Journalist Cherin debuts with the tender story of a radio-sponsored treasure hunt in Southern California. In 1981, a floundering pop radio station hatches a weeklong campaign to drum up ratings by burying $50,000 and offering one clue per day about the treasure’s whereabouts. Among the competitors are Sally Lang, a single mother and bank teller, who hopes to replace the money she’s been stealing at work to make ends meet; aging motorcycle racer Danny Baker, who eyes the cash as his path toward retirement; and Holocaust survivor and synagogue janitor Augie Kloptman, who faces unemployment and eviction when his temple announces plans to move. Augie later teams up with Jason Schneidman, a 13-year-old congregant adrift in the wake of his parents’ divorce, who plans to use his share of the money to impress girls. As Sally worries her theft will be discovered in an upcoming audit, Danny dreams of opening a motorcycle shop, and Jason warms to the lonely Augie, Cherin strikes a balance between frothy entertainment and thoughtful examination of his character’s fears, desires, and need for connection. Readers will be rooting for everyone to win in this impressive tale. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Attenberg (The Middlesteins) chronicles the lives of the dysfunctional Cohen family over four decades in her nuanced latest. The opening scene, set in 1971 Chicago during a game of Scrabble, delineates their fraught dynamics. Frieda, the mother, sneaks away to take shots of Slivovitz, then berates her 16-year-old daughter, Nancy, for playing a three-letter word (“That’s all you have to show me”?). Her husband, Rudy, a gay Holocaust survivor and loving father to Nancy and their brainiac younger daughter, Shelly, wonders if the couple made the right decision to be together. After Rudy dies the next year from heart failure, Frieda grows more critical of the girls, prompting Nancy a few years later to move in with her college boyfriend, Robby, with whom she’s unexpectedly pregnant, and Shelly to accept a scholarship to UC Berkeley. In the late 1980s and ’90s, Nancy and Robby’s daughter, Jess, becomes enamored with Shelly, an innovator in cell phone technology, while Frieda lives in Florida and works in elder care. Attenberg brings the disparate threads together as Frieda falls ill in the 2000s and the sisters must decide whether they’ll care for her. There isn’t much of a plot, but the novel is carried along by deliciously realistic descriptions of the Cohens’ complex relationships. It’s an admirable portait of a distinctly unhappy family. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown Ltd. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Haig’s magnificent latest (after The Midnight Library), a retired math teacher unexpectedly inherits property in Ibiza and escapes her static life in Lincolnshire, England. Upon hearing the news, widowed Grace Winters takes up residence in the ramshackle house left to her by her old friend Christina. In a note, Christina suggests Grace find a man called Alberto to show her the miraculous seagrass meadow beneath the Mediterranean. Grace, who doesn’t know how Christina died, determines to follow her late friend’s advice but is unable to appreciate the island’s scenery due to her guilt over her 11-year-old son’s death in a bicycle accident 30 years earlier. Her mood changes, though, when Alberto takes her scuba diving and she’s touched underwater by a shape-shifting blue light, which Alberto calls La Presencia and claims is a portal to another planet. Her encounter with the light also gives her mind-reading and telekinetic powers, which she first tries out in quotidian situations, often to humorous effect, such as when she makes an obnoxious restaurant patron stab himself with a fork. Soon, though, she applies her newfound abilities to a higher purpose, joining a battle to save the island from an unscrupulous developer. Haig’s spellbinding descriptions of the portal and its powers lend themselves to the convincing conceit that Grace, thanks to her encounter with La Presencia, is not only able to change her life but to make a difference in her new community. In Haig’s sure hands, magic comes to breathtaking life. Agent: Clare Conville, C&W Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Poet Gråbøl makes her English-language debut with this striking chronicle of a young woman’s treatment for severe depression. The unnamed narrator arrived in a Copenhagen psychiatric care center some years ago following a course of electroconvulsive therapy, and lives on a floor designated for temporary residents. They’re permitted to come and go as they please, and they cope with their conditions by cooking together, taking up boxing, watching movies, and forming a cover band. The novel is composed of short, journal-like entries that range from slice-of-life vignettes about other residents, like the angry Waheed, who regularly blasts 50 Cent in his room, to elliptical impressions of the narrator’s mental state (“I sometimes wake up and realize that what’s going to happen has no name”). Most evocative are Gråbøl’s descriptions of ECT, which the narrator reflects on with ambivalence (“There was something both disturbing and fantastic about being wiped clean like that”). The narrator is also unsure about her future as she deals with the difficult reality of the present, a state of mind she expresses poignantly (“Those of us with no place to live and no place to die end up in this trial home, this impermanent halfway house”). Readers of Janet Frame ought to take note. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wood’s charming latest (after The President’s Wife) highlights the contributions Katharine Wright (1874–1929) made to her brothers’ innovations in aviation. Katharine, brazen and spunky, supports her older siblings Orville and Wilbur’s fascination with manned flying machines, suggesting they invent planes in the back of their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. After their mother dies, she keeps house for the family, and though her brothers never finish high school, she graduates from Oberlin and becomes a teacher. She puts her prospects for marriage on hold to help her brothers design the aircraft by studying bird anatomy and recommending fabric for the wings, and she helps write a letter to the Smithsonian asking for information about flying machines. She even identifies Kitty Hawk as the perfect spot to test their plane. Over the years, she makes more sacrifices, as when she gives up her teaching job to nurse Orville after a devastating accident. Told from the points of view of Orville, Wilbur, and Katharine, the lengthy story breezes by with heart and verve. Well-researched depictions of historical events and immersive period details round out this stirring tribute to an unsung trailblazer. It’s a gripping tale of perseverance. Agent: Lucy Cleland, Kneerim & Williams. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bickers debuts with a fresh tale of two lonely hearts connected by their love of reading. Thirty-year-old Erin Connolly accidentally donates a heavily annotated copy of her favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, to a community library hutch near her London flat. Making matters worse, the book held a treasured postcard from her childhood best friend, Bonnie, who died of cancer three years earlier. Browsing the hutch a few days after dropping off the novel, Erin is surprised to find it returned, with more notes, prompting her to become pen pals with her “Mystery Man” via marginalia in other books. A parallel narrative follows James, the author of the notes, who’s desperate to keep Erin writing and worried she’ll stop if she finds out who he is—an old friend from their school days who betrayed her to get his bullies off his case. The crisis point occurs when Erin returns home for the anniversary of Bonnie’s death and has a run-in with James. The will-they-or-won’t-they plot hews closely to a rom-com structure, and the setup is a bit heavy-handed, but Bickers charms in her depiction of how James and Erin bond through literature, and how literature changes their lives. This will have bookworms swooning. Agent: Jemima Forrester, David Higham Assoc. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Booker Prize winner Doyle’s third Paula Spencer novel (after 1996’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors and 2006’s Paula Spencer) is an emotionally raw mother-daughter drama. Paula, a widow in her mid-60s, who’s in recovery for alcoholism, returns home from her Covid-19 vaccine appointment in May 2021 to find her 40-something daughter Nicola waiting for her. Nicola, who cared for Paula during earlier family crises and has continued to supplement her mom’s finances, seems content to be mothered for a change. For reasons that don’t come out until later, she’s left her husband and children behind. Over the next 18 months, as Paula deals with a nasty bout of the virus and worries about money, Doyle eventually works up to revealing why Nicola came to stay with her. If that disclosure is somewhat anticlimactic, it’s ultimately less important than Paula’s reaction to Nicola’s news, which comes to shape her understanding not only of their fraught relationship but also of how her own past traumas impacted Nicola. Despite these revelatory conversations, Nicola remains something of a cipher; Paula, on the other hand, is a richly complex character who continues to redefine herself while also contending with her regrets and past failures. Doyle’s compassionate chronicle of recovery and reconciliation is worth seeking out. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this inspired outing, Bayard (Jackie & Me) explores the effects of Oscar Wilde’s gay affair and 1895–1897 imprisonment on his family. The story begins in 1892 Norfolk, England, a period Bayard dubs “the before times,” where the Wildes have rented a house for the summer. Oscar’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, arrives for an extended stay. Oscar’s wife, Constance, is initially oblivious to the true nature of his and Bosie’s friendship. Throughout her own relationship with Oscar, she has grown accustomed to him being the focus of others’ attention, but has remained convinced he only has eyes for her. That illusion evaporates as the two men spend increasing amounts of time together and she learns Oscar is giving Bosie money. After Bosie’s father puts a stop to the affair by accusing Oscar of being a “sodomite,” leading to his conviction for gross indecency, Constance attempts a fresh start in Italy. Later sections follow the couple’s elder son, Cyril, who fights in the trenches during WWI; and his brother, Vyvyan, who has an awkward reunion with Bosie in 1925. In a moving conclusion, Constance speculates on how she might have protected Oscar from the authorities back in 1892. Bayard’s superior gifts at evoking the past are on full display, and he makes it easy for readers to sympathize with his characters. Historical fiction fans will love this poignant tale. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tulathimutte (Private Citizens) offers a shrewd novel in stories populated by characters longing for IRL connections. In “The Feminist,” a man feels “oppressed” by the patriarchy on account of his “narrow-shouldered” physique. After failing to woo women with his cringey attempts at being an ally, he moderates an incel message board. In “Ahegao,” a shy Thai American man named Kant comes out as gay and lucks into dating the “well-adjusted” Julian. Things get off to a good start, but Kant worries Julian will be turned off by his sadistic sexual preferences. And in “Pics,” Alison is derailed by her friend Nick’s rejection of her after their recent hookup and exhibits increasingly antisocial behavior, such as adopting a violent raven. The lengthy “Main Character,” which includes revelations about all the preceding stories, features Kant’s younger sibling Bee, a nonbinary tech worker who shares their life story in an internet post, beginning with how they sold their gender in grade school for $40 to a boy who wanted to get into the girls’ locker room (“In this way, before I learned gender was fluid, I’d learned it was liquid”). The prose is consistently sharp and funny as Tulathimutte cuts to the truth of his characters’ dilemmas. It’s a first-rate exploration of yearning and solitude. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Powers (The Overstory) delivers an epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography in this dazzling if somewhat disjointed novel set largely on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where a mysterious American consortium plans to launch floating cities into the ocean. The story centers on three characters: Rafi Young, a former literature student from an abusive home in Chicago who has moved to Makatea with his wife; Rafi’s onetime friend Todd Keane, the billionaire founder of a social media company and AI platform whose connection to the seasteading project is revealed later; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a Canadian marine biologist who has come to Makatea just as the island’s residents must vote on whether to let the project proceed. For some Makateans, the seasteading initiative raises hopes of economic renewal; for others, it triggers fears of environmental destruction and a return to colonialist oppression. Powers’s characters can be implausibly cerebral and pure of heart, and his narrative threads never fully cohere, but the elegance of his prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled natural world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America’s foremost novelists. “The ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement,” Powers writes of Evelyne, “into a place far larger than anything human.” Readers will be awed. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink