From its beginning The Flying Troutmans evokes Tolstoy’s famous line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Troutmans take top honors for truly unique dysfunction, and Miriam Toews writes their road trip saga brilliantly; here is one hot mess of a family in a book so enchanting it’s hard to tear your eyes away.
Published posthumously, this international bestseller is the first novel in a trilogy of crime thrillers by Swedish activist-journalist Stieg Larsson. A publisher struggles to clear his name and save his magazine by helping a rich businessman investigate the mystery of his missing niece.
In his second novel, Zachary Lazar captures the shadow lurking just on the other side of Woodstock; Sway delivers a fresh and haunting take on cultural icons like Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson–and on the era they helped characterize.
Most reviews of Netherland have focused on the relationship between two main male characters, Chuck and Hans, and on the dramatic and emblematic role of cricket in the novel. Yet a quieter but equally resonant storyline–the unraveling of Hans and Rachel’s marriage–seems to have been labeled by critics as secondary, or even undeveloped. Perhaps this is because so-called important books don’t deal with issues of domesticity and marriage. Or, if they do, we’re quick to give them another, more important label as well: a book about identity, or politics, or globalization, or exile.
Sadie Jones’s exciting debut is saturated in the same high color as the embracing couple on its cover. Simultaneously tender and urgent, claustrophobic and wistful, The Outcast tells the story of Lewis Aldridge, a tortured romantic figure in the Heathcliff tradition, and of the repressive postwar English society that drives him to self-destruction.
Near the middle of Maureen Freely’s Enlightenment, one character explains to another that in Turkey, “the first thing they make you do in a murder case is put you through a reenactment.” One of the book’s central storylines explores the supposed murder of a mentor of a group of leftist students in Istanbul in the early 1970s. And the novel itself functions as a reenactment, a piecing together of stories and perspectives. But Enlightenment is far more than a murder mystery: it’s about imperialism and politics and human rights, about love and memory, about the subjectivity of truth.
In a world insatiable for celebrity access, where there are reality shows about reality shows, and magazines shriek that the stars are “just like us!” whenever one buys a latte, pops out a baby, or heads for rehab, it seems redundant to ask if we’ve gone too far. But that’s exactly what Theresa Rebeck does with Three Girls and Their Brother, and, for the most part, it works.
In Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, the fragmented structure is an appropriate mirror for the Greers, a family torn apart and alternately struggling and refusing to reconstruct itself.
The head of the MacRinnalch clan is dead, and Kalix MacRinnalch might be responsible. Relentlessly pursued by hunters and by her family, the lonely werewolf girl makes her way through modern-day London, downing laudanum as a temporary escape from her troubles.
Filled with wonder and a sense of infinite possibility, Samantha Hunt’s second novel, The Invention of Everything Else, celebrates the boundless human creativity suggested in its title.
