This week’s offerings include a poetry collection and a remarkably cleareyed memoir by a survivor of sexual abuse, along with a bounty of good fiction by Amity Gaige, David Szalay, Allison Epstein and others. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Fagin the Thief
by Allison Epstein
You might be surprised to learn that Oliver Twist has nothing more than a walk-on part in “Fagin the Thief.” And even more surprised to learn that Dickens’s notorious villain emerges from this reimagining of his origins as somewhat less villainous — still a sinister master criminal, but indelibly shaped by the prejudices of 19th-century London, where even as a boy he suffers “the natural consequence of being visibly Jewish and visibly poor.” Epstein has created a deeply nuanced character, understandable if not wildly sympathetic, a loner who has learned a tragic lesson: “Iron hearts can’t break.” Read our review.
Heartwood
by Amity Gaige
In this slow-burn thriller, set on the Appalachian Trail, an experienced hiker named Valerie goes missing and two other women — a veteran game warden and a lonely but dynamic 76-year-old stuck in a retirement community — must crack the case. “Heartwood” absorbs the reader in the subculture and shorthand of the trail; the mystery is mostly an afterthought, but the book generates real and satisfying suspense by leaving us to wonder whether, and how, all three women will emerge from their metaphorical woods. Read our review.
The Usual Desire to Kill
by Camilla Barnes
The usual desire to kill your exasperating old parents — that’s the implied full title of Barnes’s wickedly delightful debut novel. Narrated by their middle-aged daughter Miranda, with various epistolary and dramatically scripted passages interspersed, the book chronicles a few months in the lives of a 70-something British couple who bicker and garden and suffer each other’s considerable deafness, minor dementia and timeworn personalities in a vine-encrusted, bat-infested stone house in rural France. Read our review.
Ecstasy:
Poems
by Alex Dimitrov
Dimitrov’s unflinching fifth collection of poems is for the most part proudly unconcerned with answers: “I have nothing/to prove and nothing to teach you,” he writes at one point. Instead, the book celebrates life in the moment, with no shortage of indulgence; there is plenty of sex and drinking and drugs. These poems are raw and honest and deeply personal, and vibrate with the intimacy and electricity typically reserved for late-night conversations between old friends or new lovers after the third round. Hilarious in places and heartbreaking in others, they emerge from a place of inner turmoil and inner knowing, and do not apologize for anything. Read our review.
Sad Tiger
by Neige Sinno
First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards, this achingly vivid, cerebral memoir recalls its author’s sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather from when she was around 7 into her teens. The book eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser and the great volume of literary knowledge she has accumulated over decades as a scholar and fiction writer. Read our review.
Fan Service
by Rosie Danon
After soaring to youthful fame as the lead werewolf on a supernatural soap opera, the washed-up 42-year-old hero of this fun romance suddenly and awkwardly finds himself turned into an actual werewolf, with no idea what to do about it. His only hope is a vet tech and ex-moderator of a fan archive who carries a grudge against him after a long-ago encounter. She’s snarky and dismissive; he’s an ego monster with a terminal lack of self-awareness; together they’re a nonstop disaster of sore spots, misunderstandings and inconvenient but irresistible lust. Read our review.
Flesh
by David Szalay
Szalay’s cool, remote novel tells the rags-to-riches story of a diffident and lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. Among its primary subjects is male alienation. Istvan advances toward the redoubts of privilege, yet he remains coarse, inarticulate and boorish. Dark impulses lurk in him; he seems like a bystander to his own experience; he has the detachment of a survivor. Yet Szalay lets us feel his inchoate longing for meaning, for experience, for belonging. He is more easily wounded than he lets on. Read our review.
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