This is where making this list gets hard. Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, was, by far the best book I read this year. It is way too reductive to call this a Katrina novel, even though the 2005 hurricane broods over the whole story. It is a book about family, mothers, violence, […]
Kevin Powers’ historical novel, A Shout in the Ruins, had me from the first paragraph. It’s not just that he told a gripping and heart-filled novel of my home state, Virginia, in the Civil War and mid-20th century eras. It’s also that Powers is an elemental writer who uses words to explosive effect, touching on the […]
We’re halfway through the best reads of the year. We’ve had poetry, history, and an African adventure tale. How about a mythic journey into the Yorkshire woods? Fiona Mozley’s debut novel, Elmet, is the story of a wild man, his vulnerable son, and his ferocious daughter. It is also one of the best pure stories I […]
As we continue the countdown of best reads of 2019, we come to Out of Darkness, Shining Light by the Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah. It’s a vivid imagining of the company that escorted the body of Dr. David Livingstone, the famed explorer and missionary, back to the coast following his death in central Africa. Gappah’s novel […]
I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine […]
November 11 is Armistice Day, the day in 1918 when the fighting in what was then known as The Great War, came to a stop. It took until June 28, 1919 for the Treaty of Versailles to be signed, which means that we are only just now coming to the end of centennial observances. But […]
You might expect that there’d be a little bit of Beowulf in a book by a medieval studies scholar in York, England. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel adds some Heathcliff, too, for a touch of Yorkshire Moors gothic. But even if you can spot the forbears in Elmet, you probably won’t suspect what you’re getting in […]
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When […]
Even when I was a child in the 1960s and 70s there was still some adventurer’s romance attached to the words of Henry Stanley upon finding his quarry: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Despite the flood of newly independent African nations in that era, people could still be heard referring to Africa as “the dark continent” […]
Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him […]
