A giant truffle brings hope to a down on its luck Tuscan town in this fun if over-the-top farce from Buxton (Hollow Kingdom). After a truffle dog unearths a six-pound, 14-ounce specimen, the villagers of Lazzarini Boscarino hope it will bring a much-needed influx of funds. They’re often overlooked by tourists in favor of Borghese, the next town over, which is known for its festivals and its Michelin-starred restaurant run by Umberto Micucci, native son of Lazzarini Boscarino. Umberto’s sister-in-law, Delizia, Lazzarini Boscarino’s mayor, is tasked with keeping the truffle safe until it can be appraised and auctioned off by Sotheby’s. A distinctive group of villagers help Delizia, including a scowling elderly man regularly referred to as the “disgraced postman” for a long-ago scandal, a wheelchair-using retired driver whose brightly colored pants can allegedly “be seen from outer space,” and an octogenarian restaurateur who recently lost her establishment to a landslide. Some of the writing is clever (Delizia “put her heart, soul, and a sizable number of sedatives into her run for election”), though Buxton too often exhibits a weakness for excess (during a commotion in a bar, bottles of wine are seen “leaping from a shelf to their deaths,” causing the barkeep to emit “vinegar fumes of fury”). There are laughs to be had, but Buxton has done better. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wolfgang-Smith (Glassworks) explores tensions in the private lives of three queer misfits turned business titans in her stunning latest. In 1899, 18-year-old Vivian Lesperance leaves her unloving parents in Utica, N.Y., for New York City. There, she lives by her wits and has her first sexual encounters with women, including society reporter Electra Blake, with whom she forges a “real... but... useful” friendship. The sexual dalliance is short-lived, but it yields a meeting with wealthy Italian chanteuse Sofia Bianchi, with whom Vivian embarks on an affair. That relationship is ending by the time Vivian meets Oscar Schmidt, a timid executive at a soap company. Schmidt’s business is collapsing thanks to Squire Clancey, a blue-blooded oddball obsessed with candle making, who’s been buying up the lion’s share of tallow and essential oils from Schmidt’s suppliers. Vivian, correctly sensing Oscar is secretly gay, offers to marry him to conceal their sexualities. He agrees, and after they marry, Vivian introduces Oscar to Squire and engineers a merger of their companies. Oscar and Squire fall in love and the trio style themselves as a married couple with an eccentric live-in friend. Thanks to Vivian’s vision, Clancey & Schmidt grows into a thriving commercial empire, but the men’s tender bond underscores her loneliness, as she racks up loveless encounters with other women. Wolfgang-Smith’s sharp, sardonic narration brilliantly brings to life both the Gilded Age and her unforgettable protagonists. It’s a virtuosic performance. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Schlink (The Reader) delivers a touching narrative about an elderly man’s discovery of his wife’s secrets. After Kaspar Wettner’s wife, Birgit, accidentally drowns in a bathtub, he finds a diary in which she reveals that before they married in the 1960s, she gave birth to another man’s child and left the girl on a doorstep. With the help of the nurse who delivered the baby, he locates Birgit’s daughter, Svenja, in the neo-Nazi community where she’s living with her husband, Björn, and their 14-year-old daughter, Sigrun. At first, Björn bars Kaspar from seeing either Svenja or Sigrun, but he eventually agrees to let Sigrun visit Kaspar in Berlin in exchange for the inheritance Kaspar says Birgit provided for her. During Sigrun’s visits, Kaspar tries to dispel her of neo-Nazi beliefs by giving her books and articles debunking them. As Kaspar and Sigrun grow closer and explore Berlin’s art scene, they form a bond despite their political differences and Kaspar’s fear that Björn could curtail the visits. Schlink offers an unflinching look at the neo-Nazi movement and the compromises people make out of love. It’s a powerful story of loss and the desire to move forward. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Myth and reality fuse together in the Alsakan wilderness in the potent latest from Ivey (The Snow Child). Single mom Birdie, 26, occasionally drinks too much. When sober, she devotes herself to caring for her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen, a precocious girl who believes in witches. After Birdie falls for a mysterious and badly scarred man named Arthur, she and Emaleen move with him to his remote cabin. At first, life is bucolic, full of mushroom hunting and berry picking on the mountains, and Birdie is excited by Arthur’s primitive lifestyle. But when Emaleen catches him walking the woods in a bear skin, things take a dangerous turn for mother and child. Ivey shifts perspectives between Birdie, who longs to remake her life, and Emaleen, whose attempts to make sense of what she sees animate a story rich in legends about local animals and shape-shifters. The novel is alive with a sense of the natural world of Alaska, which Ivey portrays as a liminal space where the human and animal kingdoms interact, and it’s buoyed by gripping suspense and moments of tenderness. Ivey’s fans will be well pleased. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this hilarious farce from Rudnick (Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style), a destination wedding goes extravagantly awry. Tech billionaire Trone Meston is set to marry his flight attendant fiancé, Linda Kleinschmidt, on Artemis Island, a private retreat he owns off the coast of Maine. Among the guests are Linda’s bodybuilder ex-husband, Sean Manginaro, a former TV star who was “bodysurfing an ocean of nubile, pre-lubed, equally libidinous women” before he met Linda, and who misses the stability she provided. Also invited is Isabelle McNally, a sensitivity reader for a publishing company owned by Trone. She’s followed to the island by literary wunderkind Tremble Woodspill, whose editor, Rob Barnett, lost his job after rejecting notes from Isabelle on Tremble’s novel. Other interlopers include Rob’s friend Paolo, who’s attempting to evade a stalker he met on a gay dating app. As the weekend progresses, the subplots intersect in delightful fashion. Sean grows convinced Linda wants him back, Isabelle tries to get Trone for herself, and Tremble attempts to persuade Isabelle to help Rob get rehired. It’s all carried along by Rudnick’s delicious wit and keen eye for detail (“It’s Ralph Lauren Prairie meets Embassy Suites in Akron,” Paolo says of the lobby in Alchemy Hall, the island’s estate and conference center). Readers will relish this comedy of errors. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Film writer Fine (Accidental Genius) makes his fiction debut with the uplifting story of a 60-something Minnesotan introvert trying to overcome past regrets and bitterness. As a young woman, Ruth Winters dropped out of college to care for her father after her parents’ devastating car accident, which killed her mother and left him paralyzed. Now, having abandoned her dream of becoming a museum curator, she’s laid off from her bookkeeping job and starts babysitting to make ends meet. She remains resentful of her vivacious younger sister, Veronica, who abandoned Ruth and their father decades earlier. When Veronica asks Ruth to drive her to a chemotherapy appointment, Ruth initially balks at the idea but eventually relents, and is upset by Veronica’s physical decline. Veronica apologizes for how she’s treated Ruth over the years, and as the women repair their relationship, Veronica urges Ruth to attend an upcoming high school reunion with Martin Daly, an old flame who became a huge success and is still fond of Ruth. Fine skillfully demonstrates how Ruth’s anxieties and resentment trapped her in a lifelong pattern of self-sabotage. Readers will enjoy cheering for Fine’s late bloomer. Agent: Murray Weiss, Catalyst Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Higginbotham (The Traitor’s Wife) offers a stirring tale of suffragette and abolitionist Ernestine Rose (1810–1892), a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony. In 1822 Poland, Ernestine refuses the marriage arranged by her rabbi father, to take place when she’s 16, telling him, “It is unjust for women to be traded like cattle.” Pursuing her desire to travel the world, she moves to Berlin the next year to live with her sister. There, she invents and sells perfumed paper and teaches languages to support herself, and continues to speak out against societal restrictions on women. In Paris, she makes bullets for France’s Revolution of 1830, then moves to London, where she meets textile manufacturer and social reformer Robert Owen and his colleague, silversmith and fellow atheist William Rose. Ernestine gives her first public speech to condemn the Reform Act of 1832, the first British law to officially bar women from voting. After she marries William, the couple moves to New York City, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton dubs her “queen of the platform” for her fiery and witty lectures on women’s suffrage and abolition. In Higginbotham’s capable hands, Ernestine emerges as a well-rounded character and a figure worthy of more attention. It’s a satisfying portrait. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

A man finds himself caring for his deceased friend’s toddler in Lamont’s affecting debut. Téo Erskine, 30, holds a steady job in London, where he lives alone, and spends one weekend a month visiting his widowed father, Vic, and fellow Jewish friends Ben Mossam, a wealthy playboy, and Lia Woods, a single mother, in the northern suburb where he grew up. One Friday night at the local pub, Téo, who has a crush on Lia, agrees to babysit her two-year-old son, Joel, the next day. He brings the boy to Vic’s house, and after Lia fails to answer his texts, Téo learns that she has died by suicide. The Erskines are then visited by a team of social workers, who ask Téo and Vic to keep Joel there for a few months until they can track down his father. Téo goes on leave from work and the men adjust with the help of Ben, who buys Joel a trampoline; and Sibyl Challis, a new rabbi, who takes Joel for walks. Before the social workers return, Téo is shocked by a startling revelation. Though the story takes a while to gel, Lamont offers a textured view of Téo’s family and Jewish community, and he keeps the reader invested as the characters adjust to Lia’s death and attempt to figure out Joel’s future. Readers will be hooked. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Kim makes her English-language debut with the tantalizing story of a Korean hired bride and the company that employs her. Noh Inji, 29, works as a wife at New Marriage, a secret division of a matchmaking service that allows clients to live as if they’re married while providing the option to terminate the relationship without having to go through a real divorce. After the end of her fourth marriage contract, to music producer Han Jeong-won, she’s set up on a date outside of her company’s client pool with a man named Om Tae-seong. When Inji rejects Tae-seong, he keeps pursuing her—even after she enters into a rematch marriage with Jeong-won. Tae-seong’s disruptions ring alarm bells at New Marriage, and they dispatch a team of agents to scare him off. While happy to be rid of her stalker, Inji can’t shake the guilt she feels about Tae-seong’s fate, and she asks Jeong-won to help her find him. The investigation takes her deep into New Marriage’s secrets, and as she learns unsettling details about its operations, she reflects on her lingering grief over a childhood friend’s suicide. Kim’s layered and well-constructed novel is packed with intrigue and surprising twists. Readers will be on the edge of their seats until the final page. Agents: Jackie Yang, Eric Yang Agency; Emily Randle, Randle Editorial. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Howell debuts with a beautiful and striking collection about friendship, secrets, and unspeakable desires. “Lobes,” the outré opener, explores the narrator’s obsession with her lover’s earlobes, to the point that she fantasizes about biting or cutting them off (with his consent) and keeping them as trophies. In “Cherry Banana,” a woman takes a receptionist job at a seedy hotel, where she begins shacking up with long-term guest Henry, who pines for his runaway daughter and lives in the room she’d once checked into with her deadbeat lover. The fantastical “Age-Defying Bubble Bath” follows middle-aged Alda, who’s anxious about her wrinkles. After Alda overdoes it with a bottle of high-strength de-wrinkling bubble bath, the bubbles’ serum causes her to reverse-age into a little girl. “Kitty and Tabby” concerns one girl coping with body dysmorphia and another who claims to be a shape-shifter yearning to give birth to a boy. Throughout, Howell’s discontented characters often settle for a twisted sense of intimacy (as a character in “Devil’s Juice” says to her friend about her lover: “I don’t know if I love him. I just hate him less than everyone else”). These vivid and harrowing stories are tough to shake. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink