In this mischievous and mournful story collection from Hungarian writer Kristóf (1935–2011), originally published in 2005 and translated into English for the first time, characters deal with homesickness, homicidal tendencies, and other maladies. At 15, the protagonist of “The House” is distraught when his family moves from his idyllic childhood home. As an adult, he hires an architect to reconstruct the house based on his memories, and is disheartened by the result (“I had a copy made. Ridiculous. As if you could copy what you once knew”). In “The Axe,” a woman calls the family doctor after her husband allegedly fell out of bed onto an axe, and the story’s dark joke—which is that obviously she killed him—remains funny all the way to the end. In “The Canal,” a dead man is led by a puma and an indifferent boy, who turns out to be his son, to an open sewer, where the puma explains that he will float for eternity. Uncertain filial piety also figures into “The Father,” in which a grieving son considers how he’s unable to carry out his late father’s last wishes. Each entry is coolly ironic and moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bosnian British author Morris debuts with the stirring story of a community’s heroic efforts to maintain its humanity during the siege of Sarajevo. In spring 1992, as sectarian tensions boil over, Zora, a 55-year-old artist of Serbian descent, chooses to stay behind while her husband and mother flee to London. Zora and her Catholic and Muslim neighbors underestimate the risk they face, downplaying the barricades set up by militiamen intent on carving the city into nationalist enclaves, until one night a Serbian shell slams into their building. Life in the city descends into previously unimaginable depths of horror as snipers take aim at civilians, sever power and telephone lines, and choke off exit points, stranding a defenseless population as winter looms. The embattled residents of Zora’s building band together, resisting degradation through their commitment to art and friendship. For her part, Zora opens her doors to neighbors, converts her apartment into a studio, and gives painting lessons. Morris’s prose vibrates with love for the singular city, dotted with Hapsburg spires, Islamic arches, and the onion domes of Serbian Orthodox churches; and for its residents, who, withered and starved, cling tenaciously to the ideal of a multiethnic metropolis. The world she crafts is perfectly rendered, and it amounts to a poignant love letter to Sarajevo and to the human spirit. This one is tough to shake. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pooley (Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting) charms in this rollicking tale of six wily members of a London Senior Citizens Social Club whose zest for life improves the outlook of their community center’s part-time worker. Lydia takes a job managing their club as respite from her condescending husband, who she suspects is having an affair. She expects docile card games and is surprised to meet such a vigorous group of older people. Among them is Art, a former soap opera actor who keeps himself entertained by shoplifting; Daphne, a busybody who rarely talks to the others and enjoys the “sensation of power that an imbalance of information imbued”; and Ruth, a “small but fierce-looking” knitter whose unauthorized public art earns such headlines as “Mystery Yarn Bomber of Hammersmith Strikes Again!” When the local council decides to sell the community center to a real estate developer, Lydia’s motley crew attempts to block the deal by pulling off various stunts, like sabotaging a meeting between the council and an architect. Along the way, their tenacity helps Lydia rediscover her self-respect. Pooley’s clever and delightfully farcical scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, often thanks to the frank Daphne. This ought to satisfy Pooley’s fans and win her new ones. Agent: Hayley Steed, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Harvey (The Summer of Songbirds) spins a moving tale of a heartbroken young woman discovering her family’s secrets. Keaton Smith, a marketing guru in New York City, leaves her job after learning her boyfriend has just gotten her boss pregnant. Keaton then retreats to her hometown of Beaufort, N.C., occupying herself with helping her mother and uncle ready her grandparents’ abandoned house for sale. The grandparents, Townsend and Becks, disappeared almost 50 years earlier and were presumed dead after their wrecked car was discovered in a creek. Their lives have long been a forbidden subject for the Smiths. When Keaton arrives at the house, which she didn’t know was still in the family, she quickly gathers that nothing has been changed there since 1976, the year her grandparents were last seen, and grows determined to find out what happened to them. In a parallel narrative from Becks’s point of view in 1976, Harvey breathes life into the home, where Townsend and Becks regularly host dinner parties that make them the toast of the town. Gradually, Harvey reveals the reasons behind Becks’s disenchantment with her life and desire for a change. The tautly plotted story thrums with yearning as Becks and Keaton each seek meaning for their lives. This is women’s fiction at its best. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Book Group. (June)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Espach (Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance) offers a sparkling and slightly macabre novel of a 30-something woman finding a new lease on life. After adjunct English professor Phoebe Stone’s husband leaves her for her colleague, she declines an invitation to return the next semester, unable to stomach seeing her husband’s new lover. Unable to find another teaching job, she checks into a luxury hotel in Newport, R.I., where she’s always wanted to stay, and plans to end her life with her cat’s painkillers. She doesn’t count on the hotel teeming with wedding guests, or meeting the 20-something bride, Lila, who, after hearing of Phoebe’s plans, does everything she can to keep Phoebe alive, worried a suicide would mess up her perfect wedding. During an early morning soak in the hotel’s hot tub, Phoebe is drawn to a handsome stranger and buoyed by their connection, even though he lets her know he’s taken after she brazenly hits on him. The next day, Phoebe learns he’s the groom. Over the course of her brief stay, Phoebe, having chosen to stay alive, musters the courage to break her old patterns and stop letting people walk over her, which leads to a triumphant finale. Readers are in for a treat. (July)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

The enchanting latest from Platzová (The Attempt) brings metafictional elements to a portrait of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka’s onetime fiancée. The novel opens in 1935, nearly two decades after the end of Bauer’s relationship with Kafka. Now married with children, Bauer flees Europe with her family for America during Hitler’s rise to power. After her husband dies in 1950, she begins running a nail salon out of her home and later opens a sewing shop. As Kafka’s fame grows, letters sent to Bauer by Kafka during their engagement gain the interest of publishers. A few years later, Bauer’s son, Joachim, is approached by a man who claims to be Kafka’s lost son. In chapters set in the 2010s, Platzová recounts her research, such as an interview with the real Joachim, whose name is actually Henry and who gives her his blessing to write about the family, and her decision to preserve Felice’s name despite changing Henry’s, since Kafka had already made her a “literary character.” Though prior knowledge of Kafka’s life and affairs may benefit readers, the novel succeeds thanks to its elastic bounce through time and playful blurring of history and imagination. As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

The second novel from essayist and poet Manguso (after Very Cold People) paints an excoriating portrait of a marriage. In brisk prose, Manguso tells the story of John and Jane, who meet as emerging artists and discover, over the course of their 14-year union, just how “adversarial” a marriage can become. Jane, who narrates, is a writer deeply committed to her craft. While working on a book-length poem, she meets John, a multidisciplinary artist, and she’s relieved to find a kindred spirit, someone “for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental.” But after getting married and becoming parents, Jane realizes John is “the main character” and she’s “his wife.” Consequently, she “floated face down in housewifery,” cooking, cleaning, and taking charge of moving the family from New York City to Los Angeles after John launches a film production company there, then back to New York after the company fires him. When John eventually leaves her, she fantasizes “about shitting in my hand and smearing... the shit into the backs of all his paintings.” Manguso’s barbed sentences push the plot forward at a brisk pace. The author is at the top of her game. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pilot Hopson’s stirring debut draws on the life of trailblazing aviator Bessie Coleman. As a young Black woman, Bessie toils in Waxahachie, Tex., picking cotton and doing other people’s laundry. In 1915, when she’s 23, she leaves for Chicago, where she finds work as a manicurist. Having heard of the Wright brothers’ first flight, she harbors a dream of learning to fly. She saves what she can of her earnings and secures financial support from a real estate entrepreneur, with whom she has an affair. Though she has the money, no aviation school in the U.S. will train a Black woman, prompting her to study in France. After receiving her pilot’s license, Bessie returns to the U.S., where she’s greeted by a mob of reporters. The narrative extends through WWI, after which Bessie trains in Europe with military pilots who teach her combat maneuvers. Back home in America, she stages air shows with the tricks she learned abroad and embarks on a lecture tour, hoping to inspire other Black people to learn to fly. Hopson shines a welcome light on her indomitable and unsung heroine, and her technical knowledge enriches the many exhilarating aerial scenes. Aviation buffs will love this. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Staple’s nimble first book, a PR director for a professional football team reckons with her role as enabler of toxic behavior after the head coach is found dead. Poppy Benjamin has spent the past 15 years with the Syracuse Bobcats, burnishing their image and occasionally preventing players’ indiscretions from making headlines. After coach Red Guillory dies in his home, the police open an investigation. Then, Poppy and four fellow female sports executives who jokingly call themselves WAGS (Women against Groping in Sports) discover they’ve each recently received the same anonymous note, warning that they have five days to fess up to some unspecified misdeed. As Poppy learns more about how Red died, she confronts decisions she and the other WAGS made on their way to the top that may have put other women in danger of being sexually abused. Some of the police procedural elements feel thin, but Staple’s love of football and unflinching look at its dark side are both colorful and credible. It’s a worthy addition to the fiction inspired by #MeToo. Agent: Andrea Somberg, Harvey Klinger. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the uplifting latest from Roorbach (Lucky Turtle), a girl and a monkey forge a life-altering friendship. The narrator, Beep, a restless squirrel monkey in a Costa Rican rainforest, leaves his family and sets out to find a mate, climbing his way toward a smoking volcano. There, he meets a girl named Inga, who’s visiting with her family from New York City. She feeds him pineapple before stowing him in her bag. The two communicate via grunts and agree that Inga will smuggle Beep home to Manhattan. Beep gets his footing there after chatting with squirrels in Central Park, dodging dogs, and, together with Inga, emancipating the animals on display at the Bronx Zoo. Amid the commotion, they take shelter behind the robes of two Buddhist monks, who impart advice to them about the value of loving and respecting all animals. As Beep’s relationship with Inga deepens, he learns more about himself and the world around him and resumes his quest to meet a mate. Roorbach maintains a steady supply of entertaining wordplay, as Beep phonetically reproduces what he overhears (“ladies and gentleman” comes through as “labies and genitalmen”), and the portrayal of Beep and Inga’s friendship convinces. Animal lovers will savor this. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 06/07/2024 | Details & Permalink