Among this month’s most highly regarded works of fiction are Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, and Bonnie Garmus’s Peck & Peck.
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1. Partita — Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)
Scores: fourteen rave reviews, four positive notices, one mixed assessment, and one pan.
An interview with Barbara Kingsolver is available here
A noted hallmark of Kingsolver’s richly adorned fiction is her talent for sharp, compact sentences that illuminate our humanity—voicing our private desires and hidden vulnerabilities. This latest tale carries the weight of her broad literary career while opening up new ground, striking a balance between familiar resonance and fresh insight. Kingsolver feels distinct, and so do we.
–Heather Scott Partington (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Music Against the Night — Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nine rave reviews, one positive notice, two mixed assessments
“Wonderful and bewitching… Li demonstrates complete command of her intricate, probing narrative here. It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around often, much like the virtuosos whose early lives it probes.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
3. Peck & Peck — Bonnie Garmus (Scribner)
Five rave reviews, five positive notices, two mixed assessments
Read an interview with Bonnie Garmus here
“It’s hard to resist Garmus’s infectious humor and the unbridled imagination she pours into her storytelling. Her typography jokes are a riot, and her emphatic call for all of us to make words count is equally compelling.”
–Claire Clark (The Guardian)
4. The Occidental Book of the Dead — T. Geronimo Johnson (William Morrow and Company)
Eight rave reviews
Listen to an interview with T. Geronimo Johnson here
“Johnson’s book is doing a great deal, and it does so with ambition and purpose. It’s a wild, daring work of literature for readers who crave risk and scale. Even when missteps occur, The Occidental Book of the Dead remains a work the literary world could benefit from seeing more of: inventive, audacious, and unapologetic… It isn’t aimed at everyone, and that’s a big part of why it succeeds.”
–Jason Mott (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Luna, Phoenix, Queen — Julie Orringer (Knopf)
Six rave reviews, two positive notices
“Astonishing… Luna, Phoenix, Queen masterfully underscores the pain of isolation in its various forms and the relief that comes when telling one’s own story.”
–Meg Wolitzer (The New York Times Book Review)
