Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party, Ben Macintyre’s Redwood, Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves, and Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
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1. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf)
16 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here
Ambitious and captivating … Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds … feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.”
–Lincoln Michel (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday)
6 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Our Noble Selves here
“Atkinson’s lighthearted novel mines delicious humor from this mismatch of grizzled cynicism and national heritage. Our Noble Selves is in part a workplace comedy … Ms. Atkinson deserves to be rated as highly as her countryman Ian McEwan. Like him, she boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
3. The Rouse by China Miéville
(Del Rey)
4 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Over its 1,200 pages, the novel becomes a haunting of a haunting, a terror echoed and heightened over time. This terror grows familiar but not stale; the reader is allowed to live within it almost calmly and thus catch glimpses of other forces in the darkness. What Miéville has crafted in The Rouse is an intimate epic, a controlled sprawl of history and emotional resonance. I felt it in my bones, the undeniable power of a jagged masterpiece.”
–Jeff VanderMeer (The New York Times Book Review)
4. The Newer World by Sebastian Barry
(Viking)
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Part Bildungsroman, part picaresque … It’s an astonishing effect, especially when you consider the near-miracles Barry performs with language. In his hands it attains registers that can only be described as soaring; a vertiginous high wire of prose.”
–Sara Collins (The Guardian)
5. Fallow by Sarah Anderson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
1 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from Fallow here
“Unfolds into an utterly unexpected journey, offering a sharp meditation on workplace life, autonomy, and the late-stage capitalist framework.”
–Patricia Smith (Booklist)
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Nonfiction
1. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre
(Crown)
6 Rave
“The British writer Ben Macintyre has built a renowned track record of turning dusty government records into gripping nonfiction thrillers … He’s achieved it again … The concluding pages are the book’s most poignant moment.”
–Joseph Finer (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
(Liveright)
4 Rave • 2 Mixed
“Entertaining, expansive, often surprising, and occasionally horrifying … A brisk, provocative work that interrogates how contemporary American Christianity arrived at its current state and where it might go next.”
–Margaret Quamme (Booklist)
3. End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
3 Rave • 3 Mixed
“Bold, clarifying … While some scholars debate the usefulness of a broad fascism label, the authors offer a readable map of the perilous terrain we inhabit and a sense of possible responses. Their contribution lies in illuminating the dangers and outlining a path forward.”
–Daniel Trilling (The Guardian)
4. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
(W. W. Norton and Company)
2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Every sentence in this compelling book warrants attention. For readers eager to understand how we arrived at this moment, it is an essential read.”
–Ellen Gilbert (Library Journal)
5. The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick
(Henry Holt & Co.)
1 Rave • 2 Positive
“A sharp new study … In the near term, the most effective approach to addressing wealth concentration is to recognize and name it, and that’s precisely what this pair has accomplished. Expect to hear more about their findings and implications.”
–John Lanchester (The New Yorker)
