Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Will Slater is not the man you think he is. He’s a cheat and a liar. Don’t marry him“, reads a foreboding note received by Jules Keegan, just a couple of weeks before her wedding. Jules is a highly organized and driven businesswoman, the founder and head of The… Continue reading The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Category: Fiction
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
Purchase a copy for yourself here! There is perhaps no subset of literature that feels more emblematic of the white male literary canon than the classic American western novel. In her Booker Prize nominated debut, How Much of These Hills is Gold, C Pam Zhang brings the western novel into a new century. The novel… Continue reading How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Jenny Offill’s second novel, Department of Speculation, reads more like a diary than a novel. Composed of terse paragraphs and eccentric observations woven together to form a coherent narrative, this novel follows a writer/teacher who falls in love and get married in her twenties. After a painful miscarriage, she… Continue reading Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry … It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life”,… Continue reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry
Purchase a copy for yourself here! On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a string of nine unidentified flying objects in the Mount Rainier area, a story that would spark national news coverage and mark the first modern UFO sighting post-WWII. The story catalyzed an international obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrial life,… Continue reading Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry
Lot by Bryan Washington
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete”, writes Bryan Washington in his award-winning story collection, Lot, an exploration of one of America’s most fascinating metropolises and the characters that inhabit it. Around half of the stories in the collection are told from the perspective of Nicolás,… Continue reading Lot by Bryan Washington
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Purchase a copy for yourself here! With his recent debut, Real Life, Brandon Taylor has reinvigorated the concept of the campus novel. The novel’s protagonist is Wallace, a grad student biochemistry researcher at a midwestern university, one which has not admitted a black student into its lab in over three decades. Wallace, a gay black… Continue reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In her 2003 memoir, Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton recalls the moment that Bill Clinton proposed marriage to her: “I knew that when I decided to marry, I wanted it to be for life. … I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I’d be… Continue reading Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Britt Bennett’s recent novel, The Vanishing Half, deals in multiplicative identities. The Vanishing Half is Bennett’s follow up to her debut novel, The Mothers (Read my review here), which similarly dwells on how explosive secrets can tear families and communities asunder. The novel begins with sixteen-year old twins, Desiree… Continue reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Purchase a copy for yourself here! A Burning begins not only with a burning—a train car lit on fire in a terrorist attack that kills 100 patrons—but with a Facebook post. Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in the Kolabagan slum in Bangladesh, witnessed the terrorist attack and expresses her outrage on social media, posting… Continue reading A Burning by Megha Majumdar