Featuring Barbara Kingsolver, Yiyun Li, Bonnie Garmus, and More
Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, and Bonnie Garmus’s Peck & Peck all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Partita by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper)
14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Barbara Kingsolver here
“A hallmark of the decorated novelist’s work is her flair for pithy sentences that illuminate the human experience, giving voice to our private longings and secret vulnerabilities … Kingsolver brings the full weight of her experience and her other work to the page in this entirely new story. It hits the same chords, but it is full of discovery and insight. She’s different, and we’re different too.”
–Heather Scott Partington (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
9 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
Listen to an interview with Yiyun Li here
“Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
3. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus
(Scribner)
5 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Bonnie Garmus here
“It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count.”
–Claire Clark (The Guardian)
4. The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson
(William Morrow and Company)
8 Rave
Listen to an interview with T. Geronimo Johnson here
“The book is doing a lot, but for good reason … A book for readers seeking wild, ambitious literature … Even with occasional misfires, The Occidental Book of the Dead just might be something the literary world needs to see more of: It’s ambitious, creative and, most important of all, unapologetic … It will not be a novel for everyone. It doesn’t want to be. And that’s a large part of why it succeeds.”
–Jason Mott (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer
(Knopf)
6 Rave • 2 Positive
“Astonishing … Luna, Phoenix, Queen brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms, and the relief that can only come in telling a story for oneself.”
–Meg Wolitzer (The New York Times Book Review)