Have you seen this NPR survey about America’s reading habits? My takeaway is that if reading were flossing, the country would be in serious need of dentures right now. But also, for those of us who do read: We love to be thrilled! Asked to choose among their favorite genres, respondents gave mysteries and thrillers a commanding victory.
Here at the Book Review we like them too: Our recommended fiction this week includes a slow-burn thriller from Spain, a wry homage to British cozy mysteries and, on the decidedly literary side, Katie Kitamura’s latest existential puzzle and a collection of Lynne Tillman’s inventive short stories. Its title, obligingly enough: “Thrilled to Death.” Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
John & Paul:
A Love Story in Songs
by Ian Leslie
This tribute to John Lennon and Paul McCartney explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging and learning from each other. Leslie, a British journalist, evokes the pair’s complex, remarkable dynamic in and out of the Beatles. This book is about soul, about grief and most of all about love — the love that two boys who lost their mothers far too soon have for each other, the courageous way they merge and the unfathomable power of that merger. Read our review.
Children of Radium:
A Buried Inheritance
by Joe Dunthorne
Dunthorne’s memoir investigates the life of his great-grandfather Siegfried, who was involved in developing chemical weapons for the Nazis — which makes the book sound broadly unfun. But Dunthorne’s deeper purpose, as he trudges around Europe peering into holes and standing disconsolately outside old gas-mask factories where his great-grandfather might or might not have worked, is to shine a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book’s final quarter more profound. And by acknowledging the form’s limitations, Dunthorne’s iteration rises to something genuinely, searingly meaningful. Read our review.
Your Steps on the Stairs
by Antonio Muñoz Molina
In this anxious, unconventional thriller by a literary superstar in Spain, an unnamed man, recently relocated to Lisbon from New York, is waiting for his beloved wife to join him in their new apartment. The earth is getting hotter everywhere, and the narrator sees his new home as a refuge, physically as well as emotionally. “If the world is going to come to an end, there’s no better place to wait for it to end than here,” he says. Reading this book, which has been elegantly translated by Curtis Bauer, feels like hearing a constant alarm ringing in a neighbor’s house. You’ll want to read the ending more than once. Read our review.
Thrilled to Death:
Selected Stories
by Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture that you might describe as “downtown.” This thorough selection of her short stories — chosen and arranged by the author herself — highlights her spare and spiky style and her wide-ranging, bumpy landscape of mostly ordinary lives. Form-wise, there is nothing predictable or comforting about this work: Tillman writes for grown-ups, but the kind who are constantly tending to their inner children. (Helen “was astonished at how adolescence malingered in every cell of her mature body.”) In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Read our review.
Audition
by Katie Kitamura
In the opening scene of Kitamura’s new novel, a middle-aged actress of some renown meets with a much younger man at a Manhattan restaurant. Deeply apprehensive, the woman is swarmed by thoughts of the various interpretations strangers could make of their encounter: Is she a lascivious predator, or his doting mother, or something else entirely? This is comfortable terrain for Kitamura, who over five novels has perfected the maneuver of burrowing into the gaps between our innermost selves and the roles we perform for others. The dominant mood of “Audition” is quiet dread; few writers have nailed the interpersonal thriller better. Read our review.
Miracles and Wonder:
The Historical Mystery of Jesus
by Elaine Pagels
Who was Jesus? The world may never know, but in her new book, Pagels — the best-selling author of “The Gnostic Gospels” — tries to find the man behind the faith, from whose personal existence the whole imaginative galaxy of Christianity seems to have sprung. She takes the historical approach, drawing on the Gospels, contemporaneous primary source accounts and centuries of academic research to present Jesus as a Jewish radical whose death was allegorized by his posthumous followers and eventually transposed into the language of ethics on the one hand and religious doctrine on the other. Read our review.
Hayek’s Bastards:
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
by Quinn Slobodian
In this bracingly original book Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of “neoliberal policies” even as they pay frequent homage to the very economists who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition and its gospel of free markets. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them, and in so doing demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. The book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on. Read our review.
The Mystery of the Crooked Man
by Tom Spencer
Spencer’s tart debut vaults the reader into the world of Agatha Dorn, an irritable archivist and passionate devotee of mystery fiction who becomes famous when she discovers what appears to be a lost manuscript by a beloved Golden Age author. But it’s not long until the book is revealed to be a hoax, after which Agatha’s ex-girlfriend (who had warned her to “be careful” with the manuscript) dies by suicide. Or did she? As Agatha pursues alternate theories, it’s not always clear whether she’s losing her mind, “obsessed with solving a murder that had never occurred,” or valiantly harboring the slim hope of truth and justice. Maybe both. Read our review.
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