Callan Wink, Beartooth
(Spiegel & Grau)
“Raw … Wink wants to move and excite the reader more than to educate or argue, and judged on those terms the novel is largely a success … The novel is deliberately fast-paced from the beginning, made up of short unnumbered chapters, some less than a page long. This speed is exhilarating, but in the last quarter it also encourages an unfortunate kind of sketchiness.”
–Ian McGuire (New York Times Book Review)
Belinda Bauer, The Impossible Thing
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
“A banger … Bauer comes off as a generous writer who has lots to share with us and does it with humor and ease … Bauer is a daring and confident writer who’s still introducing new characters in the last 50 pages of her 322-page book … Contains not one, but two of the best kind of romances there are: the ones where we intuit signs of love before the people involved do … All of her books are terrific, so what that means is you probably have a bunch to add to your reading list. Because, for this dazzling novelist, the hits just keep coming.”
–Chris Hewitt (The Star Tribune)
Claire Anderson Wheeler, The Gatsby Gambit
(Viking)
“A thoroughly enjoyable mystery story with all the tropes and pleasures of a golden age detective story … Well-written and pacy, inflected by the original characters and setting but otherwise unconstrained by them.”
–Alex Clark (The Guardian)
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
(Flatiron)
“It’s a rare novel that has so many simultaneous sources of trouble, and it’s to McConaghy’s credit that her plot’s many interlocking escalations only rarely seem forced. But even when the action veers toward the melodramatic, it feels fitting enough … The novel also offers its injured characters a path back to connection and community, a risk McConaghy argues must be worth taking, no matter how fraught the future, no matter how temporary the family.”
–Matt Bell (The New York Times Book Review)
Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker
(Atlantic Monthly)
“It’s a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity … One of the novel’s charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments — wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants — of an increasingly ‘Big Box Manhattan.'”
–Alexandra Jacobs (New York Times)
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence
(Europa)
“There’s a lot going on, and Coe marshals it all with ingenious ease … Coe’s subject may be inertia and nostalgia, but The Proof of My Innocence is full of energy. It’s a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricksy jeu d’esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read.”
–Justine Jordan (Guardian)
