Tomb Song by Julián Herbert
★★☆☆☆ Julián Herbert’s kaleidoscopic, autobiographical novel Tomb Song is a paean to his dying mother, written in what feels like a real-time bedside scrawl. “I’ve endeavored to draw a freehand portrait of my mother,”...
Category: Literature
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
★★★★☆ Spanning fifty years and three generations, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair tracks a network of artistic acquaintances through high-society London. Opening in Oxford during World War II, the novel loosely revolves around David Sparsholt, an...
Big Guns by Steve Israel
★★★☆☆ U.S. Representative-turned-novelist Steve Israel delivers his second novel Big Guns, which carries the torch of the 2005 comedy film Thank You for Smoking—it’s the satirical tale of an industry that revels in its...
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
★★★★★ Debut novelists disproportionately tend to write about aspiring writers. This often indicates the author’s mere desire to write, rather than actually having something of value to express. But this need not always be...
Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto
★★★☆☆ Chronicling the 1895 fall of the Gaza Empire in Mozambique, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes is a finely-researched work of epic potential. The first of a trilogy, this novel follows the lives...
Waiting for Tomorrow by Nathacha Appanah
★★★★☆ Adam and Anita feel as if they don’t belong. In fact, it was over that mutual feeling that they first met, at a New Year’s party in their late 20s. He’s from the...
Madness Is Better Than Defeat by Ned Beauman
★★★☆☆ Channeling Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, Ned Beauman’s novels are sprawling and hilarious works that tumble into realms of inspired, lost-in-time exotica. 2012’s The Teleportation Accident (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize)...
The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara
★★★★☆ The House of Impossible Beauties delivers one of the most vital things a novel can offer: a vivid and personal glimpse into a subculture that existing media has yet to examine with in...
Ice by Anna Kavan
★★★☆☆ Originally published fifty years ago and recently reissued in an anniversary edition with supplemental texts by Jonathan Lethem and Kate Zambreno, Anna Kavan’s Ice is a story of a man obsessed. A nameless...
