(Credit: Random House)
For her illuminating and tender new novel, Bloom draws upon thousands of letters that reveal the real-life relationships between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, the former Associated Press reporter who secretly lived down the hall from Eleanor when she was First Lady to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Bloom tells the story from the point of view of the feisty “Hick” – a self-described hayseed, smoker and drinker who is frank about her hardscrabble upbringing, her days with the press corps and her enduring love for Eleanor. Eleanor turns to Hick in 1945 after FDR’s funeral, and she’s comforted – drinking sidecars, listening to Cole Porter, napping. Meanwhile, Hick regales us with stories of their meeting in 1932, their time on the road, her encounters with FDR and the perils and pleasures of loving the powerful. (Credit: Random House)
Zadie Smith, Feel Free
Smith, one of the most celebrated novelists in the world today, has crafted dozens of essays positioned at the intersection of “three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.” The 35 essays in her new collection were written in the US and UK during the eight years of the Obama presidency – now “products of a bygone world”, she writes. She opens with a piece about taking her daughter to visit her mother and discovering her treasured Willesden Green bookshop is endangered. In another, she counters Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook with virtual reality pioneer Jason Lanier’s warning that we be attentive to the software which we are “locked in”. She interviews Jay-Z (“an artist as old as his art form”), assesses books and art, travels widely, and ends with joy – “such a human madness”. (Credit: Random House)
(Credit: Bloomsbury Publishing)
A small fox – a light, bright vixen – crosses Waterloo Bridge one day in February 2014. Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist visiting London to give a conference keynote on PTSD, is crossing when he’s bumped by a jogger – tall silver-haired Jean, a wildlife biologist engaged in a study of urban foxes. Forna begins with these small moments and moulds them into a richly textured and engaging novel. She ranges widely, from the 1834 New England woods where a wolfer tracks the animal killing a farmer’s cattle to a risky checkpoint in 2000 Sierra Leone where Attila recognizes the commander in charge as a former patient. Happiness is both a love story and an exploration of the potential for trauma to cause not just damage, but resilience. (Credit: Bloomsbury Publishing)
(Credit: Alfred A Knopf)
“See what can be done.” That’s the “magical request” Moore got each time Robert Silvers, the legendary editor of the New York Review of Books, asked her to write about something. Her critical stance, she writes, was “that of the ingenuous Martian who had just landed on a gorgeous alien planet”. This collection of 60 lucid and erudite cultural essays by the award-winning fiction writer is a treasure. Here are her takes on the work of John Cheever, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Clarice Lispector and dozens more. Plus, an appreciative account of binge watching The Wire. She ends with a multilayered tribute to Stephen Stills, whose songs, for her generation, are “marinated in our minds, our spines, our bones”. (Credit: Alfred A Knopf)
(Credit: Riverhead)
Groff’s new story collection offers a sensual, ambivalent portrait of Florida. It’s a “damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things.” A nightmare. A fairy tale. A place where two young sisters are abandoned on an island like Robinson Crusoe, the older keeping fierce watch over the younger. And where the spectre of a Florida panther terrifies a woman stranded unexpectedly with her young sons in an old hunting camp. In one story a woman lets her husband and sons head out on a stormy Halloween without her, forlorn because she’s been rejected by her best friend. “What is it about me that people need breaks from?” she asks the dog. In another story a frazzled mother takes nighttime walks in which “the neighbours’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.” (Credit: Riverhead)
(Credit: Random House)
The dazzling final collection from the American author who died in May. The title story follows a downwardly mobile ad man from New York to San Diego, where his perspective changes. “This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life – the distance I’ve traveled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms – that I almost crashed the car.” In an equally unpredictable tale, an injured young writer is given a knee exam after ingesting LSD (“unmasking pain, in itself, as something cosmically funny, as well as revealing the overwhelming, eternal vitality of the universe…”). Sharing a jail cell with Strangler Bob launches another “fallen angel”. A brilliant finale. (Credit: Random House)
(Credit: Algonquin)
Roy takes the fast track from Eloe, Louisiana to the historically African-American Morehouse College, then begins a promising business career. Celestial, an independent Atlanta-born Spelman graduate, has found her artistic niche. The two meet through her boyhood friend Andre, marry, and seem happy, despite Celestial’s occasional doubts (“Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk,” she muses). Eighteen months in, the marriage derails when Roy is falsely convicted and sentenced to 12 years in a Louisiana penitentiary. How can love be sustained when justice fails? That’s the question at the heart of Jones’s nuanced and evocative new novel. An American Marriage is a compelling exploration of the thorny conflicts that drive us apart and bind us, the distorting weight of racism, and how commitment looks across time – and generations. (Credit: Algonquin)
(Credit: Riverhead)
Three undergraduates meet at Noxhurst College. Phoebe is a once aspiring piano virtuoso. Will is a transfer student from a religious college in California. John Leal has returned to Noxhurst after living in Yangi, a Chinese city next to North Korea. There, he worked as an activist for an American group helping North Koreans defect. He was abducted by North Korean spies, taken across the border to a gulag, where he witnessed many horrors, then released after five months. As the three classmates gather for parties, and drinks, Will is drawn to Phoebe, but John Leal is pulling her away, toward something sinister. Kwon’s exquisitely written first novel is an explosive mix, tracking the formation of a cult that turns to violence. (Credit: Riverhead)
(Credit: Viking)
The first volume of award-winning author Vollmann’s new project is an important primer on global warming and reportage about the effects of nuclear power in Japan, incorporating his multiple visits after the tsunami and nuclear meltdown. The title comes from an official phrase used by the Japanese authorities after the accident at Fukushima. His exhaustive research encompasses coal, oil, natural gas and atomic power. To tell his tale, he “hiked up strip-mined mountains, sniffed crude oil, and occasionally tanned his face with gamma rays.” He raises complicated questions about the tradeoffs and choices we face, always wondering how those in the future will judge us. Because electricity “was as exhaustible as the buffalo herds”, he notes ironically, “needless consumption of power provoked fewer complaints than you from the future might suppose.” (Credit: Viking)
Christopher Yates, Grist Mill Road
Grist Mill Road opens with a crime: “I remember the gunshots made a wet sort of sound, phssh phssh phssh, and each time he hit her she screamed.” This moment in 1982, in the mountains north of New York City, what came to be known as the “Swangum shooting” links classmates Patrick, Hannah and Matthew for life. In 2008, when Hannah is married to Patrick and working on a true crime book, Matthew suddenly reappears, stirring up secrets and thoughts of vengeance. Yates constructed a thrilling psychological puzzle in his first novel, Black Chalk. With his second, he’s written an even more complex and propulsive whodunnit laced with questions about moral responsibility, the relativity of truth, the reliability of memory and the long-term consequences of our actions. (Credit: Picador)