Jonathan Lethem, The Feral Detective
In a detective story that feels as if it’s unfolding in real time, Lethem creates a surreal amalgam of fiction and reality in the wake of the election of Trump – who he dubs “the Beast” and the “monster in the tower.” His narrator, Phoebe, leaves her job at the New York Times and heads to the west coast, tracking a friend’s missing teenage daughter, who may have been influenced by Leonard Cohen’s withdrawal to Mount Baldy Zen Center. Phoebe hires “feral” detective Charles Heist, and voyages into the Inland Empire, where Los Angeles merges into the desert. Lethem conjures up a world evolved from hippies and isolationists, with the marginal communities divided into Bears and Rabbits. As Lethem tightens the suspense and violence ignites, Phoebe encounters her own untamed nature. (Credit: Ecco)
Yukiko Motoya, The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Strange things happen to the characters in Motoya’s fiction. In the title story in her first collection, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, a woman transforms herself through rigorous diet and weightlifting with a coach “my arms are chunky like a wild beasts”, but still her husband ignores her. Q and A is framed as the last nuggets of advice offered by a bedridden ‘agony aunt’ who notes, “I have reached the limit of my living ability to blithely continue spouting phrases like your feminine radiance, or a natural lifestyle…” In An Exotic Marriage, which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, a woman realises she is starting to look just like her husband. “It was spooky.” And it gets spookier, thanks for Motoya’s gift for making the ordinary magical. (Credit: Soft Skull Press)
Mathias Énard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants
Énard’s new novel, set in 1506, is based on the notion that Michelangelo, who in fact rejected an invitation from the Sultan in Constantinople to create a bridge across the Golden Horn, linking East and West, had said yes. Énard sketches out Michelangelo’s motivation (competition with Leonardo da Vinci, whose design had been rejected, and financial need: the Sultan offers him five times as much as the Pope). The Sultan provides for his needs, including inspiration from a muse based on the Ottoman poet Mesihi. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, who also translated the 2017 Man Booker International prize-shortlisted Compass, Énard’s exploration of beauty, love, drunkenness, cruelty and the ephemeral nature of art is both playful and profound. (Credit: New Directions)
Charles Graeber, The Breakthrough: Immunology and the Race to Cure Cancer
Graeber’s crisp and suspenseful book is the perfect backstory for this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded to James P Allison and Tasuku Honjo “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” He begins with Jeff Schwartz, the Los Angeles-based music manager, whose stage-four kidney cancer was halted when he was accepted into an early clinical trial in 2011 after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy failed. Graeber reaches back to 1885 for the origins of immunotherapy, treatment based on checkpoint inhibitors now visualised as the cure for cancer equivalent to the discovery of penicillin. His focus on the human stories, especially courageous patients like Schwartz and torch-bearing doctors like Dr Allison, make for an inspiring medical narrative. (Credit: Twelve)
Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005
Leader opens the second volume of his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist with the 1964 launch party for Bellow’s Herzog, which won the National Book Award. Throughout the 784-page book Leader explores and amplifies Bellow’s two worlds – a “love world, or spiritual world,” embodied in the end in his intense love for his fifth wife Janis, and a “world of strife and jostling,” figured in “animosities and anxieties” that follow him to the end of his life. Particularly moving are episodes in Bellow’s eighties, when he survives a near-fatal poisoning after eating contaminated red snapper in St Martin, becomes a father, publishes Ravelstein, based on his friendship with philosopher Allan Bloom, and suffers from dementia. A brilliant, stimulating, moving portrait in which “The fullness of the fiction mirrors the fullness of the life.” (Credit: Knopf)
Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth
In his concise and thoughtful new collection, Franzen credits his New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, with “the few lessons I’ve learned about writing essays,” beginning in 1994 when Franzen was a “would-be journalist in pressing need of money”. Now an award-winning novelist, Franzen writes eloquently about his passions (climate change, Edith Wharton, and bird watching in Egypt, Albania, Jamaica, East Africa and Peru). He details the voyage he took to Antarctica in memory of his uncle Walt, adding 31 new bird species to his life list, including the Emperor Penguin. The captain and passengers cheer him for spotting the Emperor, “a complete, disorienting novelty,” leading him to muse, “I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential human thing.” (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Idra Novey, Those Who Knew
On an unnamed island newly emerged from a dictatorship, single mother Lena is suspicious of Victor, a prominent young senator who champions the right to free college tuition. She had a violent encounter with him when they were student activists in college, and she suspects he may have pushed Maria P, a student introducing him at rallies, in front of the bus that killed her. Novey’s portrait of a charismatic bully who rises to power, gaining the backing of a political party through manipulation and the willing silence of others, is chilling. She tells her story through multiple forms; a diary, a play in progress, and multiple perspectives; Lena, her older activist friend Olga, Victor’s gay playwright brother Freddy, his wealthy wife Cristina, even Victor himself. A bold and timely novel. (Credit: Viking)
Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story
In this intimate intellectual memoir, Pagels, a Princeton professor of religion and author (The Gnostic Gospels), reveals the personal tragedies that accompanied her scholarly milestones. Raised evangelical, she has her first religious shift in her teens in Palo Alto, after the death of a close Jewish friend. (Jerry Garcia, later of the Grateful Dead, was also injured in the car accident.) In 1987 she and her husband, theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels, lost their first child, a son born with a heart condition, at age six. The following year, Heinz was killed in a mountain climbing accident. Pagels details life after his death in all its rawness, the comfort that comes from religion, including meditating with members of a Trappist community, and how these tragedies shaped her further work. (Credit: Ecco)
Helen Schulman, Come with Me
Schulman’s new novel covers three days in the life of a stressed-out Silicon Valley family. It’s narrated by Amy, a part-time PR person at a tech start-up, mother of 17-year-old Jack and eight-year-old twins. Her boss Donny, a friend’s techie son, enrols her as Subject X in his multiverse experiments. His concept allows users to explore alternative lives. “It’s a personalised crystal ball,” Donny says. “All of life’s regrets and little mysteries answered… Using AI.” Amy’s husband Dan is drawn astray, one twin is kicked out of school, Jack’s best friend jumps in front of a commuter train, and the personal data Amy has accumulated in the cloud comes back to haunt her. A sharp yet compassionate glimpse of the ironic excesses and unanticipated tragedies of the Internet age. (Credit: Harper)
Eric Karpeles, Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski
Karpeles delivers an elegantly framed, captivating biography of a little-known Polish artist whose life spanned most of the 20th Century (1896-1993). Czapski was “soldier, public figure, historical witness, memoirist, essayist, painter,” Karpeles writes. “Born into privilege, a titled aristocrat, he lived like a bohemian, like a monk.” Over decades in Paris, Czapski’s circles included Andre Malraux, François Mauriac, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Mavis Gallant and Czesław Miłosz. An officer in World War One and World War Two, he was incarcerated for two years in 1940, unaware that Stalin had ordered the execution of 21,000 Polish officers. (After the war he pursued the truth for decades; the Soviets kept this secret until 1992.) Karpeles’s translation of Czapski’s unforgettable survivor’s story, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, is also published in November. (Credit: New York Review Books)