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

Songwriter and novelist Vlautin’s heartrending latest (after The Night Always Comes) centers on Al Ward, an aging country music guitarist and songwriter whose 40 years on the road have left him broken and struggling with alcoholism. He lives without electricity or running water on his late great-uncle’s mining claim in central Nevada, subsisting on canned soup and spending his days writing songs and going for walks. When a blind horse shows up at his doorstep in the depths of winter, he must decide: will he let the horse die, or will he try to save it by walking 30 miles to his closest neighbor for help? His deliberations are messy and convoluted, and he eventually chooses the latter course. While trudging through the snow, he’s flooded with memories of his severe mother and alcoholic uncle, his only father figure, and recalls how he escaped his unhappy childhood through music after seeing Buck Owens and his band in concert (“When they played, suddenly Al wasn’t Al anymore. He was transported inside the noise and rhythm and melody and story”). He also reflects on his ex-wife, Maxine, and ruminates on his regrets over losing her. As Al tries to redeem himself, Vlautin movingly conveys the power of music to reveal new possibilities in one’s life. This shines. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Del Amo follows up his memorable Animalia with another arresting French rural gothic. The story begins with a prehistoric tableau in which a young boy, under the watchful eyes of his father, participates in his first deer hunt. The episode lends a mythic quality to Del Amo’s narrative, which shifts to the present day as a father abruptly reenters the life of his nine-year-old son after an absence of six years. Eventually, he brings the boy and his mother to live in the “hushed, hostile, cold” cabin where he grew up. The surrounding woods are a source of fascination and terror to the boy, as is his father, an enigmatic stranger whose “glowering presence” puts his mother ill at ease. As the novel progresses, a sense of “indefinable menace” builds as the run-down house decays even further, the mother’s health deteriorates, and the father’s erratic behavior and explosive anger make his plans seem more sinister than they first appeared. Del Amo’s signature florid style comes to life in Wynne’s consummate translation, and at the heart of the lurid plot is a sensitive depiction of a boy’s confusion. Once this gets its hooks in readers, it won’t let go. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Nature’s terrifying power is on display in a new translation of this breathtaking 1926 novel from Swiss writer Ramuz (1878–1947). The people of an impoverished mountain village decide, after fierce debate, to make up for their dwindling resources by using a high-up pasture where, according to lore, a group of their townsfolk met a terrible fate 20 years earlier. Six men and a 13-year-old boy ascend to the pasture with provisions and 70 cows. Their plan: to last the summer in that remote place, tending to the animals that sustain life in the village. Once they reach the pasture, a member of the party who survived the earlier expedition tells the others of the horrors he saw back then, among them a man who turned “all black and swollen” and died after a splinter got stuck in his thumb. The cowherds soon face horrors of their own, as sickness decimates the cattle and one of the men shoots his hand off in a strange accident. Lush prose (snowy mountain peaks seem “made of metal, of gold, steel, of silver; making all around you a sort of jeweled crown”), and profound insights about the insignificance of human life and the force of superstition pave the way to an earth-shattering finale. This thrilling tale has a timeless potency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dusapin’s dreamy and insightful fish-out-of-water story (after The Pachinko Parlor) follows a Geneva fashion school graduate to the Vladivostok circus. Nathalie, who knows little about circuses and doesn’t speak Russian, has agreed to design costumes for the trio who performs an act known as the Russian bar. Upon arrival, she meets the circus manager, Leon, who serves as her translator and introduces her to the team’s leader, Anton, a famous older performer who is mentoring Nino on how to hold the flexible bar that the flier, Anna, will jump from and land on. The act is dangerous—Anna’s predecessor was badly injured five years earlier and hasn’t jumped since—and it relies on the team members trusting one another. It takes time for Nathalie to acclimate—she struggles with psoriasis, and must stay at a hotel separate from the performers, as the room she was promised isn’t available. Her first attempt at costuming doesn’t go well, but gradually she finds her artistic voice as the group begins to bond, and the action builds to an unforgettable climax in the circus ring. Dusapin’s scene-setting and examination of languages and cultures colliding are as precise as ever. Readers will be thrilled. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pollard (Delphi) delivers a delightfully raunchy romp through the court of Louis XIV in 1682 Paris. A group of women led by Madame Marie d’Aulnoy meet regularly to discuss 25 fairy tales, which lend themselves to the title and themes of each chapter, beginning with “The Tale of Donkey-Skin,” about a king who seeks to marry his daughter. Soon men start joining the gatherings, and the group is dubbed the Modern Fairies by others at court. As the members discuss the tales of Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Prince Charming, the women note how their own husbands could have them banished for infidelity—indeed, one of them has been sleeping with a bachelor member of the Modern Fairies while her husband is away. In “The Tales of Anguillete and Red Riding Hood,” Pollard’s omniscient narrator suggests there’s a “wolf” monitoring the group for Louis XIV, who fears the political power of storytelling. Pollard’s ribald prose is addictively amusing, as in her depiction of the king as “short, pockmarked, always some problem with his arsehole... his little dick florid with some new sexually transmitted infection... such a pathetic little horn-dog.” This magnetic revisionist historical deserves a wide readership. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Two women fight to reveal the truth about a scientific discovery in this crackling novel from Cooper (The Talented Mrs. Greenway). In 1808 New South Wales, Rose Winton loves accompanying her naturalist father, Charles, to observe platypuses. Nine years later, Charles plans to present proof that the platypus is an egg-laying mammal to the Royal Society in London. After Charles is attacked by a venomous male platypus, laying him up for months, he entrusts 18-year-old Rose to take his sketchbook containing their observations to England and present them to famed naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. In a parallel story line set in 1908, New South Wales librarian Tamsin Alleyn learns of Winton’s sketchbook, which an elderly woman donated to the library just before she died. After Tamsin examines the book, she works with aspiring book dealer Shaw Everdene to uncover why Charles never received credit for his findings about the platypus’s reproductive system. Cooper shifts seamlessly from Tasmin and Shaw’s sleuthing to Rose’s ill-fated trip to England, where she uncovers family secrets and learns her life is at risk. The author keeps readers guessing as she connects the two plot strands, each of which abounds with exciting scenes, including a chase on a windswept moor that evokes The Hound of the Baskervilles. This is one not to miss. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with a moving if muted novel about a middle-aged white man yearning to tell his birth daughter, who was raised on the Penobscot Reservation, that he’s her father. Charles Lamosway grew up on the reservation, too, and lived there until 1983, when he turned 18 and had to leave because he had no blood ties to the tribe. His mother, Louise, was allowed to remain on the reservation with his Penobscot stepfather, who helped Charles build a house across the river, where he slipped into alcoholism. In 1991, Charles unexpectedly had a daughter with his Penobscot friend Mary. After she married a Penobscot man named Roger, the couple and Charles agreed to put Roger’s name on the birth certificate, so the girl, Elizabeth, could be a citizen of the tribe. Now, Charles, who’s been sober for more than 20 years, wonders if revealing the truth to Elizabeth might enrich her life and his own. The central tension—will Charles tell Elizabeth or won’t he—is set up early and doesn’t fully develop, but there are plenty of touching moments, such as a brief meeting between Charles and Elizabeth before she’s old enough to remember. This has the humanity of Talty’s promising debut, but it doesn’t quite reach the same heights. Agent: Rebecca Friedman, Rebecca Friedman Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink