(Credit: Counterpoint)
Kim France, a provocative feminist artist, doesn’t show up at Los Angeles’ Roque Museum for the opening night of her new exhibit titled Still Lives – self-portraits of female murder victims, including the Black Dahlia and Nicole Brown Simpson. Is it a sly performative gesture? Or something more sinister? Hummel’s fourth novel shows her genius for layering levels of meaning, and her sophisticated sense of the mercurial, sometimes corrupt art world, from dealers to wealthy patrons, including those so secretive they want to purchase work (and drive up an artist’s worth) without leaving a trail. Maggie, our guide into this convoluted world, works as an editor at the Roque; her boyfriend Greg has recently opened a gallery and left her for Kim France. Maggie’s stake in this story makes for unrelenting suspense. (Credit: Counterpoint)
Rachel Cusk, Kudos
A writer boards a plane for a literary festival in an unnamed European city, and offers a wry account of her seatmate’s boorish behavior, including his tale of putting down his dog before driving to the airport. So begins the third novel in Cusk’s much lauded auto-fictional trilogy (after Outline and Transit). Faye recounts a series of literary moments at the festival that end in monologues by people who are interviewing her, accompanying her to her festival events, publishing her work or meeting her at parties. One first novelist describes a mishap with her daughter’s hamster – it was a good story, she concludes; her agent sold it to The New Yorker. The college-age son of the festival director talks about his mother’s pride in his “kudos”. Cusk’s distinctive narrative radiates fierce intelligence. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Gaël Faye, Small Country
Faye, who emigrated with his family to France from Burundi in 1995, won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for this first novel, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone, which captures a child’s-eye view of genocide. Normal life for Gabriel, aged 10, is hearing his Rwandan mother and French father quarrelling and hanging out with his boyhood friends in their neighborhood in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. Gunfire one night heralds a military coup. Six months later, the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda are killed in a plane crash, and over the next few weeks the Tutsi are “massacred, liquidated, eliminated”. Gabriel’s Tutsi mother is destroyed by what she sees. As violence spills over the border, Gabriel’s father sends him to France for safety. “I didn’t leave my country, I fled it,” Faye writes. (Credit: Hogarth Press)
(Credit: Penguin Press)
“Poets investigate. Don’t we? Isn’t that what we do every day?” Robert Browning addresses Christina Rossetti and Oliver Wendell Holmes as the three ponder the latest in a string of Dante-themed murders in 1870 London. Tudor House, the Rossetti home, has become their version of Scotland Yard. Even Tennyson, England’s poet laureate, has a theory. Pearl’s cunning follow-up to The Dante Club involves Christina, her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and their late father’s controversial translation of Purgatorio. Gabriel, who has been missing for weeks, and already lost in an opium fog, is high on the official list of suspects. Christina is fighting for his honour. And the scribe of a book about the Dante Murders in Massachusetts sets Holmes on edge. Pearl twists the plot to the final page. (Credit: Penguin Press)
(Credit: Doubleday)
Louise and Lavinia seem fated to meet, the gleam of Lavinia’s luxurious life drawing Louise, who works three jobs to pay her bills, into the flame. On New Year’s Eve, Lavinia dresses Louise in a 1920s frock, does her hair and make-up and takes her out to party. So begins a deadly game of attraction set in the underground clubs and high-end restaurants of New York, starring two women in their 20s who lure each other into ever more dangerous behaviour. As Louise’s profile rises (she becomes a buzzworthy young writer to watch), her bank account falls. There’s an accidental death, and a cover-up. A psychological thriller that echoes and updates Patricia Highsmith, with Burton using ever-present social media (Instagram, Facebook, Tinder) as an ingenious plot device. (Credit: Doubleday)
(Credit: Other Press)
Guelfenbein won the international Alfaguara Prize for this novel, translated from the Spanish by John Cullen, which features a potent and mysterious literary figure modelled on Brazil’s Clarice Lispector. In the opening chapter, Vera Sigall, 80, whose fiction has inspired a cult following, is living in self-imposed isolation in Santiago. One morning her neighbour Daniel, an architect, finds her after a fall down her stairs – a fall he suspects was no accident. During his weeks attending the comatose Vera at the hospital, Daniel shares information about the enigmatic author with Emilia, a French-Chilean academic writing a thesis on Vera’s work. Vera’s past emerges through Horacio, a poet and her former lover. He sparked Emilia’s interest in Vera’s work and introduces the two. “I have a feeling we’ve met before,” Vera tells her. A marvellous, multi-faceted feat of storytelling. (Credit: Other Press)
(Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Stacey Haney, a single mother working as a nurse in rural Pennsylvania, becomes an unwitting test case for the toxic consequences of fracking when she signs an oil and gas lease with a major company. Soon her teenage son is wasting away with health troubles, including arsenic poisoning and ulcers that keep him out of school for 18 months. Stacey and her daughter have injuries that won’t heal, nosebleeds and fatigue. The prize farm animals are dying. Griswold follows Haney through seven years of struggle to find justice, with a dogged attorney who proves the company has faked test results, and that environmental agencies have been unresponsive. Griswold creates a complex, elegantly written portrait of Stacey and a community ambivalent about the industry they hope can bring prosperity. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
(Credit: Grand Central Publishing)
In this moving memoir, Stern describes growing up feeling “broken” due to undiagnosed panic disorder. Her anxious energy leads to continual testing during childhood, difficulty learning and continual fears her mother will die or disappear. She describes the sense of safety she derives from the gardens where she grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s in Greenwich Village. She dreads weekends uptown with her father and finds the world “scary on the street side of life” – a fear confirmed when her six-year-old neighbour Etan Patz is kidnapped. Writing and theatre became a way through her panic (but also present the perils of training under a predatory director). It takes two decades before she receives a diagnosis and treatment. Vivid and illuminating. (Credit: Grand Central Publishing)
AM Homes, Days of Awe
Homes, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, brings sardonic vision and intellectual acuity to a dozen stories that capture the ironies of US life. In The Last Good Time, a young father returns to Disneyland, hoping to recapture his unbroken self before his parents’ divorce. Brother on Sunday offers a first-rate account of a competitive beach day in the Hamptons. In a visionary tale set in a big-box store, a family of “consumers to the core” reach an end point. In the brilliant title story, The War Correspondent and the Transgressive Novelist, former post-collegiate buddies, reconnect at a conference on genocide and embark on a series of adventures that range from spiritual to erotic. “Why do you and I choose to live in the pain of others?” she asks him. (Credit: Viking Press)
(Credit: Akashic Books)
Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, with a population of 21 million, has, like many coastal cities, a “very checkered and noir past”, writes novelist Chris Abani in his introduction to this anthology. Sarah Ladipo Manyika writes of a man breakfasting in his Victoria Island mansion, unaware that this will be his last day. A Igoni Barrett speculates that in 800 years, when the history of Eko is taught, teachers will explain, “These were strange times in Lagos; everybody was a criminal.” Chika Unigwe follows Emeka, an ambitious okada driver, through a deadly encounter with a policeman demanding an oversized bribe. In Abani’s story, a detective investigates a Mrs Dorothy Parker’s claim that her pet monkey killed her husband. (Credit: Akashic Books)