10 New Books We Recommend This Week – The New York Times
It’s purely a coincidence, I swear, that our recommended books this week include a novel named “Elsewhere” and a memoir named “Son of Elsewhere” — but as coincidences go, it’s a pretty resonant one, no? Wherever we are these days, it seems, we all want to be anywhere but here.
Elsewhere (hey-o), we also recommend two memoirs in which well-known authors take a close look at their parents’ lives — “Esmond and Ilia,” by the literary critic and scholar Marina Warner, and “Rough Draft,” by the TV journalist Katy Tur — along with investigative exposés of abuse at a boys’ reform school and the environmental costs of industrial-scale hog farming. In fiction, we like Andrew Holleran’s time-haunted new novel, “The Kingdom of Sand,” Jess Walter’s story collection “The Angel of Rome,” and comic novels about art (by Mark Haber) and family ties (by Alison Fairbrother). Happy reading.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
Abdelmahmoud spent the first 12 years of his life in Sudan identifying as Arab — when he thought about his identity at all. When he then emigrated to Kingston, one of the whitest cities in Canada, he quickly learned he was Black. Life in a new country brought with it discomfort but also possibility.
Holleran’s fifth novel — both melancholy and hilarious — finds the protagonist living out his days in his late mother’s Florida home, navigating loneliness, a changing world and a life post-cruising. The book’s image of isolation and old age is all the more haunting because in 1978 Holleran wrote the quintessential novel about the sheer, careless pleasure of gay abandon, “Dancer From the Dance.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $27
Tur’s first memoir, “Unbelievable,” chronicled her obsessive chase of Donald J. Trump on the 2016 campaign trail. This one — which is equally riveting — charts her upbringing as the daughter of obsessive journalists. As Tur unpacks the family laundry, it turns out that her father is every bit as complicated as Trump: narcissistic, grandiose, vain, lurching noisily from success to failure. To outsiders, Tur’s dad is charming and wildly charismatic, running for mayor of Los Angeles, developing an “almost canine instinct” for TV journalism and, above all, teaching Tur how to crush her rivals. When Tur feels the urge to push a little harder, she writes, “it’s not usually my competition or my colleagues that I have in mind. It’s my father. Not that I’d endorse all his methods.”
One Signal/Atria | $28
Haber’s comic novel tracks the friendship, falling-out and sort-of reconciliation of two critics who have devoted their careers to a 16th-century painting of St. Sebastian that both find sublime — though for different reasons. What is it about art that can move us to extremes? This absurdist take on very serious people hazards a guess.
Coffee House | Paper, $16.95
Warner is an expert on myth, legend and fairy tale. As such, it makes sense that this elegiac “unreliable memoir” of her parents’ life should be a story of the power of narrative, told through lore, symbols and allegory. While we learn the details of an improbable marriage and a fractured childhood, the project is greater. More than anything, it is a reckoning with loss.
New York Review | Paper, $19.95
These stories are largehearted and wonderfully inventive, managing to render generations of emotionally complex lives in relatively few pages. Walter offers an empathetic yet unsentimental take on relationships.
Harper/HarperCollins | $27.99
Schaitkin’s second novel, set in a remote mountain town where new mothers risk succumbing to an “affliction” that causes some to vanish without a trace, joins the recent roster of impressive books that have employed speculative elements to examine new motherhood.
In this warm and funny debut novel, a grieving daughter is determined to get to the bottom of a baffling inheritance. Why did her father leave a prized baseball to a stranger — and why did she receive a glow-in-the-dark tie rack?
Random House | $27
Addison, an attorney and best-selling novelist, tells the extraordinary true story of how some neighbors of hog operations in North Carolina battled a meatpacking company polluting their communities. They sued the company in federal court, launching cases that took years to resolve, with surprising twists and serious implications not only for the future of American agriculture but also for the health of our democracy.
The abusive Florida boys’ school at the center of Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys” was based on an all-too-real institution — and in this new book by a forensic anthropologist, the appalling legacy of that school is laid bare. Kimmerle was at the forefront of an excavation effort that exposed the full horror (and the full number of casualties) of the school’s hundred-year history. Here, she recounts not just the crimes of Dozier, but the challenges and fallout of the controversial dig.