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The Book Review

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The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

21st Century Books Special Edition: Isabel Wilkerson on 'The Warmth of Other Suns'

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Isabel Wilkerson joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her 2010 book about the Great Migration.

Book Club: 'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante

The New York Times Book Review recently published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

21st Century Books Special Edition: Jennifer Egan on 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'

As part of its recent “100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Jennifer Egan discusses discuss her Pulitzer-winning novel about the music industry, "A Visit From the Goon Squad."

Liz Moore on Her Summer Camp Mystery "The God of the Woods"

A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. On this week’s episode, author Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about her new novel “The God in the Woods.”

What We're Reading This Summer

On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz chats with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the books that have been occupying their attention this season.

21st Century Books Special Edition: George Saunders on 'Lincoln in the Bardo'

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, George Saunders joins host Gilbert Cruz.

Sarah Jessica Parker on Her Life in Publishing

Since 2016, the renowned actress has also worked in publishing, bringing her name and love of books to imprints at two companies. In this episode, she discusses what that work has meant to her.

21st Century Books Special Edition: Min Jin Lee on 'Pachinko'

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Min Jin Lee joins host Gilbert Cruz.

Hosts & Guests

Gilbert cruz, george saunders, sarah jessica parker, min jin lee, colson whitehead, lev grossman, mj franklin, joumana khatib, lauren christensen, griffin dunne, ratings & reviews, new favorite episode.

Just finished listening to the August 9 episode and I relished every minute. Maybe because Gilbert C and I are enjoying the same book at the same time? But no, Anna Dubenko and Joumana Khatib were just as much fun. These are all readers with wide interests and firm opinions (don't try to borrow a book from Anna) and their love of books and reading shines through. I might listen again.

Spoiler-prone reviews

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I only check in with this podcast from time to time and am always surprised at the degree to which they spoil novels’ plots. Just as they were finishing their review of ‘Master Slave Husband Wife,’ one of them casually spoils the end of the novel! For no reason whatsoever—it was just said in passing. And then two of them gigglingly say “Spoiler alert,” AFTER they drop the spoiler!! Unbelievable. If these people were my friends I would avoid talking to them about books. Can’t believe people can be so knowledgeable about books and still be so dense about what a listener wants from a book reviewer. Tell us what we need to know in order to be enticed and no more.

Excellent and a request

Please put a photo of the book you are talking about

Still enjoy the new format

I miss the insights into and updates about the publishing industry, but otherwise enjoy this podcast.

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• Years Active 2006 - 2024
• Episodes 505
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The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023

The list of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 includes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, and highlights buzzy and lesser known books alike.

Always books. Never boring.

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Our cup runneth over with best books lists right now, and The New Yorker’s best books of 2023 is one of the latest lists to emerge. Funnily enough, no matter how many of these kinds of lists we read, it’s always interesting to see another — to note the overlap between lists, see books that perhaps hadn’t gotten a lot of buzz this year, and to read each publication’s editors’ notes.

So let’s dive in. This year, The New Yorker divided its list into three categories: The Essentials, Nonfiction, and Fiction & Poetry.

The Essentials

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Melville)

Fiction & Poetry

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey (Knopf)

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (Gillian Flynn)

For a full list of The New Yorker’s best books of 2023, click here .

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

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The Book Review

New York Times

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

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21st Century Books Special Edition: Isabel Wilkerson on 'The Warmth of Other Suns'

Duration: 00:39:12

Book Club: 'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante

Duration: 00:50:56

21st Century Books Special Edition: Jennifer Egan on 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'

Duration: 00:41:08

Liz Moore on Her Summer Camp Mystery "The God of the Woods"

Duration: 00:39:39

What We're Reading This Summer

Duration: 00:32:34

21st Century Books Special Edition: George Saunders on 'Lincoln in the Bardo'

Duration: 00:41:21

Sarah Jessica Parker on Her Life in Publishing

Duration: 00:35:44

21st Century Books Special Edition: Min Jin Lee on 'Pachinko'

Duration: 00:34:58

Book Club: Let's Talk About "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith

Duration: 00:46:12

21st Century Books Special Edition: Colson Whitehead on 'The Underground Railroad'

Duration: 00:36:20

What It's Like to Write a King Arthur Tale

Duration: 00:32:46

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Duration: 00:37:05

Book Club: 'Headshot,' by Rita Bullwinkel

Duration: 00:34:06

Griffin Dunne on His Joyful and Tragic Family Memoir

Duration: 00:37:50

10 Books to Check Out This Summer

Duration: 00:28:27

Elin Hilderbrand on Her Final Nantucket Summer Book

Duration: 00:37:38

Let's Talk About Percival Everett's 'James'

Duration: 00:45:40

Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

Duration: 00:43:03

Fantasy Superstar Leigh Bardugo on Her New Novel

Duration: 00:41:44

Colm Toibin on His Sequel to 'Brooklyn'

Duration: 00:44:19

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Breaking news.

As the last official month of summer, you best believe we’re all about the beach reads. And, of course, other new and hot releases that fell into our laps this month.

From Reese’s Book Club picks to some from Rory Gilmore’s reading challenge (yes, it’s that time again), I’ve been on the lookout for unique titles and some of the most seasonal releases to rest and relax poolside.

As someone who has been avidly reading each day and producing monthly book roundups since January, this month’s selection was one of the most unique. Above all else, they are titles to consider — some of which are approved by the Amazon Books team.

RELATED : Best July books, ranked and reviewed

Ahead, find the best titles read this month, with review notes for each. While hardcover and paperback editions are nice, there’s nothing like listening with audible , so it’s worth signing up for a membership .

“Swiped” by L.M. Chilton

Goodreads rating : 3.56/5 stars

About the book : “Swiped” by L.M. Chilton is a gripping thriller about a woman’s search for her missing sister that unravels into a dark exploration of deception, obsession, and hidden agendas.

With a fun cover and an even more engaging plot, “Swiped” by L.M. Chilton is a novel that kept me on my toes. If you love books about relationship drama, you’ll love this one.

“This novel, described as if ‘Bridget Jones found herself in a Scream film’ is in fact more darkly hilarious than Bridget’s mishaps, which is to say it does for internet dating what Bridget did for husband-hunting–except with a lot more murder,” Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Books Editor, shared. “Half a dozen of them, to be exact. And a whole lot of red herrings, grimly funny disastrous date recaps, and a crashed ice cream truck.”

Buy on Hardcover | Buy on Kindle

“All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster

Goodreads rating : 3.27/5 stars

About the book : “All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster is a heartfelt novel about a woman confronting her past and rediscovering herself and her family while grappling with love, loss and the complexities of time.

Set in The Hamptons and filled with some classic-leaning flair, “All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster is one of the best books of summer that makes you think.

“The Wedding People” by Alison Espach

Goodreads rating : 4.27/5 stars

About the book : “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach is a sharp, insightful novel that delves into the intricacies of relationships and personal growth through the lens of a couple navigating the highs and lows of wedding planning and its impact on their lives.

Trigger warning: mentions of suicide. Otherwise, “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach is a thoughtfully written and beautifully written novel unlike anything I’ve read before. Plus, its serene summertime setting is spectacular.

“This is one of the most candid, resonant, hilarious novels I’ve read about how chance encounters can lead to the most surprising outcomes,” Abby Abell, Amazon Books Editor, told the New York Post. “It takes a scalpel to the expectations we place on ourselves and celebrates how freeing it is to let them go.”

“A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner

Goodreads rating : 3.50/5 stars

About the book : “A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner is a captivating story about a woman who returns to her family’s beach house, where she confronts old secrets and discovers the power of love, family and self-reinvention.

Pleasant and fit for the lover of slow reads, the “A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner hails from one of my favorite authors and is sure to bring back all the nostalgia.

Buy on Hardcover | Buy on Paperback | Buy on Kindle

“The Fiancé Dilemma” by Elena Armas

Goodreads rating : 3.79/5 stars

About the book : “The Fiancé Dilemma” by Elena Armas is a charming romantic comedy about a woman who, facing a family crisis, recruits a charming but reluctant fake fiancé, leading to unexpected romance and self-discovery.

From the author who brought us the top-rated “ The Spanish Love Deception ,” this rom-com is both magical, witty and will keep you on your toes. It was one of my favorite reads this month, at that.

Elena Armas deftly and delightfully delivers on some of my favorite romance tropes–fake engagement, slow burn, he falls first,” Abell noted. “It is sweet and sexy and so much fun. A perfect romance to close out the summer.”

Buy on Paperback | Buy on Kindle

“Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent

About the book : “Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent is a delightful and witty novel about a woman who, after a string of personal and professional setbacks, embarks on a journey of self-discovery and culinary adventure while navigating complicated relationships and finding her own path.

If you’re a foodie and love vivid detail in writing, “Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent is the book for you. You’ll fall in love with the characters, most of all.

“Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews

Goodreads rating : 3.71/5 stars

About the book : “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews is a fun and engaging romantic comedy about a feisty chef and a charming food critic whose rivalry turns into unexpected romance as they navigate the competitive world of cooking shows and personal ambitions.

Fit for the foodie (again), “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews is a pleasurable read that’s filled with suspense, romance and a little bit of everything.

Other July Books to read, per the Amazon Books Editorial team

“there are rivers in the sky” by elif shafak.

Goodreads rating : 4.59/5 stars

About the book : “There Are Rivers in the Sky” by Elif Shafak is a reflective exploration of love, loss, and the intertwined fates of individuals set against a backdrop of cultural and spiritual landscapes.

“Spanning centuries and continents, this has everything I love in a big book — curious connections between characters, the hook of hope you harbor for each, and the satisfying (and extraordinary) way it all comes together,” Al Woodworth, Amazon Books Editor, said. “It’s perfect for fans of Anthony Doerr, Geraldine Brooks and Abraham Verghese.”

“By Any Other Name” by Jodi Piccoult

Goodreads rating : 4.17/5 stars

About the book : “By Any Other Name” by Jodi Piccoult” delves into the complexities of identity and self-acceptance through the story of a woman grappling with her cultural heritage and personal transformation.

“With intriguing, well-researched details, Picoult brings genuine depth — and love — to her characters and their narratives, playing with perception to make a point without overplaying her hand,” Seira Wilson, Amazon Books Editor, said. “This remarkable novel is an awakening, entertaining story to share.”

“House of Glass” by Sarah Pekkanen

Goodreads rating : 4.01/5 stars

About the book : “House of Glass” by Sarah Pekkanen is a gripping novel that delves into the secrets and lies within a seemingly perfect family as they unravel in the wake of a mysterious death.

“This is a tense, slow-burn of a thriller,” Cronin said. “If you enjoy the agony of rising suspense and second-guessing your own amateur sleuthing, this thriller delivers a chef’s kiss of shivers and secrets.”

“The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory ” by Thomas Fuller

About the book : “The Boys of Riverside” by Thomas Fuller is a poignant exploration of the lives of young men in a small town, focusing on their struggles and aspirations as they navigate personal and societal challenges.

“When I read The Boys of Riverside, I was taken back in time to when I first saw ‘Remember the Titans’ at the cinema,” Ben Grange, Amazon Books Editor, said. “This is one of the best books I’ve read all year; ultimately, it’s an inspiring story that will speak to sports fans, deaf communities, allies and more.”

“We Burn Daylight” by Bret Anthony Johnston

Goodreads rating : 3.98/5 stars

“This novel is perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s ‘ The Girls ‘ and Chris Whitaker’s ‘ We Begin at the End ‘ and ‘ All the Colors of the Dark ,'” Cronin recommended. “‘We Burn Daylight’ is a page-turner that will make your stomach dip and roll with anticipation and fear for what happens to two young kids in 1993, who are inextricably linked to a cult leader who stockpiles weapons. This is a lightning bolt of a read that, once you finish, you’ll want to begin again to understand just how seamlessly Johnston links all the pieces together.” 

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Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Fareed Zakaria is a captain of the punditry industry. A longtime host of his own CNN show on international and domestic politics, a columnist at The Washington Post , and the author of best-selling books on current affairs, he seems to have been everywhere and read everything. Born in India of Muslim parents, educated at Yale and Harvard, and now hobnobbing with heads of state, he maintains just enough emotional distance from the United States to look at our internal divisions and external entanglements with a relatively cool eye. In Age of Revolutions Zakaria goes all the way back to the Netherlands in the 1500s to try to understand our contemporary situation, with its populist backlash, uncertainties about globalization, eye-popping changes in digital technology, and upending of the international political order as a result of the rise of China and the revanchism of Russia. Even without the historical background, this would be a daunting subject.

The disruptions in politics, economics, and technology make this a revolutionary time, Zakaria maintains, so examples from past revolutions should help illuminate our path. He aims to answer three main questions: “What makes a period revolutionary? Are there other predictable consequences of a revolutionary era? And how does it all end?” These questions sound straightforward, but examined more closely, they reveal questionable assumptions. Zakaria contends that we live in a revolutionary period, but we cannot be certain of this because we do not know what its trajectory will be. That Steve Bannon thinks we live in revolutionary times is hardly conclusive evidence.

If it is difficult to tell whether a period is revolutionary, then it is even more challenging to seek the “predictable consequences” of revolution. Zakaria offers his own version of earlier European revolutions, extracting their predictable consequences in the hope that they will help foretell how our present era of revolution will end. Many self-proclaimed revolutionaries looked back at earlier examples hoping to derive lessons from them: in the 1920s, for example, leading Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky worried that the Russian Revolution had entered its Thermidorean phase. Thermidor was the name of the month in the French revolutionary calendar for 1794 when Maximilien Robespierre and his followers fell from power and were executed, after which their radical innovations were rolled back, the economy was made more market-oriented, and the propertied classes were able to regain their influence.

Zakaria looks back for entirely different reasons. Rather than fearing the deterioration of revolutionary spirit, he singles out exemplary “liberal” revolutions that kept in check the most extreme revolutionary impulses. These revolutions embraced globalization, benefited from technological and financial innovations, shored up representative forms of government, and encouraged religious tolerance and diversity, all of which he wants to bolster in the present. He begins with the Dutch war for independence from Spain that began in 1566, because in the course of it the Dutch set up a republic and offered religious toleration. They also gained an advantage over their economic competitors by developing the best oceangoing ships and launching new forms of investment that were open to all, including a stock exchange and a Bank of Amsterdam that functioned much like a central bank.

Zakaria then moves on to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689, because “England had the right political ingredients for a liberalizing, modernizing revolution.” The parliamentary factions united to throw out King James II, who wanted to emulate French-style authoritarianism and restore Catholicism, and they invited to the throne James’s solidly Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, the Protestant head of the Dutch Republic. The couple agreed to make England a constitutional monarchy and promptly assented to a Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, which granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. The English learned from the Dutch and leapt ahead of them, acquiring a taste for Chinese tea, building a naval arsenal with taxes on the consumption of global products, and establishing the Bank of England in 1694 to fund the state and stimulate investment. Meanwhile the Dutch rested on their laurels and lost their edge by the end of the seventeenth century.

Zakaria then seizes upon the French Revolution of 1789 as a counterexample to these liberal revolutions. In his recounting, it was extremist, violent, and based on “identity politics,” in this case a polarization between patriots and traitors. It failed because it was “imposed by political leaders, rather than growing naturally out of broad social, economic and technological changes,” as the Dutch and English ones had. The liberal constitutionalism of those like the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American War of Independence, gave way to the radical populism of Robespierre, whose repressive policies repelled even his allies. He and his followers thus paved the way for the nationalist authoritarianism of Napoleon Bonaparte. Taken as a whole, the French Revolution added up to “an unnecessary bloody detour from a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.”

This gets to the heart of the problem with Zakaria’s three main questions. He does not like radical revolutions because they do not take “a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.” Yet his Dutch and English examples are revolutionary only in the most minimal sense. The Dutch revolted to preserve their Calvinist way of life, and to achieve this they fought their Catholic Spanish overlords in what they themselves called, once it was over, the Eighty Years’ War—not exactly a brief cataclysmic event. They established a republic because a loose federation was the only way to get the various Dutch provinces to cooperate, and they allowed the private, not public, worship of any religion because some provinces still included many Catholics, Catholicism having been almost everyone’s religious identity before the Reformation of the early 1500s. (This toleration did, however, open the way in the 1590s and afterward for Jews fleeing persecution by the Spanish and Portuguese.) Democracy was out of the question; the oligarchy of rich merchants, manufacturers, and landholders dominated political decision-making until well into the 1800s.

The English “revolution” of 1688–1689 is even more questionable. It took a relatively nonviolent form because the English had had a radical revolution a generation before. In the civil wars of 1642–1660, King Charles I was defeated in battle, put on trial, and executed, and the monarchy was replaced by something resembling a republic of which Oliver Cromwell became the authoritarian Lord Protector—more authoritarian than Robespierre could ever hope to be. Events in 1688–1689 worked out differently because neither faction in Parliament wanted a repetition of those upheavals. The more relevant French comparison, then, would be with the Revolution of 1830, when, as in 1688–1689, one king was promptly replaced with another, constitutional government was assured, and religious toleration (first granted in 1789–1791) was reaffirmed. “Get rich” became the motto of the post-1830 regime. Might it be that violent revolution is sometimes necessary to prepare the ground for a steady, reformist route toward democracy?

Zakaria’s examples of previous political revolutions pale in comparison, however, with his “mother of all revolutions”: the industrial revolution that began in Britain, made the United States into a world power, and upended lives around the globe. Although he recognizes the downsides of industrialization, such as the exploitation of workers, including women and children, and environmental degradation, his view of its effects is resolutely positive. Its “ultimate consequence” was “to let humanity break free from the limits of biology” by devising machines to replace animal and human labor. Workers were eventually better off, and people yearned to move to the cities from the countryside to enjoy the benefits of new opportunities, despite crowded housing, unimaginably long workdays, and rampant infectious diseases.

In this account, as in Zakaria’s retelling of the Dutch, English, and French revolutions, slavery and colonialism hardly figure. The Dutch used their oceangoing technologies to outstrip their erstwhile Spanish masters in the transatlantic slave trade, though they soon found themselves eclipsed by the British in this, too. The Dutch seized colonial outposts from the Portuguese all over Asia and took control of what is now Indonesia, where they introduced coffee and had it grown by forced labor for consumption in Europe. Freedom at home did not translate to the colonies. The Dutch never had much of an abolitionist movement, in contrast to Britain, and only ended slavery in their colonies in 1863.

Similarly, the revolution of 1688–1689 coincided with a vast expansion of the British slave trade. Moreover, although it gained greater powers for Parliament and religious toleration for dissident Protestants in England, it only intensified the oppression of Catholics in Ireland. William personally commanded an army to defeat James and his Irish Catholic supporters, and in the ensuing reaction Irish Catholics were excluded not just from Parliament but from owning weapons, becoming lawyers or teachers, buying land, and sending their children abroad for education.

The connection between slavery, colonialism, and the industrial revolution remains a hotly debated topic. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British were all avid colonizers and enthusiastic participants in the slave trade, yet only the British went on to invent steam-driven machinery that used coal to power both factories and the new means of transport, railroads. Zakaria makes much of the singularity of Britain, but he overlooks its dependence on US cotton and minimizes its distortion of the economy of India to suit its aims. The leaders of the Confederacy had every reason to hope that the British might support their secession from the United States, since in 1860 Britain imported 80 percent of its cotton from the southern slave states. With seeds purloined from China, the British set up tea plantations in Assam in northeastern India to counter Chinese dominance in the trade. They also sold Indian opium to the Chinese to improve the British balance of payments, and when the Chinese resisted, Britain waged two opium wars, in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. At the same time they destroyed the domestic manufacture of cotton textiles in India with a system of tariffs favoring British manufacture. “Free trade” as the linchpin of globalization was free for some, not all.

Zakaria has an enviable ability to condense huge amounts of information and seize upon the most salient points, so it is regrettable that he often wears rose-tinted glasses when sifting through the evidence. “With the onset of industrial production and mechanized transport,” he maintains, “trade became more profitable than war.” He might have argued instead that industrialization made war much deadlier. If globalization “demonstrably improved the material living conditions of practically everyone in the world,” it did so at great cost to those who lost their jobs to outsourcing or found themselves virtual slave laborers in new factories. To be fair, however, Zakaria is most positive about free trade, industrialization, and globalization and less sanguine about the digital revolution, the changes in the global balance of power, and the rise of the new populism. The digital revolution has given us convenience and efficiency at the cost of “civic engagement, intimacy, and authenticity,” he concludes. In fact, he blames the digital revolution rather than globalization for most of our woes: it has fostered atomization, job losses, social resentment, and extremism.

Yet the real culprit, Zakaria claims, is identity politics, which he traces back to the Netherlands, whose people thought of themselves as Protestant and Dutch rather than distant subjects of a domineering Catholic empire. Technological and economic changes combine with identity politics, he argues, to create volatile new political alignments. In the good revolutions—the Dutch, the English, and the industrial revolutions—progress advances apace without too much disruption because identity politics give way to more pragmatic solutions such as religious toleration and the gradual inclusion of male workers in electoral politics. In the bad revolutions—the French Revolution, the rise of China and attempted revival of Russia, and the global populist surge—identity politics turn destructive. In France, self-proclaimed patriots silenced dissenters by guillotining them if necessary. Napoleon used nationalism to cement his power at home, but his wars of conquest inflamed national feeling throughout Europe, which poisoned international relations for decades. Vladimir Putin, then, is just the latest in a long line of populist nationalists who rail against alien (in this case, Western, secular, antipatriarchal, antimasculinist) influences in order to inflate their standing at home and justify their actions abroad. In the current populist surge, however, the polarization does not just pit the nation against outsiders; it divides the nation itself into irreconcilable parts.

In Zakaria’s usage, “identity politics” is a baggy term covering too many disparate manifestations. Black campaigns for civil rights and against police brutality, women’s demands for equality, and the LGBTQ movement are lumped together with sixteenth-century Dutch Protestants, eighteenth-century French patriots, anti-Catholic sentiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, anti-immigrant crusades across the globe, and even China’s policy of favoring the Han ethnic majority. In other words, identity politics power both parts of Zakaria’s subtitle: progress and backlash. They can be a sign of social progress or an expression of backlash against that progress.

For Zakaria, progress always begins with economic and technological change. The “first identity revolution,” the Protestant Reformation, was made possible by the invention of the printing press. The post–World War II economic boom, “brought about by globalization and technological progress,” made possible “the most radical identity revolutions of the twentieth century.” In doing so, it also fostered a potentially unmanageable dialectic: “Formerly marginalized groups perceive the change as liberating and reach for newfound dignity; those at the top fear losing the status they already have.” Zakaria adroitly traces the ensuing “vicious cycle of political polarization” in the United States, but the parallels with Europe do not work as well. There immigration, particularly of Muslims, is the crucial issue, much more consequential than US culture-war conflicts such as the fight over abortion rights, the banning of books, or the labeling of public restrooms. In Europe, Muslim immigration can be cast, he admits, as undermining women’s and gay rights and secularism and not just as a threat to Christian or white ethnic identities. Immigration is an issue in the United States, too, but never because it threatens women’s or gay rights.

Although Zakaria recognizes the gains made by the various campaigns for rights since the 1960s, he comes close to blaming the magnitude of those changes for the backlash that followed. American civil rights legislation passes at the beginning of one paragraph, but by the end of it “race riots became commonplace.” Four students are killed in an anti–Vietnam War protest in another, and the following paragraph focuses on the rise of crime in the 1970s.

Similarly, the backlash against immigration seems predictable. The percentage of foreign-born people in the United States “nearly tripled to over 13 percent” between 1970 and 2016, an important fact that leaves out the equally important one that the percentage of foreign-born Americans was even higher in 1890, at nearly 15 percent. Zakaria wants readers to understand the fears felt by those who express fury about the effects of immigration, but he does not offer a solution. What we need, he says, is “an immigration regime that is seen by all as rules-based and fair.” This is easier said than done.

Zakaria’s focus on identity politics ultimately leads him astray. We should not be “seduced” by identity politics, he concludes, which are “fundamentally illiberal, viewing people as categories rather than individuals.” Yet he shows that sometimes people must come together to insist that their “category” needs to be taken seriously, granted rights long refused, and afforded dignity that has been denied. His own analysis points toward the necessity of understanding the identities of those who have felt denigrated in their turn by the changes that have taken place.

A dose of identity politics might have been useful in Zakaria’s consideration of his two big geopolitical threats of our time, Russia and China. Having made a strong argument for greater understanding of those who feel that globalization, modernization, and immigration are existential threats, he reverts to a categorical, us-versus-them analysis of international politics. The United States still exercises great influence in global politics, but it now navigates in a multipower world, and to achieve its aims, it must also concede status to its competitors. Zakaria may be right that Russia “faces a future of technological decay, economic stagnation, and diplomatic weakness as it increasingly becomes a vassal state of China,” but he could also be wrong, and in either case, recognition that Russia has reasons to feel aggrieved about NATO expansion might better prepare the way for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine.

China gets a more respectful scrutiny, if only because of its powerful economy and military, and Zakaria hopes that the US “can find a way to live in peaceful albeit energetic competition” with it. If he had had more to say about climate change and pandemics and the increasingly urgent problems they pose for everyone on the planet, he might have found more grounds for cooperation, not just between the United States and China but more generally in the world. For someone so invested in international conversation, it is surprising that most of the solutions Zakaria proposes are geared to a US audience. They are often thoughtful ones: universal national service to create a new sense of community; free preschool, subsidized childcare, and paid parental leave to strengthen family life; market regulation and a modicum of wealth redistribution; and a renewed emphasis on the free exchange of ideas in colleges and universities. These may be meant to indicate a steady, reformist route, but in the current circumstances, they sound almost revolutionary.

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Lynn Hunt is a Distinguished Research Professor in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include Inventing Human Rights , Writing History in the Global Era , and, most recently, History: Why It Matters. (September 2024)

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The Year in Reading

The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2023 . The magazine’s writers also came across many other new favorites—classics they resolved to finally tackle, memoirs and biographies they drew on in their writing, an art book that is a beautiful object in its own right, a centuries-old poetry collection, a guide to writing thrillers, and other overlooked gems. Their recommendations are below.

Spurred by the delightful documentary “ Turn Every Page ,” I decided that 2023 would be the year that I finally began to make my way through Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, the sort of book one wants to have read—and thus must, at some point, read. But what a pleasure the reading of it turned out to be! I had been warned about the lengthy description of the grass of the Texas Hill Country that opens “ The Path to Power ,” the biography’s first volume, as if Caro’s rigorous attention to the history of the landscape that made Johnson’s boyhood might put me off before I got to the good stuff. Actually, it reeled me right in. “To these men the grass was proof that their dreams would come true. In country where grass grew like that, cotton would surely grow tall, and cattle fat—and men rich. In country where grass grew like that, they thought, anything would grow,” Caro writes of Johnson’s forefathers, the white settlers who thought that the unspoiled Hill Country held the key to their fortunes. (Spoiler alert: they were wrong.) What I love here is Caro’s musical grasp of rhythm and repetition, and his use of short, blunt words; this is mythic writing used for the purpose of puncturing myth. His superb grasp of character, too, benefits from a certain mythic understanding of human nature. Caro is a believer in nature and nurture both; he shows us how Johnson was shaped by the place and the people he came from, and how he determined to shape himself in defiance of them, but he doesn’t discount the innate ambition that Johnson seems to have been born with. Count me among the legions rooting for Caro to finish his fifth and final volume.— Alexandra Schwartz

For the past several months, I have been reading to write an essay on marriage. My reading list was determined by friends whom I e-mailed to ask for their favorite “marriage stories”: “a story,” I wrote, “which tells a truth about marriage but—and this is important—does not foreground courtship, adultery, divorce, or death.” Almost everyone who responded observed that this was a surprisingly challenging question. Their answers, when they came, ranged from novels to stories to poems, but it is Phyllis Rose’s “ Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages ,” first published in 1983, and reissued in 2020, which remains the most companionate book on my list. Marriage, Rose writes, is “a struggle of imaginative dominance,” the smallest unit in which the freedom of fiction—the freedom to dream, to tell stories—is cramped by the unequal distribution of power. The uneasy union of art and politics yields two plots, the plot of the conquering male and the plot of the suffering female, which Rose threads through her investigation of the Dickenses, the Carlyles, the Ruskins, the Mills, and the happiest couple of them all, the unmarried George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Rose speaks of her couples as one might speak of friends; she is, by turns, inquisitive, tender, skeptical, and animated by the high spirit of gossip, which she wants to redeem as “the beginning of moral inquiry.” Thinking of the friends whom I have gossiped with recently, I wonder if Rose’s two plots have been succeeded by a third: the marriage of the conquering female and the thwarted male, as seen in “ Fleishman Is in Trouble ,” “Fair Play,” and “ Anatomy of a Fall ”—all featuring couples who are aware of feminism’s lessons but incapable of inhabiting them peaceably or desirously.— Merve Emre

Symbols fade, but irritation is timeless. And so, while we can only guess at what “ground geckos” or a “brocade zither” meant to the ninth-century poet Li Shangyin—best known for cryptic verses about love—his inspired kvetching about everyday life in Tang-dynasty China feels as current as a text from your wittiest friend. “ Derangements of My Contemporaries ,” translated with sardonic simplicity by Chloe Garcia Roberts, is his masterpiece of misanthropy, a catalogue of follies, peeves, and misfortunes that doubles as a portrait of a society in decline. The poems take the form of deadpan lists. “Definitely Not Coming” begins with “A courtesan being called at by poor aspiring scholars,” while “Contradictions” invites us to imagine “A gaunt petty official” and “A butcher reciting Buddhist scripture.” The form is such a perfect container for annoyance that it burrows into the unconscious; once, driven to my desk by insomnia, I wrote an inadvertent homage called “Obstructions to Sleep.”

Li, a scholar-official whose ambitions were thwarted, gives vent to frustrations by turns relatable and comically élitist, heaping ridicule on bullies, hypocrites, and poseurs but also “vulgar” common folk who commit such faux pas as “casting divination blocks” or playing the flute while riding an ox. (“Cannot Abide” begins with “A fat man in summer months / Entering the residence of a hateful wife.”) Often, though, snobbish pique yields to a more rueful and ruminative mode, as Li reflects on the waste and futility around him. In the title poem, he sketches a haunting tableau of disordered responses to adversity: “Drunkenly calling on ghosts and spirits . . . Enemies reminiscing / Grown men flying kites.” Behind the scorner and the mourner is a poet who delights in the absurd, observing that “nuns, like weasels, enter the profound,” or that “a capital bureaucrat, like a winter melon, grows in gloom.” His world is long gone, but its petty derangements—and the secret joy of noticing them—are still with us.— Julian Lucas

In 1984, a filmmaker and activist named Ben Caldwell established a community art and media center, in Leimert Park, in South Central Los Angeles, that would become known as KAOS Network. His dream was to create a place for young African Americans to build sustainable, self-reliant systems for producing and distributing their art. In the nineteen-seventies, Caldwell had been part of a community of young Black filmmakers in Los Angeles—a movement, which included Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, later dubbed the L.A. Rebellion—and he hoped to empower the next generation of kids to fashion their own alternatives to traditional media. He opened KAOS Network to all: a group of young rappers who would later become known as Project Blowed; videographers and aspiring journalists; Afrofuturist thinkers and writers; drag-ball performers; and also Yoruba Christian congregations, theatre companies, dancers, and artists. Today, collaborators working out of KAOS Network are making games, augmented reality, even autonomous vehicles. “ KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell ,” by Caldwell and Robeson Taj Frazier, a professor at U.S.C., is a spellbinding book documenting the filmmaker’s life and work. Caldwell’s restlessness of spirit is mimicked in the book’s elaborate, frenetic design. It is one of the most beautiful objects I held in my hands this year, a coffee-table book as much as a rigorous monograph, full of archival images, photographs, flyers, and documents telling the story of Caldwell’s life, from his New Mexico childhood, to his military service in Southeast Asia (where he first became seriously interested in photography), to his arrival in Los Angeles, in the seventies, all of it culminating in KAOS Network, and the worlds Caldwell has helped manifest.— Hua Hsu

Claire Keegan’s “ Small Things Like These ” is a slender novel that can be read in one sitting. Since reading it this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about the book, both because of Keegan’s luminous prose and because of the crisis of conscience that unspools within its pages. Set in a working-class town in Ireland in 1985, the novel’s protagonist is Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant whose customers include a local convent that takes in “girls of low character” and puts them to work in a laundry. Rumors have circulated that the girls in the laundry are cruelly exploited. There is even talk that the convent turns a profit by arranging for wealthy foreigners to adopt the girls’ “illegitimates” (babies born out of wedlock). Furlong is not inclined to believe such talk—he is determined “to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people,” not least to provide for his wife and five daughters, who might wish to attend St. Margaret’s, a school affiliated with the convent, at some point. But a few days before Christmas, he visits the convent to deliver a load of logs and finds a girl locked inside a coal shed. Her fourteen-week-old baby has been taken away from her, she tells him.

As Keegan notes in an afterword, such scenarios were hardly uncommon in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, where tens of thousands of “fallen women” were forced to labor under squalid conditions and babies died routinely. (The historian Catherine Corless revealed that, in one Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, seven hundred and ninety-six children died.) Furlong’s own mother might well have shared the fate of these women, had a Protestant widow with a large house not agreed to take her in after she gave birth to him, at the age of sixteen. After he discovers the girl in the shed, the drama in Keegan’s book unfolds mainly in Furlong’s mind, as he wrestles with whether to do nothing—the prudent course—or to follow his moral compass and rescue her. I can’t recall a novel that captures this predicament more forcefully, attuned both to the price of silence about a shameful public secret and to the chance encounters that can spark the flicker of conscience and lead a cautious, seemingly risk-averse person to refuse to be complicit in it.— Eyal Press

Earlier this year, I posted a picture on Instagram that I took while rewatching my favorite Bravo reality show, “ Vanderpump Rules .” The image was taken from a scene in Season 2, in which Kristen Doute, a restaurant server who had split with her bartender boyfriend, Tom Sandoval, goes over to an apartment they used to share and where he still lives, supposedly to pick up some mail, though her low-cut dress and carefully curled hair tell a different story. Tom, who has moved on with another bartender, reacts frostily, and Kristen is gutted by his uninterest, which the viewers already anticipated. “Kristen coming to pick up her mail all dolled up from an apathetic Sandoval has deep annie ernaux self-abasement vibes,” I wrote in the caption. Yes, like many of my peers, I had been reading Ernaux’s autofiction, and I couldn’t get enough, especially of books like “ Getting Lost ” and “ A Girl’s Story ,” which deal with exactly the kind of humiliating lows a woman might fall to when experiencing Kristen-style heartache. And so, when the writer Lucinda Rosenfeld commented on the post, and suggested that I try another novel in a similar vein (“Speaking of deep self-abasement vibes,” she wrote, “have you read Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson?”), I jumped.

Andersson, who is Swedish (“ Willful Disregard ” was translated by Sarah Death), has created a much more cerebral heroine than Ernaux’s, and yet, as the book shows, the pain caused by love’s lament is no less pointed for the rational language it is couched in. Ester Nilsson is a critic who is asked to give a lecture on the work of an older, well-known artist, Hugo Rask, and almost immediately falls in love with him. Hugo and Ester sleep together, but while she enters, heart-first, into an all-encompassing passion, he remains emotionally detached, a fact that Ester is unable to accept, certain that in the end, he will be hers. What follows is a stunning study in self-delusion and obsession, all the more sympathetic because it is so familiar. “It could not be the case, she argued, that feelings for another person evaporated from one day to the next, and he must have had feelings, otherwise he would not have invested all that time in spending those hours with her,” Andersson writes. “The clear logic of this made it very easy to mobilize hope.”— Naomi Fry

Balzac walks into an art opening. He stands before a painting of a cottage on a winter day. He turns to a painter and asks, “How many people live in that cottage?” The painter doesn’t know. Balzac asks, “What’s the typical dowry?” The painter doesn’t know. Balzac asks, “What’s the going rate for grain? How was the harvest?” The painter doesn’t know. Cue Balzacian righteous huff: “If you cannot answer such questions,” he tells the painter, “What right do you have to paint even that wisp of smoke leaving the chimney?”

My memory is hazy, and the story possibly apocryphal. But it cuts to the heart of the questions animating so many of my favorite recent books, particularly Christina Sharpe’s “ Ordinary Notes ,” and Selby Wynn Schwartz’s “ After Sappho .” What do I know, what can I know, and who sets the terms of my knowledge? I found a companion in an older work, Arlette Farge’s 1981 “ The Allure of the Archives ,” translated from the French by Thomas Scott-Railton. Farge is a historian of the nineteenth century, and her book, born out of her research in the Archives of the Bastille, reconstructing the lives of poor women in pre-Revolutionary France, is about what it means to work with such records in practical and philosophical terms: how to handle the papers and keep them from handling you, how to think with an ocean of information that is always too much and never enough, and how to pose the questions the archive can answer and those it can’t. Farge’s challenges are nagging and sound, and her mood—her ardor, impatience, mischief—will run through your thinking, leaving its traces everywhere, its own wisp of smoke.— Parul Sehgal

I’ve long harbored a secret desire to write a thriller. Sadly, the will-I-or-won’t-I of writing it is as far as I’ve got in terms of charting a suspenseful narrative. I decided to get serious this year, so I picked up a copy of “ Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction ” (1966, revised 1981), by Patricia Highsmith. Who better to teach me how to do it? I thought. The first line reads, “This is not a how-to-do-it handbook.” Indeed, Highsmith has not assembled a writing manual precisely. Rather, the book is a guide to living for writers who want to specialize in untimely demises. There are tips on socializing. To remain attuned to your own unconscious, she advises, spend time with people who are not too “stimulating,” and rather “dull-witted, lazy, mediocre in every way.” Other writers are like witnesses, and to be avoided: “Their invisible antennae are out for the same vibrations in the air—or to use a greedier metaphor, they swim along at the same depth, teeth bared for the same kind of drifting plankton.”

Highsmith cycles through various scientific metaphors to make the point that writers are receptors. To possess “awareness of life, is an artist’s ideal, and takes precedence over all his activities and attitudes,” she writes. This is especially true when writing suspense. Your senses must be as sharp as a dagger. (Highsmith reveals that she opens all her letters with one, a gift from the Crime Writers’ Association, in England.) Any “germ” of a story could become a great suspense novel; without warning, it could whack you in the head like the oar Tom Ripley used to kill Dickie Greenleaf. And details in this line of work can mean the difference between a successful frame job or the electric chair. A husband who wants to kill his wife and frame her lover by placing a cocktail glass with his fingerprints on a terrace will not consider that it might rain, because he is a novice to murder. The writer can overlook nothing. In preparation for death, you must look widely for life, Highsmith cautions—good advice, for writers and non-writers alike.— Jennifer Wilson

“ Hope Against Hope ,” written by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, three decades after his death, narrates her husband’s life after he was arrested and exiled during the Stalinist purges of the nineteen-thirties. Initially, the book read to me as almost diary-like, so meticulous and vivid were the descriptions of the couple’s daily life under persecution and surveillance. But it is exactly through this unsparing accretion of details that the memoir achieves its emotional power. There is something unnerving about the forthrightness with which it recounts the pervasive paranoia, delusion, and resignation of a totalitarian police state. “Fate is not a mysterious external force, but the sum of a man’s natural makeup and the basic trend of the times he lives in,” Osip Mandelstam once wrote. Of course, the declaration is true not only of individual existence in a Soviet dictatorship a century earlier but of the relationship between the individual and state through any time in history. Still, it is astonishing to me that Mandelstam and his wife were able to preserve their humanity in an era that so terrifyingly dehumanized an entire populace. More astonishing still is that Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose first name means “hope,” possessed the stamina and resilience to transform into narrative a remarkable life lived out in a society that annihilates both the body and the soul.— Jiayang Fan  ♦

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Finalists for the 2024 Kirkus Prize Are Revealed

BY Michael Schaub • Aug. 28, 2024

The finalists for the 2024 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with 18 books contending for one of the richest annual literary awards in the world.

The fiction shortlist is composed of Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to My Little Friend , Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red , Percival Everett’s James , Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song , Richard Powers’ Playground , and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles .

The jurors for the fiction prize are Christine Bollow, the co-owner and director of programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland; Jeffrey Burke, a Kirkus reviewer and former editor at Harper’s magazine, the Wall Street Journal , Vanity Fair , and Bloomberg News ; and Kirkus fiction editor Laurie Muchnick.

The finalists for the nonfiction prize are Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq ; Adam Higginbogtham’s Challenger: A True Story of Heroism And Disaster on the Edge of Space ; Tessa Hulls’ Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir ; Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise ; Shefali Luthra’s Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America ; and Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love: A Memoir .   

Judging the nonfiction award are Hannah Bae, journalist, author, and illustrator whose work has appeared in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s the Margins , Catapult , the Washington Post , the San Francisco Chronicle , and the anthologies Our Red Book and (Don’t) Call Me Crazy ; Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Ann Gwinn, whose reviews have appeared in publications including Kirkus Reviews , the Los Angeles Times , the Minnesota Star Tribune , and the Seattle Times ; and Kirkus editor-in-chief Tom Beer.

The young readers’ literature category is divided into three subcategories featuring two books each. In picture books, the finalists are We Who Produce Pearls , written by Joanna Ho and illustrated by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, and There Was a Party for Langston , written by Jason Reynolds and illustrated by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey.

Making the middle-grade list are Safiyyah’s War by Hiba Noor Khan and Shark Teeth by Sherri Winston, while the young adult finalists are Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow and Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo.

The young readers’ literature prize is judged by Christopher A. Biss-Brown, curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia and Kirkus reviewer; Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor in Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington; and Kirkus young readers’ editors Mahnaz Dar and Laura Simeon.

“The finalists for the 2024 Kirkus Prize represent the very best of an outstanding crop of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ titles published in the U.S. this year,” Kirkus Reviews editor-in-chief Tom Beer said in a statement. “They’re all books that speak to our time, and we know they’ll be read for years to come.”

Each award comes with a $50,000 cash prize. Books become eligible for the prizes by receiving a starred review from Kirkus, a distinction achieved by only about 10% of the books reviewed in the magazine.

The Kirkus Prize was first awarded in 2014. Previous winners have included James McBride for The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store , Jack E. Davis for The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea , and Harmony Becker for Himawari House .

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at an in-person ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop in New York on Oct. 16, 2024, which will be livestreamed on Kirkus’ YouTube channel at 7:30 p.m. Eastern.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.

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Beneath a Perfect, Goop-Influenced Exterior Lurks a Violent Past

In Chelsea Bieker’s new novel, “Madwoman,” a woman is no longer able to keep the demons of her childhood out of her present.

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By Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey is the author of several novels including “Pet” and, most recently, “The Axeman’s Carnival.” She is based in New Zealand.

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MADWOMAN , by Chelsea Bieker

For years Clove has kept her history at bay, marrying a bland but “safe” financier husband and creating the perfect, organic linen-wearing family in Portland, Ore. From sourdough and crystals, bamboo sporks and rainbow chard, she has built a sea wall against her perilous childhood — a violent father, a mother who could not bring herself to leave him, and one shattering day too terrible for Clove to scrutinize. But what happens to a meticulously staged life when the past’s dirty tide threatens to wash away every defense?

In her third book, Chelsea Bieker breathes thrilling, risky energy into the familiar trope of the madwoman. The novel offers a number of candidates for the title role: Clove, desperate to maintain the sleek fictions she has almost convinced herself are real; her estranged mother, writing to Clove from prison, demanding she tell the entire story at last; perhaps the charismatic Jane, long-limbed and Zen, with whom Clove forms a breakneck friendship more intense and nourishing than her marriage.

But Bieker’s women are no fragile Ophelias or Madeline Ushers, no delicate young wives driven to insanity in yellow-wallpapered cages. And although fueled by rage, they are not spurned brides hidden in the attic, more animal than human, nor femmes fatales plucked from a 1980s screenplay and bent on blood. Rather, they are complex and shrewd, claiming an agency that lends the novel much of its twisty, propulsive plot.

In claustrophobic first person, Clove addresses the narrative to “you” — the mother she has tried to forget. This amplifies the sense of intimacy and interiority; the reader is at once the eavesdropper and the accused. “You said you wished you’d lied to my father in your early days of dating,” she narrates. “Before the first time my father ever hit you. Well, he didn’t hit you, he’d remind us. It was your fault for talking in passing about the guy who’d taken you to your senior prom.”

Punctuating an otherwise current voice with old-fashioned formality, Clove refers to her absent parent as “Mother,” rather than “Mom.” The choice is jarring at first, but over time it underscores the emotional and spatial distance Clove has placed between the two women. Occasionally she recounts events that feel superfluous: “Around the time I was 10,” she tells her mother, who must know this story already, “my father’s buddy Cuddles convinced him to take up work in Hawaii on a major interstate tunnel project in the Koolau mountains.” Such exposition breaks some of the novel’s spell.

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