Tenuous but necessary social bonds are at the heart of this week’s recommended fiction: There’s Binnie Kirshenbaum’s novel about a wife turned reluctant caregiver, Colum McCann’s seafaring tale of the crews who repair underwater cables and Annika Norlin’s group portrait of a Swedish commune whose members have little in common besides their dark pasts. (Also recommended: Nell Zink’s novel of one wild night in Berlin, and Emma Pattee’s story of an expecting mother confronting natural disaster.) In nonfiction, we recommend the history of a hoax with legs, along with a deeply reported account of Atlanta’s working homeless population and a sympathetic, perceptive biography of Yoko Ono. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Counting Backwards
by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Kirshenbaum’s gutsy, funny, heart-wrenching novel focuses on an artist whose beloved husband, a research scientist, is slipping into dementia as a result of Lewy body disease. Kirshenbaum, who’s known for unpredictable novels like “Rabbits for Food” (2019) and “An Almost Perfect Moment” (2004), pulls off a bold second-person approach to her chronicle of a death in slow motion. Read our review.
Twist
by Colum McCann
McCann’s latest novel begins with a fairly straightforward narrative: An Irish writer down on his luck is assigned to write about the undersea cables that carry the world’s data and the repair teams that patrol the oceans, fixing ruptures. But through authorial wiles and expertly placed sentences, McCann — a National Book Award winner for “Let the Great World Spin” — makes this premise both urgent and enigmatic. Unexpected sunderings form the core emotional motif of the novel. Wires can, with the right attention, be reconnected. Human bonds are different. Read our review.
Yoko:
The Biography
by David Sheff
Sheff’s new biography of Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon, convincingly argues for her relevance as a feminist, activist, avant-garde innovator and world-class sass. Sheff — a prolific journalist and author who conducted one of the last significant interviews with John and Yoko, for Playboy, and later became good friends with her — has written the closest thing to an authorized biography the world will get; the book is predictably sympathetic, but not fawning, mostly written in a straightforward prose that suggests sympathy is wholly justified for a figure who was not just dismissed but demonized. Read our review.
Sister Europe
by Nell Zink
Many novels take place over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine.” Fewer chart the course of a single evening, as does Zink’s narrative of one excruciating, tangled, exhilarating, humiliating night in Berlin, set against the backdrop of a 2023 literary award ceremony. Zink, who has lived in and around that city for many years, catalogs the ghosts that haunt it with a voice that is cool and fastidious and possessed of a screwball comic sensibility rooted in pain. She is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. Read our review.
The Colony
by Annika Norlin
In a bucolic forest in Sweden, the small band of misfits at the heart of Norlin’s novel forms a mysterious commune that may be a utopia or may be a nightmare, depending on your perspective. Together they bring a staggering amount of violent history and psychological torment to this glorious mountain setting, where they fall into such a harmonious rhythm that they hardly need to speak. The story’s open-ended questions — about the power of charisma and love and the boundaries between the individual and the greater good — arise organically, without forcing stale answers. Read our review.
Tilt
by Emma Pattee
The protagonist of this novel, Pattee’s debut, is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Ore., when the ground starts shaking: The “really big one” that earthquake watchers have long feared and predicted has finally arrived. The rest of the book tracks her journey across the ravaged city in search of her husband. Pattee takes the novel’s elements — the apocalyptic setting, the cutting social observation, the acerbic takes on marriage and motherhood — and shakes them into a potent cocktail. Read our review.
Ghosts of Iron Mountain
by Phil Tinline
In its December 1967 issue, Esquire magazine published a long article purporting to be taken from an upcoming book with a startling premise: War, the authors argued, was necessary and desirable for America’s growth and social cohesion, and the government should either encourage it or foster reasonable alternatives like blood sports or fake alien invasions. In reality, the book and the article were the twin prongs of an elaborate hoax — but an important and influential one, Tinline explains in this entertaining history, with reverberations that have lasted into the present era of QAnon and Deep State conspiracy theories. Read our review.
There Is No Place for Us:
Working and Homeless in America
by Brian Goldstone
Written by a journalist who also has his Ph.D. in anthropology, this powerful book — an exceptional feat of reporting — details the plight of “the working homeless” in the rapidly gentrifying city of Atlanta, where someone with a full-time job can still get priced out of a place to live. Explaining that between 2010 and 2023 the median rent shot up by a staggering 76 percent, Goldstone offers an immersive narrative of how five Atlanta families found themselves in the direst of straits: Working a lot and earning very little, they end up sleeping in cars, crashing with friends or paying for a decrepit room in an extended-stay hotel, statistically invisible even as they suffer some of the most difficult years of their lives. Read our review.
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