Brown’s sensuous and erudite debut follows a single day in the life of an Oxford student as she brainstorms an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel has yet to decide on her theme, and has risen early to “simply sit” with the text­—as a tutor once advised her to do when faced with an assignment. Despite her desire to focus, she can’t. Instead, she drinks tea, walks in the park, does yoga, and fantasizes about sex. Amid Annabel’s reveries, Brown inserts florid depictions of mundane matters (Annabel “sits on the toilet to piss. Empties herself into calmness”). Low-stakes tension simmers over whether Annabel will allow her older boyfriend to visit her on campus, while news of a friend’s hospitalization for anorexia provokes guilty feelings. When Annabel does turn her mind to the sonnets, Brown’s prose soars (“Could an essay smile with all the smiles she has for the Sonnets: the sad smile of sympathy, the wry smile sharing in his self-mockery... the soft sunlit smile when he offers an image of great beauty”). Lovers of the written word will be impressed. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, delivers a poignant ode to artistic inspiration. Patrik, whom Tawada obliquely refers to as “the patient,” is a literary researcher in Berlin whose love of art and objects often precludes his love for other people (“Even as a child, he called his toy tractor ‘my colleague’ and addressed his teddy bear as ‘Professor’ ”). After the Covid-19 lockdown lifts, Patrik receives an invitation to speak at a conference on his hero, the poet Paul Celan, but he feels too overwhelmed to attend. At a café, he meets a mysterious man named Leo-Eric Fu, who knows his work and encourages him to reconsider. The men’s lively conversations give the novel its charge as they discuss their shared love of Celan’s ever-surprising word choices and experience the ease and thrill of a new connection, which opens Patrik’s world in surprising ways (“A new friendship is my new form of long-distance travel. The airline is called Leo-Eric Fu and can fly much faster than any Lufthansa stork or the Indonesian divinity Garuda”). Readers will fall in love with this inventive and deeply human story. (July)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Jansma (Why We Came to the City) seamlessly interweaves past and present in this immersive dual narrative of a girl in German-occupied Holland during WWII and her American grandson. Mieke Geborn is eight when the Nazis invade her hometown in 1940. After the Jews are deported, and as the German war effort lags, the Nazis enlist local men to work for them. With Mieke’s help, her father conceals himself along with several others in the attic of their apartment building. Conditions worsen for Mieke and the cloistered men during the so-called Hunger Winter of 1944–1945, when harsh restrictions leave the townspeople desperate for food. In a parallel story line set in 2014, Mieke is an 80-year-old widow in New Jersey, where she’s lived for the past 50 years. After a fall in her house, her grandson Will takes leave from his internist job and his troubled marriage to care for her. Jansma rewards readers’ patience as Mieke discloses the extent of the Hunger Winter’s impact on their family and Will comes clean about his marital problems. It’s a satisfying blend of wartime and family drama. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pelecanos (The Man Who Came Uptown) veers from crime fiction with a tender if scattershot story of a dog who shuffles from owner to owner in Washington, D.C. Buster, who narrates, fondly remembers his first home in the apartment of a single mother named Darcia, where he lived with his siblings and mom and befriended Darcia’s son. When pest exterminator Ed Grange visits the apartment, he convinces Darcia to let him take Buster off her hands. At home, Ed verbally abuses his wife and son and beats Buster with a broom handle. When animal control comes to take Buster, he makes a break for it and winds up living with an older man named Joe and his dog Lucy. Then Lucy dies, and Joe passes Buster on to his nephew Top, a weed dealer who dotes on Buster. The story builds to a heart-rending crisis point after Top lands in hot water with his criminal associates. The tone is a bit inconsistent, swerving from sentimental survival story to coarse street fiction (“You had your share of bitches,” Top tells Buster after his neutering). Still, this curiosity has its moments. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Picoult (Wish You Were Here) offers a stimulating if muddled parallel narrative of two women writers, each of whose work is credited to a man. In 1582, poet Emilia Bassano becomes consort to Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain. At the time, women were forbidden to have anything to do with the theater, but when Emilia crosses paths with William Shakespeare, he’s impressed with her work and agrees to pay for the sonnets and plays she’s secretly written if he can take credit for them. Thus begins a working relationship that spans decades. In the present day, Emilia’s descendant Melina Green writes a play about Emilia and Shakespeare, but fears she won’t be able to get it produced after being told that people only relate to plays by men. Unbeknownst to Melina, her roommate, Andre, submits the play to a fringe festival under the pseudonym Mel Green, leading the artistic director to assume the writer is a man. After the play is accepted, Andre poses as Mel during the production, with Melina pretending to be his assistant. The Elizabethan sections, which follow Emilia through an unhappy marriage as the work she wrote for Shakespeare receives acclaim, are the strongest. In comparison, Picoult’s depictions of racism and sexism in the contemporary theater world are a bit simplistic. It’s a mixed bag. Agent: Laura Gross, Laura Gross Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Campbell’s dreary first novel (after the collection Cat Brushing) starts off with a corker of an ethical dilemma before drifting into the meandering musings of a cohort of Oxford-based academics. Retired Old Testament professor Malcolm Miller reflects on a letter his dying sister gave him 50 years earlier, which she asked him to pass on to Joe Bradshaw, the man she believed was the father of her daughter, Agnes, who was four at the time. For whatever reason, Malcolm didn’t do so. In the decades since, Joe became a psychoanalyst, and through a remarkable coincidence, took on Agnes as a patient when her marriage was falling apart and developed romantic feelings for her. Now, Agnes’s daughter is getting married, and Malcolm and Joe are going to be at the wedding, prompting Malcolm to wonder whether now is the time to share the letter’s contents. The novel shifts between the points of view of Malcolm, Joe, and Agnes, but each of their voices sound confusingly similar, and they’re all disposed to statements like “Somewhere is the unalterable, irradicable truth and I need not fear it.” Only the most patient readers will want to enter the minds of these circular thinkers. Agent: Eleanor Birne, PEW Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Hamya’s provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family’s fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia’s father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it’s about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia’s point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father’s misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where his staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia’s father overhears a fellow audience member call the play “social justice for the upper middle class,” which prompts him to come to Sophia’s defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia’s father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of “companionship and coddling.” None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman’s life in Hjorth’s breathtaking latest (after Is Mother Dead). Ida Heier, a 30-year-old editor and writer, is married with young children when she sleeps with Arnold Bush, a 39-year-old married professor and Brecht translator. To Ida’s surprise, their subsequent exchange of letters awakens strong feelings: “She has never felt like this before, she is in love.” A tumultuous romance begins, with Ida imploring a reluctant Arnold to be with her. Arnold eventually leaves his wife, and Ida divorces her husband. However, the two aren’t faithful to each other, and their only happy times occur during weekends away or in bed together. The volatile relationship cycles for years between bouts of “howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds.” Hjorth’s narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida’s feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn’t “worth the sacrifice.” Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she’s acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist’s self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It’s an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tang’s moving and offbeat debut revolves around a New York City gig worker who offers his services on an app called Rental Stranger. The 20-something narrator, known only as Stranger, takes on such roles as mourner at a funeral, best man at a wedding, and wingman for a pickup artist. Each time out, he strives to make his clients happy enough to give him a five-star review, and his peculiar backstory explains his diligence. After his mother’s death 10 years earlier, he found purpose by visiting his nine-year-old neighbor, Lily, once a week and pretending to be her father (the real father doesn’t know Lily exists). Stranger, who is still pretending to be Lily’s dad, divulges this secret to a woman who hires him to help develop her novel in progress by playing one of the characters and peppers him with questions about his work. Tang makes hay with themes of love, attachment, and the desire to be seen, as when the narrator reflects on playing hide and seek as a boy: “The thrill of being undetected was paltry compared to the relief of being found.” The result is a memorable character study of a man hiding from himself. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Launching a new series based on an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet, Dodd (Point Last Seen) spins an entracing story of an ill-fated wedding engagement. It’s narrated by the star-crossed couple’s oldest daughter, Rosie, who tells of how her parents survived their suicide attempt 20 years earlier. After Romeo and Juliet insist Rosie wed the “cruel and lustful” Duke Leir Stephano, whose third wife has just died under mysterious circumstances, she’s smitten by the better-looking Lysander at her betrothal ball. During the party, Stephano is found stabbed to death, and some guests accuse Rosie of his murder. Prince Escalus, who attempted to resolve the feud in the original play, attests to Rosie’s innocence, and as the body count rises, Rosie determines to unmask the killer while holding out hope for romance with Lysander. Rosie is an amiable and witty narrator (“Brace yourself for a recap, and don’t worry, it’s interesting in a My God, are you kidding me? sort of way”) and Dodd’s roller-coaster plot careens all the way to the cliffhanger ending. It’s a strong start. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink