Editorial reviews

About Motherhood

Some readers may implore Heti’s narrator to decide already, while others may immerse themselves in the vital questions she raises --- questions that shatter many of the assumptions we (still) make about the true value and purpose of women’s lives.

About Miss Subways

Duchovny weaves a brilliant, complex and fun tale. Because there’s so much in store, it’s easy for just about anyone to board the Duchovny train, take a seat next to Emer, and have the ride of their life.

About My Ex-Life

In My Ex-Life, McCauley never lets you forget that love truly is a many-splendored, not easily categorizable thing.

About The Neighborhood

The story, while moderately diverting, never achieves a truly compulsive rhythm. The eye keeps snagging on formulas in seeming rotation.

About Speak No Evil

This is a memorable book from an important talent.

About The Life to Come

For a novel concerned with dislocation, there’s a lot of grounding humor in “The Life to Come.” Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser’s observations are so spot on, you’ll forgive her even as you cringe.

About Waiting for Tomorrow

While Waiting for Tomorrow is about the longing for recovery, the novel ends on a bittersweet note, reaching a space where, even if they now have grey in their hair and are forever changed, this family can move forward and begin to count tomorrows again.

About Census

You don’t have to have any particular interest in Down’s syndrome to connect with this aspect of the book: it isn’t a polemic about special needs, but a detailed and moving portrayal of a kind of radical innocence, one that brings both the cruelty and the kindness in the world around it into sharp focus.

About Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

Like Riverton itself, “Summer Hours at the Robbers Library” feels artfully balanced between the reality of loss and a carefully guarded hope for renewal.

About Just Like February

An ultimately optimistic and hopeful novel about growing up amid personal and political disarray.

About Census

The novel’s main philosophical thrust comes through the narrator’s interest in the writing of Gerhard Mutter, a fictional naturalist who wrote obsessively about cormorants. The narrator’s sublime attempt to see the world as his son sees it is paralleled with Mutter’s trying to know the mind of the birds she so admires.

About Silver Girl

“We don’t know half the ways poison infiltrates,” the narrator overhears at a frat party, and that is the inspired wisdom of this beautiful, bleak, and hopeful story. We don’t know. But that won’t keep us from trying to it figure it out.

About Whirlaway

Bukowski and his ilk might appreciate this oddball version of the hero’s journey, soaked in beer and melancholia.

About Stray City

Quirky and sweet.

About The Flicker of Old Dreams

The Flicker of Old Dreams is an absolute literary delicacy and already is one of my favorite novels of the year.

About Let's No One Get Hurt

Let's No One Get Hurt is an excellent coming-of-age novel that explores how we deal, or don't deal, with loss and abandonment, and how we can create new versions of ourselves when we're forced to.

About Tomb Song

It’s easy to excuse the inconsistencies of Herbert’s memory; he often succumbs to his addictions or his ego, and he’s also digging out from beneath the grief and confusion of his mother’s ailment, so he’s as unreliable a narrator as they come.

About The Neighborhood

One can almost hear Mario Vargas Llosa’s voice --- smooth, quiet, understated --- while reading his prose. Not one word is wasted.

About Census

An elegiac yet ultimately hopeful story about a man’s intentions for his final days and about his wishes and dreams for his son following his death.