BookBrowse Editorial Review
Twist: A Novel
by Colum McCann
(5/7/2025)
With his always elegant prose, Colum McCann is one of those rare writers who successfully arcs back and forth between the wide-angle perspective of global and societal concerns and its opposite, the sharply focused close-up on individuals and their specific and complicated human lives. His novels expand and contract in an almost breath-like manner. Like his free-diving characters, McCann is willing to risk plunging into the depths in the hope of better articulating what exists in the dimmer reac
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Audition: A Novel
by Katie Kitamura
(4/9/2025)
In her newest novel, Audition, Kitamura commits yet another narrative sleight of hand, creating a scaffolding that results in a story more experimental and daring than in her previous books, and perhaps—certainly for those who can accept the challenges of a fluctuating narrative—even more satisfying to read. The reader must put aside all expectation and follow Kitamura through an increasingly astounding narrative landscape. Eventually, a coda provides a possible breadcrumb f
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler
(2/26/2025)
Robert Seethaler's novel The Café with No Name, published by Europa in translation by Katy Derbyshire from the original German, is set in Vienna twenty-one years after the war has ended, though the specter of war still blows across a melancholy cityscape.
Seethaler is a thoughtful chronicler of the small world within a world, the simple, the humble, and the modest. The relationships between his characters provide pockets of warmth in an indifferent city, as lonely
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Hideous Kinky: A Novel
by Esther Freud
(1/29/2025)
The young narrator is not a stand-in for an adult looking back at her youth, but an authentic child, whom Freud conveys beautifully as a full-fledged, if small, person, and many-faceted as most children are—innocent, clever, observant, capricious—and generally willing to move through new experiences as long as her emotionally anchored family is nearby. Morocco has historically been a family-oriented culture, and the author avoids exoticizing the novel's local characters in favor
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Margo's Got Money Troubles: A Novel
by Rufi Thorpe
(11/20/2024)
Thorpe's twenty-year-old protagonist, Margo, has many troubles, of which money seems the most looming. Her life has taken a sudden, skidding U-turn, and she is experiencing a kind of existential whiplash. Margo is inexperienced and naïve, and when her favorite community college English professor first made it clear that he wanted to have a sexual relationship with her, she didn't even quite realize that she had a choice in the matter. After the relationship ends, she discovers she i
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Small Rain: A Novel
by Garth Greenwell
(9/4/2024)
The novel is mostly set in the ICU, where the narrator is tethered to his hospital bed with IV lines and sensors, but where his mind roams freely and widely. Greenwell is a master at creating intimacy; the poet seems to speak directly to the reader, and his narrative voice is compelling: sometimes self-critical and dismissive of his perceptions, but also empathic and reflective... As the poet is experiencing his own unique medical crisis, the outside world faces an unprecedented pandemic; both t
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Blue Ruin: A Novel
by Hari Kunzru
(7/17/2024)
Like Red Pill and White Tears, the first two novels in Hari Kunzru's loosely connected Three-Colors trilogy, Blue Ruin stands alone as both a powerful novel of ideas and a compelling story. Although the three books are entirely different in theme, character, and setting, each focuses on specific cultural moments of the recent past. Blue Ruin alternates between the London art scene during the final years of the 20th century—in its exhilarating heyday
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Anita de Monte Laughs Last: A Novel
by Xochitl Gonzalez
(5/1/2024)
In Xochitl Gonzalez's second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, readers are in for another thrilling ride. Again, the author delivers a satisfying, propulsive story as she relates the sometimes-parallel experiences faced by two Latina women who, a decade apart, must each navigate elitist, alien environments. As her characters confront the mores and expectations of the New York art world and Ivy League academia, Gonzalez points a high beam into the shadows to locate the traps of race, ge
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Table for Two: Fictions
by Amor Towles
(4/3/2024)
Amor Towles's short story collection Table for Two reads as something of a dream compilation for those of us who have dearly wished we could spend just a bit more time in the company of his characters and in the fully imagined settings of his novels Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and The Lincoln Highway (2021). It appears that the author may have felt that way, too. The general sensibility, gentle humor and expert storytelling we as
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
(2/7/2024)
Lynch understands that totalitarianism doesn't simply storm into power; all too often it creeps in, exploiting minor, seemingly harmless administrative policies and incrementally asphyxiating democratic mores, leaving only the specter of terror as the ruling party, their ambitions unmasked, declares that those who are not with us are against us. As the novel proceeds, readers follow Eilish through a cold Kafkaesque nightmare in which family members can get no information about missing relati
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
(11/1/2023)
In writing The House of Doors, Twan Eng effectively reverse engineers the work of the real-life Maugham, using his book of short stories The Casuarina Tree to envision a context within which the author might have been sparked to create his fiction. In so doing, Twan Eng crafts a novel that has much to say about the very art of narrative crafting, and structurally functions as something of an infinity mirror held up to a repeating interplay between fiction and nonfiction.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut
(10/4/2023)
At once historian, biographer, philosopher, and poet, Labatut is adept at eloquently communicating complex ideas in an accessible but not overly simplified style. The MANIAC will appeal to a wide variety of people, from those knowledgeable about math and physics to those, like this reader, with a decidedly more humanities-based education. Labatut creates fully fleshed actors and brings events from the past into sharp, clear focus.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Loot: A Novel
by Tania James
(8/2/2023)
As in any exceptional novel, resonances and subthemes run like an underground river throughout the book—most obvious in this case is the impact of the British in India and the never-overstated reminder of how deeply a country's course of history can be altered by a foreign civilization imposing its own modes. The British swept through the region with a great sense of their own destiny, and in doing so, deprived local cultures of their own.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Postcard by Anne Berest
(6/7/2023)
The novel is at once a closely depicted, meticulous account of the lives of the Rabinovitch family and the ways in which their terrible fate has resonated in the lives of their descendants; a fascinating, true-life mystery involving detectives and handwriting analyst; and a powerful account of the occupation of France and the unfurling, systemic reinforcement of antisemitism through the Vichy government's administrative practices.
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