The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
★★★★★ The disappearances started small. A certain type of candy, let’s say, was one morning gone — not gone from the stores but wiped from existence. Every resident of the unnamed island of The...
Category: Literature
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
★★☆☆☆ A shadowy novel about espionage and emotional fidelity, Berta Isla follows a woman’s unrelenting commitment to her husband and his secrets. Tomás Nevinson and Berta Isla were teenage sweethearts and set on maintaining...
Going Dutch by James Gregor
★★★★☆ Big city dating is quite the battlefield, and James Gregor’s Going Dutch is as current and insightful a portrait as one might find. At his worst, the story’s protagonist Richard treats social capital...
The Expectations by Alexander Tilney
★★★☆☆ The Expectations by Alexander Tilney is an exploration of the difference between the main character’s hopes for his boarding school experience and the reality he encounters. At St. James boarding school, Ben wants...
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada
★★★☆☆ Selva Almada’s debut novel The Wind That Lays Waste is set up as a carefully orchestrated morality play: when a reverend’s car breaks down, he and his daughter are forced to spend a...
The Travelers by Regina Porter
★★★★☆ Regina Porter’s debut novel casts a big, wide, engrossing net of an intergenerational family saga. It starts in the 1950s and ends in the Obama era. It follows not one but two parallel...
Hark by Sam Lipsyte
★★★☆☆ Sam Lipsyte’s Hark plays like an inside joke that requires prerequisite familiarity with the author’s sensibility. There’s absolutely talent on the table here, an intriguing blend of the offbeat charm of George Saunders...
Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam
★★★☆☆ Without treading heavily in religious domain, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss depicts the classic story of never feeling satisfied despite having it all. The titular Chandra enters a late-life crisis, at the tail...
The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
★★★★☆ Picture a glass globe, hollowed out. Is it empty, or paradoxically, is it filled with a void? Like the questionable audibility of a falling tree in a distant forest, it’s a conundrum that...
