goodness for reader recommendations or I may have missed this truly unforgettable book.
Raven Leilani writes with a brilliant blend of urgency and humor in Luster. Her protagonist Edie finds herself sexually entangled with an older male colleague, who himself is in an open marriage. Edie is a twenty-something, Black woman and the married couple is older and white. Leilani explores the dynamics of this threesome across race and class and propels Luster to a level far beyond what could sound like a soap opera trope.
Like many readers I suspect, my only Zora Neale Hurston experience was reading (and loving) Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school. Although I remember truly enjoying the book, I didn’t remember much about the author, and so was glad to find this short story collection comes with a lengthy intro. It reminded me about her rise to fame at a time when Black fiction was scarce and Black, female authors almost entirely unknown.
Yaa Gyasi has been on my radar for a while, but somehow I have never read her award-winning first novel Homegoing. (It won at least four major literary prizes.). But now that I have read her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, I cannot wait to read her first. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama and draws on those experiences in Transcendent Kingdom. With prose so succinct and beautiful it reads like poetry, Gyasi tells the story of Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University.
With an author as prolific as Margaret Atwood, it seems I can always find another of her books to read. I don’t remember how this 2015 novel made its way onto my reading list, but it is a fascinating story with plenty of psychological tricks and thrills, like so many of Atwood’s better-known works.
I had never heard of this book until Kathleen, a friend of a friend and a reader of L & L, wrote my editor and me an email which included her favorite recent reads. It makes me so happy to hear from readers–and to get book recommendations. Please, keep them coming!
This beautifully written novel somehow manages to feel like a meditation or poetry while simultaneously spinning out the story of two lives over a sixty-year span. Yuki Oyama is a young Japanese girl growing up in New York in the 60s. When her parents decide to return to Japan, she chooses to stay with a friend to finish her high school years in America.
