guardian book reviews july 2021

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The best books of 2021

John le Carré’s final novel, the race to make a vaccine and the conclusion of the groundbreaking Noughts and Crosses series… Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, politics, science, children’s books and more. Let us know in the comments what your favourite books have been.

• The Observer’s best books of 2021, chosen by guest authors

Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning family saga and Kazuo Ishiguro’s take on AI - Justine Jordan chooses the best novels of the year.

Read the full list Best fiction of 2021

Children’s books

Imogen Russell Williams on reimaginings of King Arthur and Medusa, luminous fairytales and the conclusion to the unforgettable Noughts and Crosses series - plus books for young readers by Ben Okri and inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Read the full list Best children’s books of 2021

Crime and thrillers

Final outings from John le Carré and Andrea Camilleri, plus three standout debuts - Laura Wilson picks five of the year’s best thrillers and crime novels.

Read the full list Best crime and thrillers of 2021

Science fiction

Adam Roberts selects five of the best science fiction novels of the year - from murder on a spaceship to a feminist utopia.

Read the full list Best science fiction books of 2021

Biography and memoir

Fiona Sturges rounds up the best celebrity autobiographies, from Brian Cox to Miriam Margolyes, as well as a poignant account of a woman who helped Aids patients and terrific studies of DH Lawrence and Barbara Pym.

Read the full list Best biography and memoir books of 2021

The inside stories of Brexit, Sage and Unite, plus a reckoning with Britain’s imperial history - Gaby Hinsliff’s choice of books about politics and politicians.

Read the full list Best politics books of 2021

Nicholas Wroe picks the best books about sport, covering everything from racism on the pitch to the history of female cycling - as well as memoirs by Billie Jean King and Rob Burrow.

Read the full list Best sport books of 2021

Ian Sample on a history of quarantine, a biography of the family that helped to fuel the US opioid crisis and the inside story of how the Oxford vaccine was made.

Read the full list Best science books of 2021

Covid-19 and the climate crisis haunt much of this year’s poetry, including Michael Rosen’s response to his experience in intensive care and Kate Simpson’s hopeful environmentally-themed anthology - Rishi Dastidar picks the best collections.

Read the full list Best poetry books of 2021

Comics and graphic novels

The return of Alison Bechdel, a cold war epic and a nuanced observation of a mother’s illness - James Smart marks a year of excellent graphic books.

Read the full list Best comics and graphic novels of 2021

Alexis Petridis chooses the best books about music and musicians - including Sinéad O’Connor’s striking memoir, Paul McCartney’s autobiography in lyrics and the story of a stolen piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum.

Read the full list Best music books of 2021

A fascinating memoir of food and grief, Stanley Tucci’s life story in recipes and new cookbooks from Ruby Tandoh and the Ottolenghi test kitchen - Rukmini Iyer selects the best food books of the year.

Read the full list Best food books of 2021

• Best books of the year
• Best books of 2021

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16 Best Books To Read in July

JULY 6, 2021

by Violet Kupersmith

Drawing from genres as diverse as horror, humor, and historical fiction, Kupersmith creates a rich and dazzling spectacle. Full review >

by S.A. Cosby

Violence and love go hand in hand in this tale of two rough men seeking vengeance for their murdered sons. Full review >

JULY 20, 2021

by Katie Kitamura

This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril. Full review >

AUG. 24, 2021

by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it's a mighty attempt at achieving one. Full review >

GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

by Kristen Radtke ; illustrated by Kristen Radtke

Superb. A rigorous, vulnerable book on a subject that is too often neglected. Full review >

by Michael Pollan

A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind. Full review >

by Cynthia Barnett

An absolutely captivating nature book. Full review >

JULY 1, 2021

by Precious Brady-Davis

An inspiring memoir of nonconformity. Full review >

JULY 13, 2021

by Rodney Barnes ; illustrated by Selina Espiritu & Kelly Fitzpatrick & Tom Napolitano

A heartfelt voyage through time and space. Full review >

JULY 27, 2021

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT

by Alex Richards

A moving portrayal of grief, family, and the complexity of different perspectives. Full review >

by Nisha Sharma

A perceptive and textured romance. Full review >

by Erica Waters

Potent, atmospheric, and wholly satisfying. Full review >

CHILDREN'S

by Leslie C. Youngblood

A heartwarming story with an inspiring message about creative youth activism. Full review >

by Sarah Dillard ; illustrated by Sarah Dillard

A thoroughly delicious (and practically wordless) charmer. Full review >

by Peter Raymundo ; illustrated by Peter Raymundo

Not just another fish story—will be a favorite with fledgling marine biologists and landlubbers everywhere. Full review >

AUG. 31, 2021

by Victoria Ying ; illustrated by Victoria Ying

Important, engrossing, and altogether necessary. Full review >

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From Appleseed to XOXO .

Summer is finally upon us, folks, and it’s bringing an abundance of great new books with it. Readers across the U.S. are finalizing their summer reading lists , trying to decide which books to take on vacation, whether in a carry-on or a beach bag. But If no recently released book has tickled your vacation-reading fancy so far, one of July’s hot new releases is sure to hit the spot.

The best books hitting stores this month include rom-coms from Jasmine Guillory and Sonali Dev, memoirs from Precious Brady-Davis and Shiori Ito, thrillers from Liv Constantine and Karin Slaughter , and speculative novels from Elizabeth Lim and Shelley Parker-Chan — among many, many more. There’s something for everyone landing in stores this month, and Bustle has pulled together a list of the month’s biggest and brightest new titles for you to check out.

Presented below for your reading pleasure, the 43 most anticipated books of July 2021.

We only include products that have been independently selected by Bustle's editorial team. However, we may receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

I Have Always Been Me

Raised in a midwestern Pentecostal church, Precious Brady-Davis — as a biracial trans girl in the foster-care system — never felt as if she fit in. Little did she realize, she was born to stand out instead. In I Have Always Been Me , Brady-Davis revisits her childhood in Omaha, Nebraska, her college drag career, and her transition journey.

The Seven Day Switch

No one would ever expect Celeste and Wendy to be friends. One’s a crunchy, hands-on supermom, the other’s a workaholic who unapologetically prioritizes her career — and neither has anything good to say about the other. But when a booze-filled party lands them in a Freaky Friday -style body swap, Celeste and Wendy find out just how similar their lives really are, in Kelly Harms’ The Seven Day Switch .

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

After she answers an ad for free therapy at a local Catholic church, Gilda, an atheist lesbian, is mistaken for a job applicant. She soon finds herself working as the replacement for the church’s recently deceased receptionist, Grace, and fielding emails from Grace’s old friend — who doesn’t seem to know the woman is dead — in Emily Austin’s darkly funny debut.

The Very Nice Box

Years after the unexpected death of her girlfriend, Ava spends her days working at STÄDA. Her job at the Brooklyn furniture store provides her with a much-needed distraction from her lingering pain, but everything changes when she meets Mat. Her new boss is handsome and charming, and as they strike up an unanticipated relationship, things seem to be looking up for Ava. When she finds out the secret Mat’s been keeping from her, however, Ava’s life jerks into another surprise twist .

The Stranger in the Mirror

From the author of The Last Mrs. Parrish comes The Stranger in the Mirror , an all-new psychological thriller in which two narrative threads — one about a missing wife and mother, the other regarding a bride-to-be with no memory of her past — become hopelessly tangled.

Incense and Sensibility

Traumatized by a hate crime that hurt a close friend, Yash Raje is forced to put his campaign for Governor of California on hold. Yash’s family arranges for him to take lessons in stress management from his childhood friend, India Dashwood. Unbeknownst to them, Yash and India had a brief, but passionate, affair 10 years ago. It’s a secret that could put a stop to Yash’s political aspirations for good... but could it still be worth revealing?

Dear Miss Metropolitan

When two women are rescued from their captor’s Queens residence, a neighboring newspaper columnist can’t help but be drawn into their mystery. As the two survivors navigate life on the other side of captivity, and wrestle with the salvation that never came for their still-missing friend, Miss Metropolitan finds herself questioning how she missed the clues about the women’s plight, hidden under her nose for years.

Four years after the police forced her to reenact her assault before telling her that her assailant, Noriyuki Yamaguchi — then a prominent journalist with the Tokyo Broadcasting System — could not be prosecuted for rape, Shiori Ito — who was a Thomson Reuters intern at the time of the assault — won a civil suit against Yamaguchi, when a judge ruled that she “had not consented to the act” in 2019. Hailed as “the memoir that sparked Japan’s #MeToo movement,” Black Box tells the story of Ito’s quest for justice.

Rise to the Sun

You Should See Me in a Crown author Leah Johnson returns to stores this month with Rise to the Sun . Two heartbroken, queer Black girls, Toni and Olivia, connect at a weekend music festival. One’s mourning the loss of her father, and the other’s still reeling from a bad breakup — and they’re both about to get so much more out of this getaway than they ever imagined.

The Belle Époque: A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond

Moulin Rouge fans, take note! If you’ve ever wanted to know more about Christian and Satine’s world, Dominique Kalifa’s The Belle Époque is here to give you all the juicy details about life and love in turn-of-the-century France.

Six Crimson Cranes

Spin the Dawn author Elizabeth Lim is back with an all-new YA adventure this month. This retelling of “The Wild Swans” transports readers to Kiata, where a young princess resorts to magic to avoid her upcoming wedding, setting off a disastrous series of events. After her stepmother discovers Shiori’s hidden magical talents, she curses all of her stepchildren, turning the princess’ six brothers into cranes and warning Shiori that she must remain silent, or else the cranes will die. As the exiled princess searches for answers, it soon becomes clear that her former intended may be the only ally she has in the coming battle.

An unsuspecting pilot must make a terrible choice in Falling , the debut novel from former flight attendant T.J. Newman. After taking off from LAX on a flight to JFK, Captain Bill Hoffman learns that his wife and children have been kidnapped... and that’s not even the worst part. Not only will these criminals murder Bill’s family if he speaks up, but the captors are also threatening to kill their victims unless Bill goes through with the unthinkable: intentionally crash his plane.

Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

Catherine Raven’s always been drawn to the wilds, and she’s never longed for companionship from other humans. But when a fox began visiting her off-the-grid Montana home at the same time every day, Raven couldn’t help but be curious about what he wanted. So begins the story of their “uncommon friendship,” recounted here in Fox and I .

The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It

Our oceans’ deepest depths are home to creatures that seem downright alien, even when compared to their counterparts in shallower zones. Helen Scales brings these sea-dwellers, as well as the fascinating features of their native environments, to light in The Brilliant Abyss .

The Startup Wife

The trajectory of one brilliant woman’s life changes entirely in Tahmima Anam’s The Startup Wife . After falling into a whirlwind romance with her childhood crush, Asha gives up on pursuing her doctorate, marries Cyrus, and follows him to work at a tech incubator. There, she develops a new app that could change the world, replacing all religious rituals with personalized, virtual faith practices. But when credit that should be Asha’s begins to trickle away, can she and Cyrus survive the coming storm?

It Happened One Summer

Cut off from their wealthy family’s coffers after one’s party-girl lifestyle grows too chaotic, sisters Piper and Hannah find themselves stuck in Westport: a tiny fishing town in the Pacific Northwest, where their late father died when the girls were young. It doesn’t take long for one of the locals, a prickly sea captain named Brendan, to make it clear: no one in Westport thinks pampered Piper can cut it in the Washington wilds. Little does Brendan know that Piper is headstrong enough to prove him wrong, if only out of spite.

We Were Never Here

Long-distance BFFs Kristen and Emily reunite every year to vacation together. But when two people close to them die in two years, Emily begins to wonder if Kristen is telling her the truth about what happens when Emily isn’t looking. Things don’t get any easier to process when Kristen shows up at Emily’s door for an unscheduled visit. Now, Emily has to decide how far she’s willing to go to protect a friend who may not have her best interests at heart, in Andrea Bartz’s We Were Never Here .

From the author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods comes Appleseed : a sprawling cli-fi novel that probes humanity’s relationship to nature across time. Moving from the wilds of 18th century Ohio, to a near-future moment in which a Monsanto-esque company has monopolized necessities, and on to a far-future ice age, Appleseed is a gripping and timely read for 2021.

Well, This Is Exhausting

GQ ’s Sophia Benoit examines contemporary womanhood in her debut essay collection, Well, This Is Exhausting . For anyone who’s grappling lingering impostor syndrome, looks like they have it all figured out but are still foundering in some unseen area of life, or has tried to be a flawless feminist in the new millennium, this

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Record of a Spaceborn Few author Becky Chambers begins a new series with A Psalm for the Wild-Built . Centuries after robots gained sentience and left human civilization behind to live in the world’s forests, one robot emerges from obscurity to ask one question of a tea monk: What do people need? What begins as a simple question soon turns into a philosophical journey, as Sibling Dex teaches Mosscap about their way of life.

Embassy Wife

Amanda gives up a career in Silicon Valley to follow her husband, a Fulbright Scholar, to live near his family in Namibia. There, she falls in with Persephone: another American woman who suspects that her (fake) husband, a diplomat, is actually a C.I.A. operative. As their lives in Namibia become more strained, both Amanda and Persephone find themselves questioning why they are where they are, in Katie Crouch’s Embassy Wife .

The Taking of Jake Livingston

As one of the few Black students at a majority-white prep school, Jake already feels isolated from most of his peers — and that’s not to mention his ability to speak with the dead. His life gets infinitely more complicated when he meets Sawyer: the ghost of a local boy who killed himself and six other students in a recent shooting at another school. Sawyer wants something from Jake, but will the living survive this game with the dead?

The Right Side of Reckless

Regan always does what her parents expect, and right now, they expect her to stay away from Guillermo: the new kid in town, who’s on parole and doing community service for his past mistakes. When they inevitably meet, the two teens have instant chemistry, but Regan’s already in a relationship, and Guillermo is one misstep away from having his freedom revoked...

While We Were Dating

Romance queen Jasmine Guillory returns to stores this month with a Hollywood romance. While We Were Dating centers on Anna, an actor looking for her next big role, and Ben, the ad man running the campaign that Anna’s starring in. They’re on opposite sides of the camera, but when Ben steps up to help Anna in a crisis, they must decide whether to take their relationship public... or keep it away from the media’s prying eyes.

The Final Girl Support Group

Six women who survived their brushes with brutal killers gather together regularly to discuss what happens after the interviews and docuseries stop. But when one of them suddenly disappears, her 22-year-old groupmate, Lynette, discovers that their tight-knit clan of final girls is under attack. Will one of them become a final girl twice over, or can these survivors band together to weather the coming storm?

Such a Quiet Place

Harper was the one who found the bodies: Brandon and Fiona Truett, killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a car left running in the garage. Photographic evidence pointed to Harper’s roommate, Ruby, as the culprit, and the good people of Hollow’s Edge all came out to testify against her. Fourteen months after Ruby went to prison, she’s returned to Hollow’s Edge to live with her old roomie again. But when threats against Harper begin to trickle in, it becomes clear that the Truetts’ killer may have never been brought to justice at all... and they might be ready to kill again.

A Touch of Jen

Beth Morgan takes on social media and para-social relationships in this twisty debut novel. Remy and Jen worked together, once upon a time. Jen’s now a wildly successful jewelry designer, by all accounts, while Remy is still stuck in regular-job drudgery with his far less perfect girlfriend, Alicia. Alicia idolizes Jen, and her relationship with Remy hinges on their shared fantasies of a woman they barely know. When Jen invites Remy and Alicia to stay with her clique in the Hamptons, it’s a dream come true. Too bad that dream’s about to turn into a nightmare.

Enrolled in a new, arts-focused school after moving to South Korea with her family, Korean American cellist Jenny doesn’t expect to see any familiar faces. Imagine her surprise when she runs into Jaewoo: the guy who ghosted after their one adventurous night in L.A. As it turns out, he’s one of the hottest K-pop idols around, and that means dating — for Jaewoo — is strictly off-limits. Jenny’s always had a good head on her shoulders, but will she risk her future cello career to pursue a forbidden love?

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

Kristen Radtke’s graphic nonfiction book digs into America’s loneliness epidemic, which was already raging before the pandemic put everyone’s lives on hold. In Seek You , Radtke examines our uniquely American ways of dealing with what we lack from others, whether that’s social interaction, affection, or assistance.

The Comfort of Monsters

The Comfort of Monsters centers on Peg, a woman still grieving the loss of her sister, Dee, who disappeared in Milwaukee in 1991 — around the time of Jeffrey Dahmer’s final murder spree and arrest. In a bid to help Peg’s dying mother find peace, the family enlists the aid of a psychic to determine what happened to Dee, and Peg finds herself haunted by the memories of that fateful summer. What does she remember, and — more importantly — what if her memories are wrong?

Isn’t It Bromantic?

The fourth installment in Lyssa Kay Adams’ Bromance Book Club series centers on Vlad: a Nashville-based Russian American hockey player stuck in a loveless marriage to his childhood friend, Elena. He desperately wants his wife to fall for him, and joining a book club based around romance novels seems to be the best way to figure out what women want. But the skeletons in Elena’s closet are about to cross an ocean to find her in America, and Vlad’s love may not be enough to keep her safe.

When they couldn’t figure out how to help her cope with depression and substance abuse, Elizabeth Gilpin’s parents agreed to send their daughter to a boot camp for troubled teens. Abducted and abandoned in Appalachia by people who were supposed to be helping her, Gilpin soon found herself attending a boarding school rife with abuse. In Stolen she recounts the trauma of her teenage years, including the self-harm and addiction issues that continued to plague her peers from the program.

Fresh out of college and desperate to fit in with New Yorkers, Luca, the newest hire at an established magazine, finds himself surrounded by magnetic influences. Set in the early days of the Trump administration, Virtue follows Luca as he bonds with his only Black co-worker, Zara, who presses their bosses to do more to combat the administration’s policies. Luca is also compelled to befriend white creatives Jason and Paula, a married couple living a picture-perfect life in the city. But Luca’s alliances are about to be tested in ways he does not anticipate, and he’s about to learn that hindsight is, unfortunately, 20/20.

From A Separation author Katie Kitamura comes Intimacies . The novel follows an unnamed translator for the International Court as she balances personal relationships — including an affair with a married man, and friendships with both a witness to a crime and the sister of its victim — with what she hears and says at work. She has the power to dictate, quite literally, what some of the world’s most powerful people hear. The question is, what is the best and most moral use of that power?

She Who Became the Sun

A grieving orphan assumes her late brother’s identity and fortune, seeking shelter in a monastery. Disguised as a boy, Zhu is always one misstep away from losing her place among the monks, but her strong will to live sustains her through yet another tragedy: the destruction of her new home. With occupying Mongol forces threatening to destroy everyone and everything she loves, Zhu takes up a warrior’s mantle to mount her own resistance.

The Book of Accidents

Years after they endured horrific traumas there, a married couple returns to their hometown — in a deeply haunted corner of Pennsylvania — with their young son in tow. When the sensitive Oliver becomes the new focus of the town’s dark attentions, his parents recognize the signs. But can they step in before it’s too late for Oliver?

In Rachel Yoder’s sharply observant debut novel, a frustrated stay-at-home mom finds herself shifting into a canine form. No one, not even her husband, believes her when she tells them about the changes to her body and mind, but Yoder’s protagonist soon finds refuge in a strange book — A Field Guide to Magical Women — and an MLM clique that may have something much weirder than a pyramid scheme in the works.

False Witness

Decades ago, Leigh helped her kid sister, Callie, murder the man she babysat for — a man who was raping Callie and selling videotapes of the evidence. The stiff’s son was in the house at the time, but a little boy doped up on NyQuil couldn’t possibly remember what those girls did... could he? Now, that boy’s a man on trial for rape, and he wants Leigh, now a prominent defense attorney, to represent him. Leigh’s sure that Andrew knows what happened that night, and now she’ll have to get Callie out of town, if she wants to keep her carefully constructed life intact.

Fierce Little Thing

Twenty years after her commune days, Saskia begins receiving anonymous threats, ordering her to return to Maine... or else. The blackmailer knows what Saskia and the others did all those years ago, but what will going back to Home mean for any of them? As Saskia and her estranged found-family return to their old haunts, their mettle will be tested one last time .

They’ll Never Catch Us

From the author of They Wish They Were Us comes this new novel about three high-school girls — sisters Ellie and Stella, and a rival newcomer named Mila — locked in a fierce competition to impress cross-country scouts. Drawn separately into Mila’s orbit, Ellie and Stella soon find themselves taking big career risks with their new friend. But Mila’s about to disappear, leaving Ellie and Stella in the worst kind of spotlight.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois

A girl who understands DuBois’ concept of the “Double Consciousness” all too well takes center stage in this tender story. Dividing her time between the north and south, Ailey is haunted by messages from her ancestors. In order to appreciate them, she’ll have to dive into centuries of her family’s history, uncovering painful truths about their past and America’s legacy.

Not a Happy Family

From The Couple Next Door author Shari Lapena comes Not a Happy Family : a tense whodunnit centering on one ultra-wealthy clan. Someone murdered Fred and Sheila Mercer on the night of a family gathering, and each of their three children had a motive to kill. But was a member of the Mercers’ unhappy family responsible, or someone else with an axe to grind?

Hold Fast Through the Fire

K.B. Wagers’ second NeoG novel is out this month, and sci-fi fans won’t be disappointed. The story here centers on the crew of the Zuma’s Ghost ; fresh out of a roster rotation, the little family find themselves in the line of fire, thanks to a secret one of their new crewmates has brought onboard. The Zuma’s Ghost is attracting a lot of unwanted attention, and it might spell the end of the whole crew’s careers .

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2021: Fiction

Featuring sally rooney, kazuo ishiguro, colson whitehead, viet thanh nguyen, jonathan franzen, and more.

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Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections ; Poetry ; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Fiction .

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (FSG)

27 Rave • 26 Positive • 25 Mixed • 2 Pan

Listen to an excerpt from Beautiful World, Where Are You here

“… wise, romantic, and ultimately consoling … Once again, Rooney has drawn a circumscribed world—four people, tightly wound in the small universe of one another’s lives—and once again, this is a love story, although the book’s most compelling romance is the platonic one between its two main female protagonists … it is the epic minutiae of human relations , not the grand structures of economic inequality, that send the blood pumping through the writing. Nonetheless, we know the two can’t be extricated; the latter impinges on the former … In [some] moments, Rooney deprives herself of access to her character’s interiority—the very medium of most fiction concerned with personal relations. Here’s an alternate way of seeing, one derived from a camera lens rather than the traditionally omniscient novelist’s gaze. The effect—implying the novelist herself might not fully know her characters, or at least withhold some of her knowledge—is one of delightful modesty … Maybe Rooney knows that it’s the small dimensions of her fiction—the close, funneled, loving attention she pays her characters—that allow her books to trap within their confines anxieties of huge historical breadth.”

–Hermione Hoby ( 4Columns )

2. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)

28 Rave • 24 Positive • 6 Mixed

“ Klara and the Sun confirms one’s suspicion that the contemporary novel’s truest inheritor of Nabokovian estrangement—not to mention its best and deepest Martian—is Ishiguro … Never Let Me Go wrung a profound parable out of such questions: the embodied suggestion of that novel is that a free, long, human life is, in the end, just an unfree, short, cloned life. Klara and the Sun continues this meditation, powerfully and affectingly. Ishiguro uses his inhuman, all too human narrators to gaze upon the theological heft of our lives, and to call its bluff … Ishiguro keeps his eye on the human connection. Only Ishiguro, I think, would insist on grounding this speculative narrative so deeply in the ordinary … Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro’s recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories.”

–James Wood ( The New Yorker )

3. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)

31 Rave • 13 Positive • 7 Mixed

Read an interview with Patricia Lockwood here

“Now Lockwood has put that strength into her first novel, No One is Talking About This , which leaves no doubt that she still takes her literary vocation seriously. It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight … Lockwood deftly captures a life lived predominantly online … This portrait of a disturbing world where the center will not hold is a tour de force that recalls Joan Didion’s portrait of the dissolute 1960s drug culture of Haight-Ashbury in her seminal essay, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ … Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole movements and eras … It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it … Of course, people will be talking about this meaty book, and about the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a brain is, and most important, what really matters.”

–Heller McAlpin ( NPR )

4. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen (FSG)

32 Rave • 12 Positive • 7 Mixed • 1 Pan

“… a novel that takes the religious beliefs of its characters seriously, without ever forgetting how easily faith can twist itself into absurdity … is light on curmudgeonly social commentary. (Readers who prefer his breakout 2001 novel, The Corrections , will surely welcome this … As with the best of Franzen’s fiction, the characters in Crossroads are held up to the light like complexly cut gems and turned to reveal facet after facet … feels purged of showy writing and stylistic set pieces, but the long flashback recounting this interlude feels bleached with the merciless glare and punishing downpours of winter afternoons on treeless Southern California boulevards. The way Franzen conveys this atmosphere without calling attention to how well he’s conveying it is in tune with the deferential spirit of the novel … The power of this enveloping novel, facilitated by neatly turned plot elements finally resides in how uncannily real, how fully imagined these people feel … Real people are tricky puzzles, volatile blends of self-knowledge and blindness, full of inexhaustible surprises and contradictions. Literary characters seldom achieve a comparably unpredictable intricacy because they are, after all, artifacts made by equally blinkered human beings, and furthermore they are the means to an artistic end. Franzen hasn’t always given his readers characters as persuasively flawed as the Hildebrandts. He hasn’t always tried to. But in Crossroads , his satirical and didactic impulses largely in check, his touch gentled, Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do? I didn’t think so.”

–Laura Miller ( Slate )

5. Matrix by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

30 Rave • 9 Positive • 4 Mixed

Read an interview with Lauren Groff here

“Now that we’ve endured almost two years of quarantine and social distancing, [Groff’s] new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely … We need a trusted guide, someone who can dramatize this remote period while making it somehow relevant to our own lives. Groff is that guide largely because she knows what to leave out. Indeed, it’s breathtaking how little ink she spills on filling in historical context … Though Matrix is radically different from Groff’s masterpiece, Fates and Furies, it is, once again, the story of a woman redefining both the possibilities of her life and the bounds of her realm … Although there are no clunky contemporary allusions in Matrix, it seems clear that Groff is using this ancient story as a way of reflecting on how women might survive and thrive in a culture increasingly violent and irrational.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

6. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

30 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

Read an interview with Colson Whitehead here

“Whitehead’s own mind has famously gone thataway through nine other books that don’t much resemble one another, but this time he’s hit upon a setup that will stick. He has said he may keep Ray going into another book, and it won’t take you long to figure out why … brings Whitehead’s unwavering eloquence to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It’s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels. It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing … The author creates a steady, suspenseful churn of events that almost forces his characters to do what they do. The final choice is theirs, of course … Quaint details aside, this is no period piece … Though it’s a slightly slow starter, Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they’re Chock Full o’ Nuts and characters you won’t forget even if they don’t stick around for more than a few pages.”

–Janet Maslin ( The New York Times )

7. Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

25 Rave • 7 Positive

Read an interview with Elizabeth Strout here

“… yet another stunning achievement … In spare, no-nonsense, conversational language, Lucy addresses the reader as an intimate confidante … all her characters are complicated, neither good nor bad but beautifully explored and so real in their humanness … Strout’s simple declarative sentences contain continents. Who is better at conveying loneliness, the inability to communicate, to say the deep important things? Who better to illustrate the legacies of imperfect upbringings, of inadequate parents? When William explains that what attracted him to Lucy was her sense of joy, the reader can only agree. This brilliant, compelling, tender novel is—quite simply—a joy.”

–Mameve Medwed ( The Boston Globe )

8. The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.  (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

24 Rave • 3 Positive

Read an excerpt from The Prophets here

“Meeting yourself in media is no guarantee that the mirror will be kind or wanted. Instead, it’s often a jagged glass you catch yourself in before it catches you. And even when you know it’s coming, the blood’s still warm and sharp. What of me, of us, was I to witness in The Prophets , the debut novel of Robert Jones Jr., set on an antebellum plantation in Mississippi? … What I found was an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood … One of the blessings of The Prophets is its long memory. Jones uses the voices from the prologue to speak across time, to character and reader alike. These short, lyric-driven chapters struck me as instructive and redemptive attempts at healing historical wounds, tracing a map back to the possibility of our native, queer, warrior Black selves. These voices are Black collective knowledge given shape, the oral tradition speaking in your face and setting you right … What a fiery kindness […] this book. A book I entered hesitantly, cautiously, I exited anew—something in me unloosed, running. May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.”

–Danez Smith ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

19 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan

Listen to an interview with Viet Thang Nguyen here

“The novel is […] a homecoming of a particularly volatile sort, a tale of chickens returning to roost, and of a narrator not yet done with the world … Nguyen […] is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied; he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe. This mission drives the rhetorical intensity that makes his novels so electric. It has nothing to do with plot or theme or character … That voice has made Nguyen a standard-bearer in what seems to be a transformational moment in the history of American literature, a perspectival shift … It’s a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone wherein the narratives of nonwhite ‘immigrants’ were tasked with proving their shared humanity to a white audience … May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard—through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be.”

–Jonathan Dee ( The New Yorker )

10. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco)

22 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read … The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are mainly built around conditions of youth—vexed and tender relationships with parents, awkward romances, nebulous worries about the future. But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age. The stories are great fun to read—brimming over with life and energy and comic insight and deep feeling.”

–Deborah Eisenberg ( New York Review of Books )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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June 21, 2024

• The challenge and humanity of finishing a dead person’s novel .
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In 'Parade,' Rachel Cusk once again flouts traditional narrative

June 20, 2024 • In her latest work, Cusk probes questions about the connections between freedom, gender, domesticity, art, and suffering.

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2 books offer just the right summer mix of humor and nostalgia

June 20, 2024 • Catherine Newman's novel Sandwich centers on a woman vacationing with her young adult children and her elderly parents. Julie Satow’s When Women Ran Fifth Avenue profiles three NYC department stores.

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Books We Love

Here are the nonfiction books npr staffers have loved so far this year.

June 17, 2024 • We asked around the newsroom to find favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and much more.

Summer BWL Nonfiction

NPR staffers pick their favorite fiction reads of 2024

June 17, 2024 • At work: hardworking news journalists. At home: omnivorous fiction readers. We asked our colleagues what they've enjoyed most this year and here are the titles they shared.

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'Horror Movie' questions the motivation behind evil acts

June 12, 2024 • Paul Tremblay's latest tale is dark, surprisingly violent, and incredibly multilayered — a superb addition to his already impressive oeuvre showing he can deliver for fans and also push the envelope.

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Queenie's second life on screen gives her more room to grow

June 11, 2024 • An irresistible new Hulu series follows the quarter-life growing pains of a lonely South Londoner. It's based on a 2019 novel by showrunner Candice Carty-Williams.

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In 'Consent,' an author asks: 'Me too? Did I have the agency to consent?'

June 10, 2024 • Jill Ciment wrote about a relationship she had with a teacher when she was very young – that turned into a marriage – in Half a Life . Now, eight years after his death at 93, she reconsiders their relationship in light of the #MToo movement.

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'Forgotten on Sunday' evokes the heartwarming whimsy of the movie 'Amélie'

June 8, 2024 • Like her other books, French writer Valérie Perrin's third novel to be translated into English, centers on the life-changing magic of friendships across generations.

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June 6, 2024 • Morgan Talty's debut novel is a touching narrative about family in which the past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life, while also entertaining what that life could have been.

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'The Last Murder at the End of the World' is a story of survival and memory

May 24, 2024 • Stuart Turton’s bizarre whodunit also works as a science fiction allegory full of mystery that contemplates the end of the world and what it means to be human.

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'Rednecks' chronicles the largest labor uprising in American history

May 23, 2024 • Taylor Brown's Rednecks is a superb historical drama full of violence and larger-than-life characters that chronicles the events of leading to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

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May 13, 2024 • Messud draws from her grandfather's handwritten memoir as she tells a cosmopolitan, multigenerational story about a family forced to move from Algeria to Europe to South and North America.

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12 Must-Read Books for July

• The new books you should read in July 2021.

Are the temperatures rising where you are, dear reader? If you’re like those of us at the CHIRB without regular access to air conditioning, maybe you’ve begun to seek refuge at afternoon matinees or the local public pool. Unfortunately books can’t offer such instant cooling gratification, but they more than make up for that with their portability. So whether you’re heading for the beach or out on a hike or merely looking for a little distraction on your morning commute (because we’re doing that again!), here are twelve new releases coming out this month that we think would make for perfect companions wherever your summer travels take you.

Variations on the Body By María Ospina; Translated by Heather Cleary Coffee House Press

Short stories fans in search of a new obsession, look no further than María Ospina, whose first collection is now available to English-language readers. Weaving together a complex interconnected portrait of girls and women in Bogotá, Colombia, this crystalline translation from Heather Cleary has an offbeat sensibility reminiscent of Joy Williams, where the potential for inexplicable violence exists alongside the mundane.

The Collection Plate By Kendra Allen Ecco

Already widely hailed for her award-winning nonfiction work, Kendra Allen makes her poetic debut with this collection that melds personal narrative and cultural commentary in exuberant and expansive prose. Like Morgan Parker and Danez Smith, Allen is interested in the intersections of minority personhood in America, offering up her own experiences of girlhood and Blackness with an audacious and invigorating honesty.

Bolla By Pajtim Statovci; Translated by David Hackston Pantheon

Pajtim Statovci’s previous book Crossing was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Translation, and his latest is sure to build on the promise of that well-deserved honor. Steeped in both the mythology and political turmoil of Statovci’s Albanian homeland, Bolla’ s portrait of a man struggling with his queerness in a hostile society is at once deeply personal, astonishingly universal, and impossible to forget.

Strange Beasts of China By Yan Ge; Translated by Jeremy Tiang Melville House

This early-career curiosity from Yan Ge, one of the most exciting writers in contemporary Chinese literature, is finally available to English readers in a sparkling translation from Jeremy Tiang. A detective story with a metaphysical twist, Strange Beasts of China is a hypnotic and haunting page-turner like no other, guaranteed to delight and unsettle readers in equal measure.

The Letters of Shirley Jackson Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman Random House

If Elisabeth Moss’s bewitching performance in Shirley last year whet your appetite for more Jackson action, you’re in luck. Compiled and edited by her eldest son, this intimate collection brings together the author’s personal correspondence with ephemera that spans over thirty years. More than a mere supplement to Jackson’s remarkable career, it stands as a work of art in its own right, with writing as vivid and subversive as her fiction.

Ghost Forest By Pik-Shuen Fung One World

Pitched as perfect for fans of The Farewell , this kaleidoscopic debut from a beguiling new voice in fiction is a uniquely structured meditation on loss. Layering in poetic detail, trenchant humor, and familial history with the subtle touch of a painter, Pik-Shuen Fung’s striking use of white space in her prose gives a tactile weight to her character’s grief, transforming what’s often a private experience into a profoundly communal one.

The Atlas of Disappearing Places By Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros The New Press

At a time when the latest doom-and-gloom news is just a swipe away, it can be difficult to find new ways to make the climate crisis feel vital again. The Atlas of Disappearing Places succeeds by approaching the subject from a place of hope and beauty, combining place-based storytelling and scientific data with exquisitely-rendered maps of twenty vulnerable locations across the globe. The rare coffee table book that’s also a call to arms.

Intimacies By Katie Kitamura Riverhead Books

It’s been four long years since Katie Kitamura’s A Separation took the lit world by storm, and this month sees the highly anticipated release of her follow-up. Written with her singularly seductive and rhythmic prose, Intimacies is a beach read for the Ferrante set, a decidedly adult exploration of political and personal accountability that still manages to be effortlessly sexy. Sure to be part of the cultural conversation long after the summer heat fades.

“Take It Easy”: On the Seriousness of Young Women’s Stories

Nightbitch By Rachel Yoder Doubleday

This one already had tongues wagging last year when Amy Adams optioned it for film while it was still in manuscript form. Now readers will have a chance to see what all the fuss is about, and judging by the instantly iconic cover and ecstatic blurbs, it might well be the debut of the year. A feral fairy tale of maternal dissatisfaction, it’s best to go into this one knowing as little possible, the better to let Yoder work her devious magic on you.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Harper

It takes a certain amount of boldness to make your fictional debut with a 816-page doorstopper, but Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, whose career as a poet and essayist spans twenty-five years, makes the case for such unbridled ambitions with this magisterial epic, tracing one family’s story from the colonial slave trade to our modern era. Fans of the historical sweep of Toni Morrison and Marlon James won’t want to miss it.

A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes By Rodrigo Garcia HarperVia

Rodrigo Garcia is a highly respected director of such film and TV work as Alfred Nobbs , The Sopranos , and In Treatment . He also happens to be the son of Nobel laureate and international icon Gabriel García Márquez, and this tender portrait of the love his parents shared and the formidable legacy his father left behind offers fans the chance to get to know the beloved public figure in an intimate new light.

Always Crashing in the Same Car By Matthew Specktor Tin House Books

Los Angeles casts a long shadow in the literary landscape, from the hardboiled detectives of Raymond Chandler to the decrepit hangers-on that populate Nathanael West’s work to Joan Didion’s Bethlehem slouchers. It can be hard terrain to crack, but Matthew Specktor’s memoir-criticism hybrid surprises with its slippery examination of the city and artists that called it home, unearthing what it means to him in the process.

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The 12 best books of July 2021, according to Amazon's book editors

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• July is an excellent time to read — be it on your commute, at the beach, or spending time at home.
• Amazon's book editors have selected 12 new titles to sink your teeth into this July.
• Want more books? Check out the best new books of the year and the best summer beach reads .

Regardless of what your July plans are, reading will likely fit right in, whether you're bringing along a page-turner for the beach , stocking up on audiobooks for a trip, or diving into a new release in your backyard.

Just as they do every month, Amazon's book editors have developed a list of 12 interesting new reads to dive into this July. Witty beach reads , powerful memoirs , and nail-biting psychological thrillers are all included in Amazon's selections for the best books of July 2021. We outlined each pick below, with captions provided by Amazon's editorial team. 

The 12 best new books of July 2021:

Captions provided by Amazon's book editors. 

'Count the Ways' by Joyce Maynard

"Count the Ways" mines the tiny ways a marriage is built and broken. And while a series of significant events eventually tears this family apart (not a spoiler!), it's the minutiae of everyday life that cracks the foundation of Eleanor and Cam's relationship. A sweeping family epic told over decades, I haven't stopped thinking about "Count the Ways" since I finished it. —Sarah Gelman

'Nightbitch' by Rachel Yoder

"Nightbitch" is a Kafkaesque novel, and the plot is hard to describe: It involves a multilevel marketing scheme, some intense suburban moms, and a book about mythical women — but don't let that deter you. It's filled with wickedly smart observations and hilarious — and heartbreaking — moments. "Nightbitch" made this mother of young children feel more seen or heard than I have in years. —Sarah Gelman

'Razorblade Tears' by S.A. Cosby

As he demonstrated in "Blacktop Wasteland," S. A. Cosby has an uncanny knack for weaving righteous anger, heartfelt reflection, and even the inarticulate space between those two, into compulsively readable prose. And in "Razorblade Tears", he does it again. In it, two fathers — driven by regret, race, and grief — set about avenging their son's deaths, and it makes for a killer thriller. —Vannessa Cronin

'Appleseed' by Matt Bell

While uniquely its own tale, "Appleseed" will remind readers of the best of Neal Stephenson, N. K. Jemison, and Richard Powers as it wraps mythology and climate change around a mesmerizing struggle for domination. There's a lot going on in "Appleseed," and that slow-burn complexity is what will fascinate readers. Every chapter is brilliant, and the gradual reveal of what's really going on makes the span of this book deeply rewarding. —Adrian Liang

'All Our Shimmering Skies' by Trent Dalton

Molly Hook is seven years old, brave and lonely, born into a cursed family and surrounded by bad men. At the brink of World War II in Australia, Molly flees her home and has only a map, the sky, and two unlikely companions (a wannabe actress and a Japanese fighter pilot) to help her fight for her life. Full of adventure, longing, and discovery, Dalton's "All Our Shimmering Skies" shimmers with unforgettable characters that you will root for. —Al Woodworth

'Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood' by Danny Trejo

Raised in an abusive home, Danny Trejo was out on the streets committing robberies to feed his drug habit when he was still a youngster, which led to him serving over a decade in prison, in places like Corcoran and Folsom. Recounting his experiences in a no-holds-barred, honest, grateful, and amusing way, he has written not just a memoir but a redemption story worthy of, well, a Hollywood blockbuster. —Vannessa Cronin

'Falling' by T.J. Newman

Pilot Bill Hoffman is about to take off on a cross-country flight when he receives a call from his wife's phone. Except the person on the other end isn't his wife — it's a man who is holding her, his son, and infant daughter hostage. The terrorist gives Bill a choice: crash the plane he's flying, or his family dies. Imagine the movie "Speed", but on an airplane. "Falling" is what a summer thriller should be — taut, suspenseful, and absolutely unputdownable. —Sarah Gelman

'The Comfort of Monsters' by Willa C. Richards

"The Comfort of Monsters" is an astonishing debut with a heartbreaking double lens: one on a young girl whose disappearance was overshadowed by a monster, the other on the sister she left behind. An agonizing thriller centered on a missing woman, and a shattering portrait of grief, loss, and fractured memory, "The Comfort of Monsters" is unforgettable. —Vannessa Cronin

'Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead' by Emily Austin

Emily Austin's deceptively zany debut finds Gilda — our suicidal, atheist, lesbian anti-hero —taking a receptionist job at a Catholic church, dating a man — sort of — and posing as her deceased predecessor in an ill-advised, but well-meaning effort to not hurt someone's feelings. If this sounds like comedy, "Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead" is far from it. These plot points temper some serious subject matter. So does the novel's obvious heart. —Erin Kodicek

'Intimacies' by Katie Kitamura

In Katie Kitamura's latest, a young woman creates a new life in The Hague where she acts as an interpreter for the International Court. But there are seeds of disquiet: the presence of her new boyfriend's ex-wife lingers, her new friend witnesses a violent act which she becomes enmeshed in, and at work, a controversy ignites when she translates for a former president accused of war crimes. Kitamura is a master of building quiet, psychologically thrilling novels, and "Intimacies" is no exception. —Al Woodworth

'The Wonder Test' by Michelle Richmond

When the son of a grieving FBI agent comes home from high school and describes a crazy-sounding aptitude exam, the Wonder Test, and a local police officer approaches her for assistance investigating a rash of disappeared-then-reappeared teenagers, Lina finds herself dragged back into work mode. Like "Stepford Wives" but with Silicon Valley scions and their delusional dreams for their offspring, "The Wonder Test" blends a mystery with some tart social commentary. —Vannessa Cronin

'This is Your Mind on Plants' by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan extends the fascinating, and provocative, conversation he started in "How to Change Your Mind" with "This Is Your Mind on Plants," an invitation to think differently about drugs — in this case opium, mescaline, and one many of us are all too familiar with: caffeine. While acknowledging the risks and perils of drug abuse, this book warns against the universal demonizing of certain psychoactive plants, given their potential as a tool to improve mental, emotional, and spiritual health.  —Erin Kodicek

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July 27, 2021

July 2021 Book Reviews

This post may include Amazon links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

July has been a big month for many reasons. It’s my first month off school, though technically retirement doesn’t start until September 1, and I really don’t expect to actually “feel” retired for at least another month after that. There’s still a lot going on and maybe that’s the new normal, but I’m hoping not. A week and a half ago, we had buried my mom’s ashes next to her mother’s grave and later that same day had a wonderful party to celebrate her life. It felt good to honor her and to get past that. We still have about 15 tubs of her things to go through, but we’ll save that for a little later. Around all that, I managed to get quite a bit of reading done and am happily sharing six of my favorite books in my July 2021 Book Reviews.

Each of the six books covered in this post I read in print. I’ll share audiobooks in a separate post on Thursday, but for today you’re in for some special books, including one that just might end up being my best of the year!

My Thoughts:  I’m not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve never even been hardcore into music, yet in the last few years it’s become clear that I love stories centered around music. 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐔𝐑𝐒𝐀 𝐌𝐀𝐉𝐎𝐑 by debut author Emma Brodie, my latest love in this little sub-genre that includes 𝘋𝘢𝘪𝘴𝘺 𝘑𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 & 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘹 , 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘭𝘦 , 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘑𝘢𝘯𝘦 , and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘱𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘕𝘦𝘷 , to name just a few.⁣ ⁣ Inspired by a brief affair between Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, 𝘚𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘜𝘳𝘴𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘫𝘰𝘳 follows a young budding rock singer, Jane Quinn and her band The Breakers. As the summer of 1969 is winding down, a fortunate twist of fate launches them from obscurity on a small Massachusetts island to a record deal, and the opening act for a heartthrob folk singer, Jesse Reid. Along the way there’s a little romance, a little friendship, a bit of mystery, a whole lot of male chauvinism, and even more “hell no” from Janie Quinn who refuses to live life on anything but her own terms.⁣ ⁣ From the opening number through the last encore, I was completely engrossed in this book, always rooting for Jane, and the people she loved. If you’re also a fan of books set in the world of music, or are just looking for the perfect beach read for a long holiday weekend, I guarantee you will have found both in 𝘚𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘜𝘳𝘴𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘫𝘰𝘳. Grade: A-

Note:  My thanks to  Knopf for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

My Thoughts:  You know that excited feeling you get after reading only a few pages of a book? That feeling that tells you this one is going to be special? That feeling that you’re reading one of the best books of the year? Well, I got all that last week as I read 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐏𝐄𝐑 𝐏𝐀𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐄 by debut author Miranda Cowley Heller. Being released today, I’m here to tell you that you’re going to want to read this book!⁣ ⁣ 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 follows Elle as she struggles with loving two men. She has an incredible partner in her husband, Peter. She loves him dearly. They share three children and a good life together. But then there’s Jonas, her best friend since childhood, her first love. Had life not taken a cruel turn, they’d have long been together. As the story opens, Elle and Jonas have both crept out of a family gathering and had sex while everyone they love chatted inside. From there, Heller beautifully brings together the single, tense day after their union, and all the years leading up to it. Half the story spans those 24 hours and the rest the 50 years of Elle’s life including her mixed up parents, her bond with her sister, her love of the family summer home on Cape Cod, everything that first brought her and Jonas together, and what had forced them apart.⁣ ⁣ This book truly had it all: a wonderful sense of place, strong character development, and a plot that propelled me to read “just a little more” over and over again. I guarantee 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 WILL BE on my 𝘉𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟷 list, maybe even at the top. Grade: A

Note:  My thanks to  Riverhead Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

My Thoughts:  Growing up, my mom had a real fascination with early female pilots and flying. A little of that rubbed off on me over the years, so I very much looked forward to reading 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓 𝐂𝐈𝐑𝐂𝐋𝐄 by Maggie Shipstead. One half of 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘊𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘦 tells the story of Marian Graves and her twin brother Jamie. When tragedy separated the two infants from their parents, they were raised in rural Montana by an uncle who took a bit of a hands-off approach to child-rearing. After barnstormers came through town, igniting Marian’s imagination, her desire to fly could not be deterred. Through some rather unusual means she learned to fly, first working as a pilot running bootleg booze across the Canadian border, and later as a WWII era aviator delivering planes to the male fighter pilots in Europe. Of course, there was far more than just flying to Marian’s story, and her brother’s life offered a great counterpoint to hers, enriching this tale. ⁣ ⁣ Had I only read this historical fiction side of 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘊𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘦, I’d have given it a solid A-. Unfortunately, there was also a present day timeline that just didn’t do much for me. It told the story of Hadley Baxter, a down on her luck Hollywood actress cast to play Marian in a film adaptation of her life. No matter how far I got, I just never cared about Hadley’s side of the book. So, for her timeline, I’d give it only C-.⁣ ⁣ Shipstead worked valiantly to connect the two stories, but those connections often felt forced to me. I’d have enjoyed the book much, much more had she stuck to Marian and Jamie, diving even deeper into both their adult lives. Overall, I guess that lands me somewhere in the middle.  Grade: B-

Note:  My thanks to  Knopf for a beautiful finished copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

My Thoughts:   𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐔𝐏 𝗪𝐈𝐅𝐄 by Tahmima Anam tells the story of a couple seemingly perfect for each other. They first meet in high school, and when they reconnect 10 years later, they suddenly seem perfect together, and quickly marry. Cyrus is an idea man, already creating personalized, meaningful weddings, funerals and other ceremonies for people he knows and those who’ve heard about his special talent. Asha, is the tech wiz who can write code for anything. She and their best friend, Jules, convince Cyrus to let them create an app to replace traditional religious rituals with things more special and significant for individuals, also creating new communities along the way. Cyrus is reluctant to have his ideas used in such a way, that is, until their app takes off, becoming a worldwide social media sensation.⁣ ⁣ I think 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘱 𝘞𝘪𝘧𝘦 was a great little story, especially for people interested in or familiar with the tech and startup worlds. I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself one of those people, so those aspects of the story I didn’t enjoy as much as others might. What I did enjoy was the relationships between the three main characters and how those evolved and changed over their time struggling to create something brand new and then even more so when they stumbled into success. The most fully developed character was Asha, who I both loved and was frustrated by. I also appreciated that Anam touched on so many hot-button topics: race, the tech industry and its treatment of women, venture capitalism, artificial  intelligence, ego, and even the global pandemic. I’d love to hear what  those working  in the tech industry think of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘱 𝘞𝘪𝘧𝘦. For me it was a well-written, entertaining book, but probably won’t be one that stays with me for long. Grade: B-

Note:  My thanks to  Scribner Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

My Thoughts:  𝗪𝐄 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐒 by Tracey Lange features the type of close, loving, large family that we’d all like to be a part of. That family also happens to have some dark hidden secrets that tip them over to the dysfunctional side, just like many of our own families. Sunday Brennan, the only sister in the mix, had left their small New York neighborhood five years earlier for reasons no one seemed to understand. After her life in California crumbles, big brother Denny brings her home, and the many secrets held by this Irish Catholic family slowly come to light.⁣ ⁣ Even though they argued and disagreed on many things, what made the Brennans so special was that in the end, the four siblings, plus a fifth friend that was like a brother, ALWAYS had each others’ backs. Wouldn’t we all like to be part of a family like that? ⁣ ⁣ 𝘞𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘴 was a very well-written family story, but not one that struck me as particularly new or different. I also thought the ending was just a little neat and tidy. Despite those minor flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Brennans, flying quickly through their story. It truly would be a wonderful book to pack in your beach bag or read on vacation this summer. Grade: B

Note:  My thanks to  Celadon Books for a beautiful finished copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

My Thoughts: ROCK THE BOAT by Beck Dorey-Stein was a book I’d long looked forward to because I so loved her 2018 memoir, F rom the Corner of the Oval . I was excited to see what she’d do with fiction. The story revolves around Kate, dumped by her fiance as the book begins. She returns home to the small town of Sea Point, NJ where she grew up. There she reconnects with Ziggy, her neighbor and childhood friend. Ziggy is reeling from the recent death of his father, a man everyone adored. Into this mix is Miles, longtime friend to Ziggy and nemesis to Kate. He’s come back to town to prove to his mom that he’s capable of taking over the beach resort she owns.

Now this sort of combination is not really unusual and not many of the events in it were particularly surprising, but I still liked it! The beginning was a little slow and for a short time I even considered DNFing it, but am so glad I didn’t Rock the Boat is a perfect example of a book that gets better and better and pays off in the end. The more I read, the more attached I became to the characters, to the point where I even shed a couple of tears at the end. My advice? Give it about 100 pages and then, if you’re like me, you’ll be all in! Grade: B

Note:  My thanks to  The Dial Press for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

That’s it for my July 2021 book reviews. What books have you loved recently?

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Reader Interactions

July 27, 2021 at 4:16 am

I loved this post and happy that I put The Paper Palace, We are the Brennans on my reading list. Now Songs in Ursa Major also interest me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

August 4, 2021 at 9:32 am

I hope you love The Paper Palace as much as I did.

July 27, 2021 at 6:20 am

I had given up on Reese’s book choices, but after your review, I added The Paper Palace to my TBR. I loved Ursa Major too!

August 4, 2021 at 9:33 am

It’s funny, I don’t usually go for Reese’s picks either, but I just loved The Paper Palace. It will definitely be on my Best Books of 2021 list.

July 27, 2021 at 10:18 am

I’m most looking forward to reading The Paper Palace and Songs in Ursa Major. Happy Retirement, Susie. I have a feeling you will be wondering how you ever had time to work a full-time job. 🙂

August 4, 2021 at 9:35 am

You’re right! I already feel like there is NO WAY I could go back to squeezing in work. It’s been a super busy summer and the fall is looking the same.

July 31, 2021 at 3:21 am

You’ve had a tough year with losing your Mom … but it sounds like you gave her a wonderful memorial service & celebration, and I know you’ll be happy in retirement. Very glad to have these reviews. I look forward to Paper Palace and Ursa Major. I will read The Great Circle too for the early pilots part. thx for the word on these.

August 4, 2021 at 9:36 am

Thanks, Susan. You know how it is, that great big circle of life. I’m really feeling it these days!

August 8, 2021 at 8:16 am

We didn’t have much consensus in July. I didn’t love The Paper Palace to the degree everyone else did and I thought The Startup Wife was fresh- one of my favorite books of summer.

I completely agree about Brennans and here’s why–We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. Even the title is similar! Same theme- large Irish family, secret, etc. I was really surprised. It was all too familiar.

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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

• Richard Brody on the best movies .
• Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
• Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
• Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
• Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
• Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances .
• Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes .
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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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This week we take our cue from the title of Stephen King’s new story collection, “You Like It Darker,” with books about a honeymoon gone wrong, an artist’s midlife crisis and the appeal of beautiful monsters (in a wild coming-of-age graphic novel) joining King’s own collection on our list of recommendations.

It’s not all darkness, though: We also recommend a biography of the groundbreaking Chinese cooking star Fu Pei-mei, a prismatic portrait of five Black ballerinas from the 1960s and ’70s, and Cristina Henriquez’s historical novel set during the construction of the Panama Canal. Happy reading.— Gregory Cowles

CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food Michelle T. King

In 1971, this newspaper called Fu Pei-mei “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as King’s biography notes, it was really the other way around: The legendary Fu, who taught generations to cook dishes from all over China, preceded Child on TV by several years. King interviews women who learned from Fu’s cookbooks and show, making the case that she was a cultural force.

“Studious and wide-ranging. … [Uses] Fu as a jumping-off point to discuss the complicated history of Taiwan, feminism in Taiwanese society, the complexities of Chinese identity in the wake of the Chinese Civil War, Indigenous Taiwanese food and culture and much more.”

From Thessaly La Force’s review

Norton | $29.99

THE SWANS OF HARLEM: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History Karen Valby

For those who believe that the narrative of Black prima ballerinas begins and ends with Misty Copeland, Valby’s rich, prismatic portrait of the five dancers who formed the core of the Dance Theater of Harlem’s inaugural 1969 class offers a joyful and spirited corrective.

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