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A Year in Reading: A Reviewer’s Favorites from 2019
I read some exceptionally fine books this year, among them memoirs and biographies, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect...
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Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
The English author Andrew Miller is not especially well known here despite his winning a number of literary awards in Europe, including the Costa Award for Book of the Year and the Irish IMPAC. Four...
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My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You
My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You is Aleksandar Hemon’s second—or, more accurately, second and third—foray into memoir. It consists of two parts bound together head to tail, the...
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The Wall
John Lanchester’s two best-known novels had, for their day, an in-the-news feel: The Debt to Pleasure (1996) was about a foodie—a murderous one, as it happens—while Capital (2012) followed a large...
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Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban
Like most people, I had never heard of the American expatriate writer, Rachel Ingalls, but unlike most people, I was fortunate enough to have a copy of her 1983 novel, Binstead’s Safari, show up at...
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Milkman
Anna Burns’s Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old woman and is set in an unnamed neighborhood in an unnamed city in the 1970s. To someone who has no...
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5 Favorite Novels of 2018: A Critic’s Choices
I have a big folder of book lists: best, funniest, scariest, bestselling, culturally required, and sadly neglected, as well as lists of books and authors I want to investigate. Recently I have been...
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The Personality Brokers
Perhaps the two most noteworthy features of the immensely popular and profitable Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are that it is no more scientifically valid a tool for assessing individual proclivities...
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A Life of My Own
Claire Tomalin brings the same scrutiny and forensic intelligence to her own beginnings in A Life of My Own as she brought to the more shadowy aspects of the lives she investigated in her celebrated...
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The Last Cruise
Kate Christensen’s last two books, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, were memoirs, and, as you can easily guess, both had food at their hearts. Now comes The Last Cruise, the author’s...
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Mr Flood’s Last Resort
It has been a long time since I’ve read a book as peculiar as Jess Kidd’s Mr. Flood’s Last Resort—and I say that with a some consternation. The Mr. Flood of the title is an ancient, unwashed,...
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Convenience Store Woman
You could say that Keiko Furukura, the central character and first-person narrator of Sayaka Murata’s wonderfully strange Convenience Store Woman, suffers from some degree of Asberger’s syndrome,...
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The Sparsholt Affair
The Sparsholt Affair is Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, and like his previous two — the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty and, subsequently, The Stranger’s Child — the story travels through...
View ArticleTime Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
No one has captured Dublin of the 1950s, its griminess and narrowness, so well as John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. I say this as a person who is only a couple of years younger than he and who,...
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Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, prizewinning biographer and cultural historian, here turns her talents to fiction with a first novel, Peculiar Ground. The story begins in 1663 as the Royalist earl of Woldingham...
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A Critic’s Picks: Five Best Novels of 2017
As a source of harmless outrage, lists of the best books of the year can scarcely be bettered. In the first place, it is obvious that the choices are necessarily skewed toward what the choosers have...
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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose “Little House” books are sweet, yearning stories of a bygone childhood on a vanished American frontier. They are also...
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Reservoir 13
Set in our own day in a village in England’s Peak District, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 opens with searchers assembling to look for thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw, last seen out on a walk in the...
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The Ninth Hour
Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, begins in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn with a thirty-two-year old man named Jim preparing to take his own life. He has sent his pregnant wife,...
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Birdcage Walk
We are often warned against allowing considerations of an author’s personal circumstances to influence our view of his or her work, but it is impossible to read Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk without...
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