19 minute read

EDITOR’S NOTE

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

Wait—2021 Isn’t Over Yet

December is always a slow month for new books, since publishers want to get those volumes on the shelves in time for holiday shopping. But if you’re craving something new—or if the dreaded supply-chain problems mean you can’t find that bestseller you’re looking for—there’s some great fiction coming out in the next few weeks. Sharpe’s Assassin by Bernard Cornwell (Harper, Dec. 7): This is Cornwell’s 22nd novel about Lt. Col. Richard Sharpe, and the British army still has work to do in France after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo. As our starred review says, “Sharpe is a great series character who doesn’t fit the officer mold. He is the gutter-born bastard son of a prostitute and a random whorehouse customer. He’d been a rank-andfile soldier with deep scars on his back from flogging until the duke noticed his intelligence and bravery and made him an officer. But wouldn’t you know, now under his command is the captain who’d once had him flogged. No hard feelings, though? Think again.”

The Love Con by Seressia Glass (Berkley, Dec. 14): This charming rom-com follows an aspiring costumer as she tries to turn her love of cosplay into a career, which somehow involves getting her best friend to pretend to be her boyfriend on Cosplay or No Way, a TV competition show. As our starred review says, “Kenya is a heroine who staunchly refuses to exist on the sidelines, fighting to prove that she deserves every aspiration she dreams of reaching.”

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim (Ecco, Dec. 7): “In this extraordinary historical novel, debut author Kim weaves together the story of friends and rivals trying to survive and thrive from the era of the Japanese occupation of Korea to the political purges of the mid-20th century,” according to our starred review. “The majority of the novel follows Jade, whose impoverished farming family sends her as a young girl to work as a servant for a courtesan. Jade observes the rivalries of other girls in training, particularly Luna, the spoiled favored daughter of the head of the household, and Lotus, the spirited but plainer younger sister. Thanks to her intelligence and resourcefulness, Jade will grow up to become a celebrated courtesan and movie star in Seoul, where she and the two sisters end up as adults.… Gorgeous prose and unforgettable characters combine to make a literary masterpiece.” The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (Knopf, Dec. 14): Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, this novel is based on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali immigrant who in 1952 became was the last man hanged in Wales— for a crime he didn’t commit. According to our review, this is “an intimate personal portrait with a broader message on the mistreatment of migrants.”

Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić, translated by Damion Searls (Tin House, Dec. 6): The narrator of this novel shares a name with the author and also a home country, though he’s not quite sure where that is: “The country where I was born no longer exists. For as long as the country still existed, I thought of myself as Yugoslavian. Like my parents, who were from Serbian (Father) and Bosnian-Muslim (Mother) families.” Now he lives in Germany, and the book looks back at his childhood in Germany, where his family fled during the Yugoslav wars, and memories of his grandmother, who has dementia. According to our starred review, the book “is full of tenderness and compassion and also a real intelligence—it’s a stunning novel that asks what it really means to be from somewhere, anywhere.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

A LETTER TO THREE WITCHES

Bass, Elizabeth Kensington (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 25, 2022 978-1-4967-3432-7

What happens when a family of witches is forced to suppress their powers? Gwen Engel is a witch. Well, sort of. Decades ago, the Grand Council of Witches banned her family from practicing witchcraft—all because her great-great-grandfather accidentally started a little something called the Dust Bowl. The name of Gwen’s upstate New York business, Abracadabra Odd Job Service, is the only vestige of her magical heritage. That is, until she and her cousins Milo and Trudy receive a letter from Tannith, Gwen’s distant cousin and adoptive sister. Tannith, who spends her days talking with her cat familiar and spying on her family, informs her cousins that she’s moving to New York City and taking one of their boyfriends, whom she’s enchanted, with her. Whose boyfriend, you might ask? Well, that’s left up to the cousins to figure out. After receiving this life-altering letter, the supernatural abilities inherent in each cousin start to spill out, and magical mayhem unfolds: “Trained or not, we were all witches. Stifle a talent too long, and it was bound to exhibit itself one way or another.” Filling her book with talking animals, toad transmogrification, and love spells, Bass leans heavily into the cliché. Lacking any worldbuilding except for Witchbook, Cackle, eCharmed, and BrewTube, the cringingly named websites for witches, the novel teeters between trite and amusing and is ultimately saved by some surprising twists and the cousins’ enjoyable banter.

A lighthearted supernatural romp.

HER HIDDEN GENIUS

Benedict, Marie Sourcebooks Landmark (304 pp.) $21.49 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-1-72822-939-3

Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal role in the discovery of DNA was overlooked, gets her due in Benedict’s scholarly novel. The story begins in 1947, with Franklin’s Paris period. After the unwelcoming attitude of London’s scientific community, the atmosphere of the Paris lab is exhilarating for the 26-year-old chemist. There, her gender and bluntness are not held against her, and she fits right in with her fellow researchers. Her expertise in X-ray crystallography, a technique for documenting molecular structures, is honed while studying coal and carbons. But in 1951, a distracting obsession with her womanizing supervisor, Jacques Mering, whom she wisely rebuffs, drives her back to London and a fellowship at King’s College, where she deploys crystallography to map DNA molecules. Her path crosses those of other DNA sleuths, including her fractious colleague Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick and James Watson, two Cambridge researchers who will later claim all the glory and the Nobel Prize. Though her minute detailing of Franklin’s experiments, not to mention the data-freighted dialogue, can be eye-glazing, Benedict’s conclusions are sound: Franklin is way ahead of the men in verifying the structure of DNA and its helix shape. But Franklin’s methodical habits in amassing data work against her in the race to take credit for her groundbreaking discoveries. The men, especially Wilkins, who undermines her at every turn, and Watson, who’s not above snooping in her workspace, don’t share Franklin’s qualms about publishing results based on incomplete research. After leaving what would now be described as the hostile work environment at King’s for Birkbeck College, Franklin’s work on RNA paves the way for antiviral vaccines. But the denouement drags as Benedict seems unsure whether her protagonist should bridle at her unfair treatment or simply move on, as the real Franklin seems to have done, leaving her scores to be settled by others, posthumously. The cancer that killed

Franklin in 1958 may have been attributable to long-term exposure to X-rays—like many of her peers, she was cavalier about safety precautions.

Wise behavior seldom makes for electrifying fiction.

NOBODY’S MAGIC

Birdsong, Destiny O. Grand Central Publishing (368 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 8, 2022 978-1-5387-2139-1

Poet Birdsong’s fiction debut: three novellas about African American women grappling with their families’ and communities’ attitudes toward their albinism. They come from very different backgrounds in Shreveport, Louisiana. Suzette is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy car dealer, still living at home at age 20 because her controlling father doesn’t want her to go to college or get a job. Six years out of college, Maple is still drifting among dead-end jobs and taking handouts from her mother, a good-time gal whose income currently comes from a drug-dealing boyfriend but whose past includes stripping and porn. Agnes fled poverty in Shreveport for Fisk University, graduate school, and a lectureship at Vanderbilt, but she’s now 34, unemployed, and broke, grading high school essays in Utah for a pittance. Nonetheless, the three novellas show each woman shaped by her skin and people’s reactions to it as central facts in their development. Suzette’s story, Drive, is an overlong coming-of-age tale with a fairly predictable denouement redeemed by a poignant depiction of a sheltered girl: “Everything that’s happenin around me is about me. But don’t nobody wanna tell me wha’s goin on.” Maple’s odyssey in Bottled Water is a more interesting saga of devastating loss and grief overcome with the help of a man who has his own experience of bereavement to deal with. Maple’s Momi is a fabulously vital character, inappropriately open with her daughter about sex and drugs but lovingly accepting of the white skin that Maple—like Suzette—thinks makes her undesirable. We see in

“A serious story, luminously told.”

defenestrate

Mind the Prompt that Agnes’ experiences of being mocked for her skin color in high school by her social-climbing sister have scarred her emotionally to the extent that she can’t keep a job and lives with an abusive man, but even this keeningly sad tale offers hope in a denouement that shows Agnes, like Suzette and Maple, tentatively embracing a new beginning.

A thoughtful examination of a subject rarely addressed in contemporary literature.

DEFENESTRATE

Branum, Renée Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-1-63557-739-6

A twin brother and sister work to overcome their family’s superstition as well as their own personal demons. Marta and Nick were brought up by their mother with a warning about a tendency for people in their family to be gravely injured or killed by falls. It all began when a great-greatgrandfather pushed a stonemason out a window in Prague, an act known as defenestration, which forced him to flee to the American Midwest and seems to have led to an uncanny string of falls in the family. Their father’s love provided levity for the twins and balanced out their strictly religious mother’s dogma, but after Nick graduates from college and tells his parents he’s gay, his mother kicks him out, and the family is irrevocably changed. Told through brief vignettes from Marta’s first-person perspective, the story recounts how the twins went to live in Prague and attempted to make sense of their upbringing and obsession with falling. In the current timeline, Marta visits Nick in the hospital after his own fall and remeets her mother after years of estrangement. Branum makes excellent use of the fragmented structure of her debut novel, offering meditations on Prague’s rich history and architecture; Buster Keaton and his theatrical falls, as well as other historical people who famously survived falls; the difficulties of close relationships that define you but also bind you; and the complicated legacies of family stories that defy clarity or comfort. Even as Marta’s own wellbeing depends on her finding an ability to heal separately from Nick, she muses on this unknowability: “I know then, with a shiver of certainty, that sometimes a story can have a meaning for the teller that no one else, no matter how many times they hear it, can unearth.”

A serious story, luminously told.

IRON ANNIE

Cassidy, Luke Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (320 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jan. 11, 2022 978-0-593-31481-4

The adventures of a small-time criminal whose mettle is truly tested when she leaves the hard-edged Irish border town she calls home to embark on a perilous mission in neighboring yet utterly alien England.

In this free-wheeling, foulmouthed monologue-as-novel, we enter the close-knit underworld of a small, unlovely town on the redundant border between Ireland and Northern Ireland where our heroine, Aoife, plies a modest trade in drugs and knockoff alcohol. “Most’a the Smirnoff ye dink narth’a the Boyne is brewed in Mullaghbawn, Drumintee an Forkhill,” she explains of her rural territory. “Fuckin first-class stuff too. Gets ye where yer goin sure.” With trusted colleagues to rely

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on—chiefly Shamey Hughes, poet, singer, and muscle when necessary, and the stalwart Rat King, a respected patriarch in the Traveller community—Aoife is running her business smoothly when the mercurial, highly educated Annie enters her life, captures her heart, and puts old loyalties to the test. “She doesn know too much bowt the proper temptation that’s in poverty,” Aoife observes of Annie’s leftist pronouncements. “But that’s grand. I love her so I do. So I can let her run. Cause I know she’ll come backta me.” Employing language that is at times as poetic as it is profane (a shoreline, for example, appears “like a tear between sea and sky”) and with razor-sharp sardonic wit, the novel hurtles through a handful of loosely connected episodes, each entertaining enough, though some verging on slapstick or, worse, sentimentality, before finding its feet in a somewhat predictable plot. As a favor to Rat King—and to spare her town a gangland showdown—Aoife travels to England with a substantial amount of cocaine to unload and with Annie along to complicate matters. What follows is as entertaining as what went before, and Aoife’s acerbic view of Brexit England is as bracing as her earlier take on urban Ireland’s moneyed smugness. But mayhem and tragedy inevitably ensue. Leaving some essential plot threads dangling, the narrative returns home, to the only safe place.

A vibrant, profane narrative of heartwarming criminality.

HOW TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY

Davids, C.A. Verso (304 pp.) $19.95 paper | Feb. 8, 2022 978-1-83976-087-7

South African novelist Davids delivers a politically charged story of love and espionage. Beth, a South African consul long in the post-apartheid government’s service, arrives in Shanghai to take up a new post. Disconcertingly, on moving into her new apartment, she is kept awake by someone’s pounding on a typewriter late into the night. Although he denies being that “pertinacious typist,” Huang Zhao comes by to ask for an English word that means “something like ‘sad,’ but not ‘sad.’ ” The mystery deepens when Beth asks Huang for a context in which to place that word, a context he refuses to provide. He has reason to be sad, having lived through poverty and the Cultural Revolution and, as a Party-hack journalist, witnessed the events of June 1989 at Tiananmen Square: “I, Huang Zhao, a decent but cowardly man, testify that when the smoke cleared, the beautiful girl who had been seated weeks earlier against the lamppost no longer wore her face. No, it was stuck to the underside of a tank’s metallic wheels.” Davids spins several tales on parallel tracks, one involving a visit to Shanghai by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and the trouble it earns him both with the Japanese invaders of China and, later, with the House Un-American Activities Committee; another recounts Beth’s college friend Kay, killed while assembling a bomb intended for an apartheid-era police station. Hughes’ story doesn’t quite fit, although it affords entry into a long history of racism throughout the world; as Davids has Hughes say, “Some people cross to the other side of the road when they see me coming, as if I am contaminated, as if my skin is a disease rather than a beautiful shade of black.” Racism meets sexism meets political brouhaha when Beth, with her “brown-beige skin,” is charged with misconduct for smuggling the now-disappeared Huang’s memoir out of China and is sent home.

An intriguing story that, with occasional missteps, winds its way to an elegantly satisfying conclusion.

“Manhattan’s beau monde served up in juicy, evocative prose.”

base notes

BASE NOTES

Donnelly, Lara Elena Thomas & Mercer (414 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-5420-30700

Can perfume kill? Scent is everything in Donnelly’s unique, voluptuous thriller. Not only does suave antihero Vic Fowler analyze the mix of odors emanating from every person and place he encounters; Donnelly’s introductory list of characters describes them in terms of their “base notes.” She opens each chapter with an analysis of its content in scent—for example, Chapter 1: “Notes de Tête: Whiskey, Jasmine, Oakmoss. Notes de Cœur: Old Cigarettes and Stale Coffee. Notes de Fond: Mildew, Charcoal, Barbicide.” The death of iconoclastic perfume magnate Jonathan Bright has left his company, Bright House, in tatters under the stewardship of Vic, his lover and protégé. Vic’s brilliant invention is a line of perfumes that allows the wearer to relive memories. Down at the heels and subletting a basement apartment in Harlem, Vic is determined to use his considerable charm and sex appeal to return to his former glory and exact revenge upon Joseph Eisner, the man he blames for bringing him low. As Vic is implicated in both Jonathan’s death and the disappearances of wealthy Conrad and Caroline Yates, dogged detective Pip Miles lurks in methodical pursuit of the truth. Details of those crimes are doled out in tidbits over hundreds of pages. Vic accepts a commission from Eisner to devise a fatal scent and, with an offbeat trio of sexy sidekicks—bartender, barber, and tailor—hopes to use it as the vehicle of his vengeance. Donnelly offers physical descriptions nearly as rich as the olfactory, and she colorfully depicts a preCovid New York City, heavy with detail and likely to trigger nostalgia. But her plot moves at a glacial pace. The question for readers to ponder: Is the journey luscious enough to mitigate a long-delayed destination?

Manhattan’s beau monde served up in juicy, evocative prose.

LOVE & SAFFRON A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love

Fay, Kim Putnam (192 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 8, 2022 978-0-593-41933-5

Two women, one in Los Angeles and the other on an island near Seattle, strike up a correspondence that blossoms into a deep friendship in the early 1960s.

When Miss Joan Bergstrom, then 27, sends a packet of saffron she has picked up on her travels to Mrs. Imogen Fortier, the author of a column she enjoys in Northwest Home & Life magazine, a correspondence between the two women begins. Imogen leaps into the friendship with both feet despite their 32-year age difference, as does Joan. What starts out as the occasional chat about food evolves into much more as the women expand their horizons—Joan with a new job as a reporter on the women’s pages of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and an exploration of the wide variety of foods available in Los Angeles, and Imogen with new tastes and recipes that bring Francis, her husband of four decades, out of the shell he’s lived in since the Great War. Author Fay has written an all-too-brief novel that explores how the women’s friendship evolves and deepens when they open up to each other. In their letters, Joan and Imogen show their true selves, exploring their experiences and their thoughts about love, mental health, sadness, difficult decisions, and unexpected joys. Fay’s touch is deft, and the information is received by both women with love and acceptance without becoming cloying to the reader. Written primarily in the form of letters sent between 1962 and 1965, the story also explores how adventures in the culinary world redefine the women’s relationships with happiness, food, and new experiences. The story leaves the reader wanting more—more recipes, more

letters, more time in the gentle, unfolding friendship of these two women.

A glimpse into a friendship that doesn’t hesitate to touch on joy, sadness, love, and death.

BE HERE TO LOVE ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Fletcher, Sasha Melville House (272 pp.) $17.99 paper | Feb. 8, 2022 978-1-61219-947-4

A young couple copes with bad weather and looming apocalypse in this debut novel. Sam and Eleanor share an apartment in Brooklyn. She designs websites. He freelances as a proofreader and cooks nice dinners. They’re young and in love, although Sam’s college debt hangs over him and Eleanor’s thyroid nodule could portend trouble. They are the main story, but the first-person narrator also presents recurring motifs such as epic snowstorms, an impending nuclear attack on New York City, commuting woes, secret police who put people in black plastic bags and take them away in vans, historical events such as the killing of Black activist Fred Hampton, a German orchestra that wolves hold captive in an Italian castle, and angels in various contexts. The narrator frequently refers to violent acts by regular police, as in “the cops are shooting children in the street.” There’s a faux naif quality to the voice here, as if the narrator wants to write a nice love story but the incessant bad news from the nasty world keeps getting in the way. The prose is naif-appropriate. It has the graceless exuberance and emotional swings of a letter home from summer camp. The narrator occasionally throws up his hands in frustration: “Sam brought her coffee, or he stayed in bed. I can’t tell you everything that happens.” While the voice and prose can be humorous and even charming at times, finally they become tiresome. And frustrating since it’s clear that a sharper intelligence lies beneath the ingenuous facade. Fletcher brings it out for the historical asides, for the rants on debt, even for the detailed recipes of the meals Sam prepares. His decision to assume a pose somewhere between Forrest Gump and Mister Rogers— “Listen sometimes we just have to let things in the world be nice”—doesn’t serve him well.

A strange, amusing work that leaves one puzzled by the author’s choices.

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Fu, Kim Tin House (220 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-951142-99-5

Stories blending emotional realism with surreal imagery. It’s worth mentioning this from the outset: The title of Fu’s latest book is not a metaphor. In the pages of this collection, readers will discover a sea monster more aptly described as “an amalgamation of brainless multicellular organisms”; a sinister doll that once belonged to a family beset by tragedy; and a being with a hood that pours out sleep-inducing sand. This book will likely resonate with readers of Karen Russell and Ben Loory; like them, Fu is equally at home chronicling bizarre events and pondering her characters’ inner lives. “June Bugs,” for instance, follows the travails of Martha, a woman who moves to a new place abounding with an uncanny number of bugs. Fu explores the circumstances of how Martha came to live there, including the way an earlier relationship curdled into something toxic and abusive; by the denouement, the story has arrived at a phantasmagorical place, but Martha’s challenges in life and work are what endure. Some of the stories venture fully into the speculative realm, such as “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” which is told entirely

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