Joyce Carrol Oates |
Summertime, and the reading is easy. But not every summer volume is a throwaway beach book, quickly skimmed and quickly forgotten. Herewith, promising, (mostly) substantive reads in all genres.
Fiction
Take PAUL AUSTER’s Man in the Dark (Holt, August 19), set in an alternate America where the Iraq War never happened and states are bloodily seceding after the disputed 2000 election. Meanwhile, retired book critic August Brill mourns the loss of his wife and the murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend.
JOYCE CAROL OATES reconfigures the JonBenet Ramsay case in My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (Ecco, July 1), which centers on a murdered nine year old whose figure-skating triumphs fed the ambitions of her social-climbing parents — and pushed her brother into the shadows. In Yale law professor STEPHEN L. CARTER’s third novel, Palace Council (Knopf, July 8), which plows politically murky waters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, African-American writer Eddie Wesley discovers a corpse in the park and follows up a conspiracy that leads straight to the White House.
Novels by veterans can be expected to make big noises, but a few debuts this summer will likely add to the din. Written over 30 years, SELDEN EDWARDS’s The Little Book (Dutton, August 14) dumps ’70s rock star Wheeler Burden in late 19th-century Vienna, where he tangles with Freud, Mahler, and growing anti-Semitism. The narrator of ANDREW DAVIDSON’s The Gargoyle (Doubleday, August 5), horribly burned in a car crash, finds the will to live (and not a little craziness) when a woman who sculpts gargoyles enters his hospital room and announces that they were lovers in medieval Germany.
In CATHERINE O’FLYNN’s What Was Lost (Holt, June 24), longlisted for several major British prizes, the disappearance of a solitary child at a mall is blamed on a young man who had befriended her. Dr. Leo Liebenstein hunts desperately for his wife — not the imposter who looks exactly like her — in RIVKA GALCHEN’s Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, June 3). And Pen Award–winning journalist KIRA SALAK will surely have something interesting to say about her profession in The White Mary (Holt, August 1), the story of a war correspondent knocked sideways by the death of a colleague she had worshipped.
This summer, some fiction readers will be revisiting American history. Ever wondered about The 19th Wife (Random, August 5) of Brigham Young? Random House editor at large DAVID EBERSHOFF makes the introduction in his third novel. HANNAH TINTI follows up a highly praised story collection, Animal Crackers, with The Good Thief (Dial, August 26), about a youngster rescued from a 19th-century New England orphanage by a shady character claiming to be his brother. BRET LOTT follows a teenager down that Ancient Highway (Random, July 15), all the way from 1920s Texas to Hollywood. And in ETHAN CANIN’s America America (Random, July 1), set in the 1970s, working-class Corey Sifter is given a hand by the wealthy Metareys — and falls for a Metarey daughter.
Eager to go further afield? So was first novelist ZOË FERRARIS. Once married to a Saudi-Palestinian Bedouin, she has crafted the tale of a Saudi desert guide troubled by a teenaged girl’s death in Finding Nouf (Houghton Mifflin, June 20). FADHIL AL-AZZAWI’s The Last of the Angels (Free Press, July 22) introduces us to an Iraq we’ve never known, as the author guides us through the back alleys and coffeehouses of 1950s Kirkuk, his hometown. The novel was first published in Iraq in 1992 and subsequently banned.
Whereas the hero of ROSE TREMAIN’s The Road Home (Little, Brown, August 26) flees Eastern Europe for a better life in London, DOMNICA RADULESCU’s Train to Trieste (Knopf, August 5) carries 17-year-old Mona Manoliu all the way to America, where she’s stuck wondering whether the dreamboat she left behind belonged to Romania’s secret police. National Book Award nominee JOAN SILBER’s The Size of the World (Norton, June 9) also ends up in America, by way of 1920s Siam and war-ravaged Vietnam.
What’s fiction without fraught family relationships? A couple slowly fractures owing to a child’s genetic disability in JENNIFER HAIGH’s The Condition (HarperCollins, July 1). In JOHN DUFRESNE’s Requiem, Mass. (Norton, July 21), down-to-earth Johnny tries to survive a wacked-out mom, an elusive dad, and a sister who locks herself in the closet. In Sorry (Europa, June 28), GAIL JONES, whose Dreams of Speaking was shortlisted for the 2008 Dublin IMPAC award, introduces us to a domineering Englishman pursuing his anthropological studies in the Australian Outback at the expense of his wife and daughter.
In Undiscovered Country (Little, Brown, July 3), a first novel by LIN ENGER (brother of Peace Like a River’s Leif Enger), Minnesota boy Jesse Matson might as well be in Denmark; he thinks that his recently widowed mother is a little too cozy with her husband’s brother. LINN ULLMANN’s A Blessed Child (Knopf, August 15) transports us to the remote Swedish island of Hammarsö, where three sisters recall the shifting alliances and petty betrayals of childhood, which sometimes become dangerous.
