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| City of Girls Best books of the year |
The Silent Patient by Alex Michael ides feels like it could be
the big psychological thriller debut of 2019. The novel takes a few
chapters to clear its throat and set the plot in motion, but once the
tracks are laid it’s full steam ahead. Alicia Bronson is one-half of a
glamorous couple—she’s an artist married to her fashion photographer
husband, Gabriel. But when Gabriel returns home late one night, she
shoots him five times in the face and refuses to speak again. Now she is
being held in an institution outside London called the Grove. When a
psychotherapist named Theo Faber becomes obsessed with her case, he
finds his way to the Grove to treat her. Dark twists and delightful
turns follow, secrets (and a diary) are revealed, and you will likely
find yourself racing to the end.
There’s a moment early in Once More We Saw Stars when Jayson
Greene’s 2-year-old daughter, Greta, is in the hospital, hovering
between life and death but slipping towards the latter, and “we glance
around us, realising this is the last we’ll ever see of the world as
we’ve known it. Whatever comes next will raze everything to the ground.”
That sentence illustrates how difficult it is to read this memoir
without a lump in one’s throat. In the hierarchy of death, the death of a
child is the worst, the one that makes people recoil. Those who
experience such a trauma frequently talk about moving through a fog of
grief, unable to recall the particulars of the days and weeks after the
death, memories and heartstrings cauterised by the searing pain of loss.
How amazing, then, that Greene can recall those particulars:
the pain, the grief, the fears that their little family will never again
experience joy, and the worry that his marriage cannot survive such
loss. And that even in the midst of trauma he knows he and his wife have
the tools and the traits to get out the other side, to refashion their
broken life into one where they can laugh again. How they keep their
eyes on that prize is what makes this memoir a heartbreaking but
reassuring look at courage, resilience, our slim hold on life, and the
bonds of family that make life precious.
Spanning sixty-five years, Jo and Bethie Kaufman are sisters whose story
begins in 1951. They’re polar opposites—Jo, the intrepid jock, has an
eye for adventure (and, as it so happens, women), and Bethie is the
girlie-girl whose aspirations skew more on the conventional side. When
tragedy befalls one of them, dreams get deferred, threatening to
irreparably change not only the course of their lives, but who they are.
Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs. Everything is sweeping in its personal
and political scope, chronicling Jo’s and Bethie’s fumbling attempts to
right their respective ships against the backdrop of an America
experiencing its own growing pains. It’s a multi-layered and very moving
story for the #Me Too era, one that traces how far women have come, and
how far we have yet to go. While Mrs. Everything will surely resonate with Weiner’s legion of female fans, I hope it does for more than a few good men, too.
Some readers will be intrigued by apprentice dressmaker Ji Lin and her
strong minded pursuit to achieve more with her life than her
old-fashioned family will condone. Others will be hooked on the premise
of a young houseboy named Ren trying to find the severed finger of his
former master, who might or might not also be a were tiger. Still others
will gravitate toward the mythologies, food, traditions, and culture of
1930s colonial Malaysia under British rule. Once Ji Lin comes in
possession of the mummified finger that Ren seeks, they are destined to
collide, even as a deadly tiger roams the edges of town. Whatever your
entry point to The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo will win you over
with her newest historical novel, and you'll find yourself embracing
everything she hurls onto the page, including a number of curve balls
that contain the perfect amount of surprise. Too often historical novels
can feel overstuffed or simply stuffy. The Night Tiger is supple and powerful, like the predator that stalks the shadows of Choose ensnaring tale.
There is something a little intoxicating about Daisy Jones and the Six.
This is the story of a young, captivating singer who came of age in the
late 60s/early 70s, all told as an oral history. The Six did not hit
the big time until Daisy joined the band as their lead singer, but her
presence brought along drama, intrigue, and a variety of tensions
between herself and Billy Dunne, the leader of The Six. It’s best not to
know too much about this book going into it; instead, allow the
transcribed interviews from the band members (they weren’t real, but
they seem real), and from those who tagged along during this great
fictitious band’s run, to unspool the story for you.
Heads-up to your inner Gilgamesh: "The way into the under land is through
the riven trunk of an old ash tree." Starting with that sentence,
Robert McFarland begins an exploration of the world beneath our feet.
Where his earlier book The Old Ways explored landscape and its effects on human experience, Under land
dives into catacombs, caves, nuclear waste facilities, and the land
beneath Greenland's shrinking ice cap to delve into the darker recesses
of our imaginations, a place where artists, adventurers, and criminals
have travel ed, willingly and otherwise. Expanding his journey into the
realm of "deep time"—a parallel expanse of past and future almost
unimaginable to human intellect, but also irresistible to
contemplate—Macfarlane takes us from the moment of creation into a
post-human future, one that might be better off without us. Add its
stunning jacket by Stanley Don wood (who creates Radiohead album covers
in his spare hours), Under land is a one-of-a-kind book, deeply thoughtful, richly written, and infinitely rewarding.
Julie Yip-Williams’ memoir speaks to one of our greatest fears, that we
would be diagnosed with a terminal disease, and to our greatest hope,
which is that we could face life straight on, fully, without squinting,
and live each day with honesty, ambition, and true feeling. She was born
ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. As a young child, she had cataracts that
rendered her nearly blind—her grandmother felt she would be a burden to
the family and tried to have an herbalist end her life. When the family
fled for the U.S., she was able to get corrective eye surgery in
California. Still, she was declared legally blind due to poor vision.
She earned her way into Williams College, attended Harvard Law School,
married, and settled in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. Then
at 37, she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. For five years,
she dealt with the disease, took care of her family, prepared them and
herself for the future, and sought understanding by writing about it.
There is hope, anger, fear, reflection, immersion in the everyday, and
joy reflected in this book. The Unwinding of the Miracle seeks to
express the truth about what it is like to face death--and to face
life--and it succeeds masterfully.
When Gourmet magazine closed its doors, no one was more surprised than its editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl. Reichl’s previous release, My Kitchen Year, is a cookbook of the recipes that saw her through this sudden and heartbreaking change. Save Me the Plums
is a memoir of how Reichl came to be at the magazine she’d pored over
as a child, how she transformed it from a stuffy relic of the old guard
into a publication that embraced a new culinary era, and how Gourmet magazine met its end. Reichl is a marvellous writer, and in Save Me the Plums readers experience her exhilarating journey from New York Times
restaurant critic, to the farm-to-table movement of Los Angeles, and
finally to the job she never expected to get: editor-in-chief of Gourmet.
Reichl’s passion for the role food plays in our lives is evident on
every page, including a smattering of recipes that complement the
narrative. Save Me the Plums is a book not only about a
changing food culture, but also about a woman taking on new challenges,
pushing boundaries, and hanging onto the sense of wonder that started
her on this road to begin with. A memoir to Savior.
Miami Beach, a white sand paradise with a history of violence, is an
inspired choice of location for Thomas Harris’ harrowing new novel of
greed and survival: Cari Mora. Somewhere in a mansion on
Biscayne Bay there rests a thousand pounds of cartel gold that Pablo
Escobar, now dead, will never retrieve. Hans-Peter Schneider—the new
face in our nightmares from the man who gave us Hannibal Lecter—has
plans to steal the gold but he’s not the only one looking for it. Cari
Mora is the young caretaker of the Escobar mansion, and Hans-Peter has
plans for her too; plans that involve his primary occupation as a flesh
peddler of the most disturbing sort, catering to the fantasies of an
incredibly wealthy clientele. Hans-Peter’s macabre interests and
inventions are pure Thomas Harris--and Cari Mora, a woman who has
already survived unspeakable things, is a worthy opponent for Hans-Peter
in this complex cat-and-mouse thriller. Cari Mora is as
cinematic as one might expect (and hope for), charged with smugglers and
lawmen, gruesome deaths, and deceit that crisscrosses the ocean between
Colombia and Miami. Just when you think you know what’s coming, Harris
has another twist up his sleeve. His first novel in more than a decade, Cari Mora proves that Harris is a masterful storyteller who knows exactly how to get under our skin and into our heads.
Mary Beth Keane is a fantastic writer. She has the kind of authorial
magic that makes her characters appear in the imagination as complete,
fully realised human beings. They are alive—and Ask Again, Yes
is about the entirety of those characters’ lives. Told in alternating
chapters, the book is a domestic novel about two families who wind up
living next door to one another in the 70s. Both of the fathers are cops
working in the same precinct. They aren’t that close, but two of their
children—Peter and Kate—develop a relationship. Peter and Kate provide
the through line to the story, a line that is broken by a violent act.
When they do reconnect they will spend the rest of their lives dealing
with the fallout from their early years, as will their family members—as
readers we will watch as their lives move from promise to actual
experience to finally examining and understanding how it all happened.
You could label The Parisian as historical fiction, but it
seems silly to limit it that way. This is just a great novel, and
Isabella Hammad is an ambitions, sensitive, and abundantly talented
writer. The Parisian is the story of Mid hat Kamal. We first
meet him in 1914 Marseilles, while he is on his way to Montpelier to
attend medical school. He is also about to fall in love for the first
time. Within a year, he is studying in Paris, absorbing the culture; but
as a Palestinian living in France, he is always an outsider.
Eventually, Mid hat returns to his hometown of Nablus, where his father, a
wealthy textile merchant, rules his days, and where Britain now rules
the land. Mid hat must answer to his father’s expectations at the same
time that he is trying to make his way in a changing Palestine—and still
there are tendrils that reach back to France. The Parisian is,
almost unbelievably, a debut novel—a moving personal story set against a
sweeping historical backdrop—and Isabella Hammad is an exciting new
voice in literature.
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| Maybe You Should Talk to Someone - best book of the year |
I didn’t quite know how to take it when a publishing friend excitedly
thrust a copy of celebrated psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone into my hands and exclaimed: “Erin, this is a book for you!”
(Did I mention a couple colleagues were present and did not receive the
same recommendation? The same colleagues who were just then nodding?).
But I’m so glad he did. Giving the reader a behind-the-scenes peek from
both sides of the couch, it’s a witty, relatable, moving homage to
therapy—and just being human. While therapists are required to see a
counselor themselves as part of their training, Gottlieb enlists an
experienced ear when an unexpected breakup lays her flat. Working
through her issues with the enigmatic “Wendell” helps Gottlieb process
her pain, but it also hones her professional skills; after all, a good
therapist possesses the ability to empathize with their patients (four
of whom she chronicles in funny, frustrating, heartbreaking and
profoundly inspiring detail). Like Gottlieb, you will see yourselves in
them--in all their self-sabotaging, misunderstood, unlucky, and
evolutionary glory. So, for those of you thinking: self-help books are
just not my jam…They aren’t mine either (trust me, my woo-woo detector
is very sensitive). But Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is so much more expansive than that. Everybody, this is a book for you.
The Yoo family are Korean immigrants plying an unusual trade, running a
pressurized oxygen chamber participants use in the hopes of improving
conditions ranging from autism to infertility. When a horrific explosion
at the facility leaves two dead, the case against the alleged culprit
is not as open and shut as it first appears...Angie Kim’s
intricately-plotted courtroom thriller, Miracle Creek, isn’t a
conventional whodunit where the bad guy is eventually unmasked and the
reader closes the book with righteous satisfaction. Kim has weaved a
more complicated web than that, one that ensnares characters many
readers will empathize with--well-meaning but flawed, doing foolish
things for noble reasons--and that only adds to the suspense. There were
many times I thought I had Miracle Creek all figured out, only
to realize I'd been hoodwinked by another red herring. Kim was a former
trial lawyer and that experience shows, but if this debut is any
indication, she made the right career change.
Until I read Formation: A Woman’s Memoir of Stepping Out of Line,
I hadn’t realized that I’d grown habituated to the simplistic,
single-hump emotional rollercoaster of most memoirs. Ryan Leigh Dostie’s
story of her life so far—raised in a matriarchal cult in Connecticut,
joining the army to pursue her love of languages, her sexual assault by a
fellow solider, deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the
crippling aftershocks of PTSD—flings the reader around so many
unsettling corkscrews as well as breathtaking highs and lows that you
may stagger when you flip the final page. The core of Dostie’s story is
not her tour in Iraq; nor is it the military itself, which she admits
she often loved. The assault, followed by the army’s determination that
her accusation is “unsubstantiated” despite evidence to the contrary,
claws away at Dostie’s confidence and self-worth, propelling her along
dangerous paths. But Formation is a war memoir, too. Her
stories about battle and occupation will sound familiar to regular
readers of the genre, as will the psychological impacts that gut the
soldiers on the ground. When a male soldier tells her, “I don’t think I
can ever love again,” she’s terrified of this insight even as numbness
swells inside her as well. True life rarely hews to a predicable
narrative structure, and Dostie refuses to perpetuate that myth, penning
a memoir that inspires, terrifies, enrages, and prompts triumphant
fist-pumping all at once.
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The Guest Book - best book of the year
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Sarah Blake’s latest novel, The Guest Book, is a gorgeous epic
that charts the course of an American family over three generations,
from the 1930s to present day. Blake draws you into the Milton clan, and
the more I became privy to their secrets, fears, and desires, the more I
felt at home with every flawed one of them. Early in the novel, Blake’s
character Evie tells her students, "History is between the cracks,” and
so it is in this book: a history created in moments big and small,
knitting itself together inside us, and of us. Crockett Island, off the
coast of Maine, bought by Kitty and Ogden Milton in 1936 as a place of
refuge and legacy, is as much a character in the novel as those who
gather there. Through Blake’s writing I could smell the ocean, see the
lilac tree beside the door. And I could feel Kitty and Ogden’s dream
fray when the grandchildren inherit the island and all it represents.
The Miltons’ story mirrors the times in which they lived, and we watch
as parents and siblings make choices driven by ambition, prejudice, or
pride that later haunt them and their progeny. Issues of gender
inequality, classism, racism, breaking free from the past—Blake tackles
them all, because all play an important role in the history of the
family as well as that of the country in which we live. There is so much
I want to tell you about this book. So many passages I have underlined
and returned to. Instead, I invite you to visit the Miltons of Crockett
Island in the pages of The Guest Book yourself, so that you too may experience the emotional resonance of Blake’s remarkable and thought-provoking novel.
Newlywed Isra thought life would be different when she immigrated to
America from Palestine, but her dreams were quickly dashed. You’ll need
to steel yourself the more you delve into Etaf Rum's penetrating debut
novel A Woman Is No Man, which follows Isra’s journey, and that
of her daughter Deya. The clash between dual cultures creates much of
the drama, as Deya tries to do what her mother ultimately
couldn’t--break free from their family’s violent, misogynistic past and
forge her own path in life. While A Woman Is No Man is a
rallying cry to resist patriarchal strictures designed to keep women in
‘their place,’ it is also a love letter to books and their
transformative power. Reading was one of the only comforts, and acts of
rebellion, that Isra enjoyed, and she had a particular affinity for
literary heroine Scheherazade: “For a thousand and one nights [her]
stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon—a reminder of the
extraordinary power of stories, and even more, the strength of a single
woman.” It’s the harnessing of that strength that sets Deya, and this
family, free.
Peter Heller has written three previous novels, but he has been writing about the outdoors in magazines like Outside and Men’s Journal for much longer. In The River
Heller has drawn from all that experience to create an exciting,
thoughtful, and well-paced thriller about two friends paddling into
trouble in northern Canada. A distant wildfire is the first portent of
danger. When the friends hear a man and woman arguing on the foggy
riverbank, they decide to warn them about the fire—but their search for
the pair turns up nothing. The next day a man appears solo on the river.
Was he one of the people they heard the day before? The River
starts out as a leisurely backwoods paddle and inexorably picks up speed
before spilling readers down its cascade of an ending. This is a
thriller, an adventure novel, and a meditation on friendship, the
outdoors, and something altogether deeper. As I read, I felt like I had
been waiting for this book without knowing it, and I fully expect The River to persist as one of my favorite reads of 2019.
There is an immediacy to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that
almost feels unique. The author Ocean Vuong was first published as a
poet, and the poetry in this novel—present in the language, in the
images and ideas—is unforgettable. The narrator is a young man in his
late twenties, nicknamed Little Dog by his family, who is composing a
long letter to his Vietnamese mother. Little Dog and his family grew up
poor in Hartford, Connecticut, but their struggles do not end there. His
mother still carries the burden of the war, as does his grandmother,
and Little Dog’s struggles reach not only back to the traumas of Vietnam
but forward in his efforts to fit in to a world that sees him as other.
Eventually, he does find some solace in an ill-fated relationship with
an older “redneck” boy, but that is only temporary. What is permanent is
his desire to write, and of course his family. Vuong almost seems to be
trying to super inject imagery, emotion, and language into every page,
and to great effect; but no writer can reach absolute perfection. There
are soaring moments in this novel, many of them. There will also be
moments (although they will disagree on which ones) where readers feel
that the writing fails. That’s how great art is made.
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| Say Nothing - best book of the year |
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