Pelecanos (The Man Who Came Uptown) veers from crime fiction with a tender if scattershot story of a dog who shuffles from owner to owner in Washington, D.C. Buster, who narrates, fondly remembers his first home in the apartment of a single mother named Darcia, where he lived with his siblings and mom and befriended Darcia’s son. When pest exterminator Ed Grange visits the apartment, he convinces Darcia to let him take Buster off her hands. At home, Ed verbally abuses his wife and son and beats Buster with a broom handle. When animal control comes to take Buster, he makes a break for it and winds up living with an older man named Joe and his dog Lucy. Then Lucy dies, and Joe passes Buster on to his nephew Top, a weed dealer who dotes on Buster. The story builds to a heart-rending crisis point after Top lands in hot water with his criminal associates. The tone is a bit inconsistent, swerving from sentimental survival story to coarse street fiction (“You had your share of bitches,” Top tells Buster after his neutering). Still, this curiosity has its moments. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Picoult (Wish You Were Here) offers a stimulating if muddled parallel narrative of two women writers, each of whose work is credited to a man. In 1582, poet Emilia Bassano becomes consort to Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain. At the time, women were forbidden to have anything to do with the theater, but when Emilia crosses paths with William Shakespeare, he’s impressed with her work and agrees to pay for the sonnets and plays she’s secretly written if he can take credit for them. Thus begins a working relationship that spans decades. In the present day, Emilia’s descendant Melina Green writes a play about Emilia and Shakespeare, but fears she won’t be able to get it produced after being told that people only relate to plays by men. Unbeknownst to Melina, her roommate, Andre, submits the play to a fringe festival under the pseudonym Mel Green, leading the artistic director to assume the writer is a man. After the play is accepted, Andre poses as Mel during the production, with Melina pretending to be his assistant. The Elizabethan sections, which follow Emilia through an unhappy marriage as the work she wrote for Shakespeare receives acclaim, are the strongest. In comparison, Picoult’s depictions of racism and sexism in the contemporary theater world are a bit simplistic. It’s a mixed bag. Agent: Laura Gross, Laura Gross Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Campbell’s dreary first novel (after the collection Cat Brushing) starts off with a corker of an ethical dilemma before drifting into the meandering musings of a cohort of Oxford-based academics. Retired Old Testament professor Malcolm Miller reflects on a letter his dying sister gave him 50 years earlier, which she asked him to pass on to Joe Bradshaw, the man she believed was the father of her daughter, Agnes, who was four at the time. For whatever reason, Malcolm didn’t do so. In the decades since, Joe became a psychoanalyst, and through a remarkable coincidence, took on Agnes as a patient when her marriage was falling apart and developed romantic feelings for her. Now, Agnes’s daughter is getting married, and Malcolm and Joe are going to be at the wedding, prompting Malcolm to wonder whether now is the time to share the letter’s contents. The novel shifts between the points of view of Malcolm, Joe, and Agnes, but each of their voices sound confusingly similar, and they’re all disposed to statements like “Somewhere is the unalterable, irradicable truth and I need not fear it.” Only the most patient readers will want to enter the minds of these circular thinkers. Agent: Eleanor Birne, PEW Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Hamya’s provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family’s fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia’s father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it’s about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia’s point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father’s misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where his staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia’s father overhears a fellow audience member call the play “social justice for the upper middle class,” which prompts him to come to Sophia’s defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia’s father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of “companionship and coddling.” None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman’s life in Hjorth’s breathtaking latest (after Is Mother Dead). Ida Heier, a 30-year-old editor and writer, is married with young children when she sleeps with Arnold Bush, a 39-year-old married professor and Brecht translator. To Ida’s surprise, their subsequent exchange of letters awakens strong feelings: “She has never felt like this before, she is in love.” A tumultuous romance begins, with Ida imploring a reluctant Arnold to be with her. Arnold eventually leaves his wife, and Ida divorces her husband. However, the two aren’t faithful to each other, and their only happy times occur during weekends away or in bed together. The volatile relationship cycles for years between bouts of “howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds.” Hjorth’s narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida’s feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn’t “worth the sacrifice.” Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she’s acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist’s self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It’s an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tang’s moving and offbeat debut revolves around a New York City gig worker who offers his services on an app called Rental Stranger. The 20-something narrator, known only as Stranger, takes on such roles as mourner at a funeral, best man at a wedding, and wingman for a pickup artist. Each time out, he strives to make his clients happy enough to give him a five-star review, and his peculiar backstory explains his diligence. After his mother’s death 10 years earlier, he found purpose by visiting his nine-year-old neighbor, Lily, once a week and pretending to be her father (the real father doesn’t know Lily exists). Stranger, who is still pretending to be Lily’s dad, divulges this secret to a woman who hires him to help develop her novel in progress by playing one of the characters and peppers him with questions about his work. Tang makes hay with themes of love, attachment, and the desire to be seen, as when the narrator reflects on playing hide and seek as a boy: “The thrill of being undetected was paltry compared to the relief of being found.” The result is a memorable character study of a man hiding from himself. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Launching a new series based on an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet, Dodd (Point Last Seen) spins an entracing story of an ill-fated wedding engagement. It’s narrated by the star-crossed couple’s oldest daughter, Rosie, who tells of how her parents survived their suicide attempt 20 years earlier. After Romeo and Juliet insist Rosie wed the “cruel and lustful” Duke Leir Stephano, whose third wife has just died under mysterious circumstances, she’s smitten by the better-looking Lysander at her betrothal ball. During the party, Stephano is found stabbed to death, and some guests accuse Rosie of his murder. Prince Escalus, who attempted to resolve the feud in the original play, attests to Rosie’s innocence, and as the body count rises, Rosie determines to unmask the killer while holding out hope for romance with Lysander. Rosie is an amiable and witty narrator (“Brace yourself for a recap, and don’t worry, it’s interesting in a My God, are you kidding me? sort of way”) and Dodd’s roller-coaster plot careens all the way to the cliffhanger ending. It’s a strong start. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Wilkins’s lovely latest (after Fall Back Down When I Die), a teenage drifter offers a grieving rancher a new lease on life. The year is 1994 and Rene Bouchard, 71, is a recent widower in tiny Delphi, Mont. He’s in the midst of planning his suicide when he discovers that his long-serving ranchhand has been neglecting the sheep and decides to take over. A parallel narrative follows Justin, a waifish 16-year-old from Seattle who runs away from home to escape his abusive uncle. After Justin wanders onto Rene’s land, Rene puts him to work, haunted by how Justin triggers memories of his youngest son Franklin, who was bullied as a teen and who died by suicide. The cast also includes Rene’s married daughter, Lianne, who sticks around after her mother’s funeral to work as a substitute teacher. Despite Lianne’s misgivings about Justin, she accepts her father’s rapport with the teen, though the trio’s stability is threatened by a homophobic neighbor. In flashbacks, Wilkins gradually reveals the depth of the pain carried by each of the characters. It adds up to a bracing story of second chances. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand, Union Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Translator Hur debuts with an ambitious and mostly successful story of human life transformed by technology. The novel begins in the near future, when a breakthrough treatment called nanotherapy replaces a terminally ill patient’s body with an immortal replica. In a journal, Dr. Mali Beeko, whose mother invented the procedure, records her misgivings after the first nanotherapy patient, a lover of 19th-century poetry named Yonghun Han, vanishes from a South African lab and reappears days later in the same place. Upon his return, Yonghun finds Mali’s journal and begins writing in it, confessing that he’s not the “real” Yonghun, even though he possesses Yonghun’s memories. Over the following decades nanodroids become common and AI is used for decision-making in military strategy. Though Hur’s worldbuilding occasionally feels unwieldy, the final sections are worth the wait, as nanodroids read Yonghun’s journal entries about poetry and consider the impact of art on humanity. Fans of Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel ought to take a look. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Anthony (Enter the Aardvark) examines a fraying marriage in her sensational latest. Kathleen Beckett, a former college tennis champion, lives with her husband, Virgil, and two children in the suburbs of 1950s Newark, Del. One Sunday, Kathleen tells Virgil to take the children to church without her. The narrative spans the rest of the day and alternates between Kathleen’s and Virgil’s points of view, gradually revealing the sources of their tension. It turns out Virgil recently ended an affair with a woman named Imogene Monson, and, as the day progresses, Kathleen pieces together the truth while Virgil contends with Imogene’s attempt to win him back. Meanwhile, Virgil’s father digs up dirt on Kathleen, and hints to her that he knows about her affair with her high school tennis instructor. More juicy revelations and surprising twists ensue as Anthony unspools each spouse’s side of the story, and suspense mounts as the clock ticks toward their reunion at home. What makes this exceptional, however, are the distinctive details, such as a tennis strategy called “the most,” inspired by the bombing of a bridge in Czechoslovakia during WWI, in which a player lures their opponent toward the net and then hits a devastating passing shot. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink