Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, Shawn Gude’s American Socialist, Bonnie Garmus’s Peck & Peck, and Lieke Marsman’s On Another Planet They Can Save Me all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
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1. Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
2. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus
(Scribner)
4 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an interview with Bonnie Garmus here
“It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count.”
–Claire Clark (The Guardian)
=3. Solace House by Will Maclean
(Grove)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“There are faint echoes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: a close-knit group of students become increasingly absorbed by esoteric ideas that reshape their understanding of the world … Although it runs to more than 500 pages, Solace House sustains its atmosphere with remarkable consistency. Thoughtful, unsettling and ambitious, it is less interested in delivering conventional scares than in evoking a slow, disorientating collapse of reality itself.”
–Julia Kelly (The Irish Times)
=3. Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer
(Knopf)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
“Astonishing … Luna, Phoenix, Queen brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms, and the relief that can only come in telling a story for oneself.”
–Meg Wolitzer (The New York Times Book Review)
5. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
(Riverhead)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“A fascinating, sometimes frustrating and thoroughly original new novel … This book, a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing that can enlighten even when it obfuscates … This grim but powerful book portrays the many incompatible states of existence, and the baffling collapse of time, that stem from extreme crises.”
–Dave Kim (The New York Times Book Review)
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1. On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman
(Catapult)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Cathartic and often wondrous … Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity’s most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure.”
=2. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs by Shawn Gude
(Simon & Schuster)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“This charmingly penned and prodigiously researched study both refreshes familiar stories and prods readers to reconsider common assumptions … A page-turning delight, American Socialist is an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme.”
–Matthew E. Stanley (Jacobin)
=2. Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science by Saul Justin Newman
(MIT Press)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“Intriguing, eccentric … In an age of incessant online grifting and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy as US secretary of health, Newman’s conclusions are refreshingly simple. Longevity ‘science’ is largely built on nonsense data.”
–Rachel Clark (The Guardian)
4. The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas
(Henry Holt & Company)
4 Rave
“Ghattas is well qualified to tease out the insidious relationships of ideology, convenience and betrayal that have condemned Lebanon to half a century of instability … If the best kind of American is one whose view of the Middle East is disinterested, benevolent and untainted by thoughts of commercial or strategic hegemony, Ghattas’s excellent book commemorates a breed that is all but extinct.”
–Christopher de Bellaigue (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Reds: A Global History of Communism by Paul Mason
(Scribner)
3 Rave • 1 Mixed
“A deeply researched, thought-through, essential history of a protean ideology.”