DREAM TOWN by David Baldacci

fiction

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

DREAM TOWN by David Baldacci ..................................................... 4 JACKIE & ME by Louis Bayard.............................................................7 THE RED ARROW by William Brewer ..............................................10 A TINY UPWARD SHOVE by Melissa Chadburn ..............................11 ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING by Lisa Hsiao Chen.........................12 TRUST by Hernan Diaz.......................................................................16 VIGIL HARBOR by Julia Glass ...........................................................18 THE COLONY by Audrey Magee.........................................................23 IF AN EGYPTIAN CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH by Noor Naga.........25 LUCKY TURTLE by Bill Roorbach.......................................................27 A SUNLIT WEAPON by Jacqueline Winspear...................................44 BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry........................................................46 HUNT THE STARS by Jessie Mihalik..................................................47 THE MARQUESS MAKES HIS MOVE by Diana Quincy..................48

LUCKY TURTLE Roorbach, Bill Algonquin (416 pp.) $27.95 | April 26, 2022 978-1-64375-097-2

DREAM TOWN

Baldacci, David Grand Central Publishing (432 pp.) $29.00 | April 19, 2022 978-1-5387-1977-0

An old-fashioned gumshoe yarn about Hollywood dreams and dead bodies. Private investigator Aloysius Archer celebrates New Year’s Eve 1952 in LA with his gorgeous lady friend and aspiring actress Liberty Callahan. Screenwriter Eleanor Lamb shows up and offers to hire him because “someone might be trying to kill me.” “I’m fifty a day plus expenses,” he replies, but money’s no obstacle. Later, he sneaks into Lamb’s house and stumbles upon a body, then gets knocked out by an unseen assailant. Archer takes plenty of physical abuse in the story, but at least he doesn’t get a bullet between the eyes like the guy he trips over. A 30-year-old World War II combat veteran, Archer is a righteous and brave hero. Luck and grit keep him alive in both Vegas and the City of Angels, which is rife with gangsters and crooked cops. Not rich at all, his one luxury is the blood-red 1939 Delahaye he likes to drive with the top down. He’d bought it with his gambling winnings in Reno, and only a bullet hole in the windscreen post mars its perfection. Liberty loves Archer, but will she put up with the daily danger of losing him? Why doesn’t he get a safe job, maybe playing one of LA’s finest on the hit TV show Dragnet? Instead, he’s a tough and principled idealist who wants to make the world a better place. Either that or he’s simply a “pavement-pounding PI on a slow dance to maybe nowhere.” And if some goon doesn’t do him in sooner, his Lucky Strikes will probably do him in later. Baldacci paints a vivid picture of the not-so-distant era when everybody smoked, Joe McCarthy hunted commies, and Marilyn Monroe stirred men’s loins. The 1950s weren’t the fabled good old days, but they’re fodder for gritty crime stories of high ideals and lowlifes, of longing and disappointment, and all the trouble a PI can handle.

Well-done crime fiction. Baldacci nails the noir.

KARITAS UNTITLED

Baldursdóttir, Krístin Marja Trans. by Philip Roughton Amazon Crossing (416 pp.) $18.00 | March 1, 2022 978-1-5420-2707-6

Award-winning Icelandic novelist Baldursdóttir’s story of a woman’s struggle to become an artist in the early decades of the 20th century. When the widow of a fisherman lost at sea moves her six children from rural western Iceland to the city of Akureyri, it’s in order to educate not just her sons, but her daughters as well. It’s 1915, and Icelandic women have just been granted suffrage: “This new era will bring women brighter days. We can get educations, and we can vote.” After a harrowing boat journey, Karitas, the artistic youngest daughter, is put in charge of her little brother and the household chores while the others go out to work. Told mostly in third person, with short sections from Karitas’ point of view, the novel depicts their time in a saltfish warehouse and their longing for dry feet and leather shoes during a winter so cold the urine freezes in the chamber pot. A rich neighbor arranges for Karitas to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Returning after five years, she tries hard to create a life as an artist even after getting pregnant and moving to a turf-and-stone farmhouse with her fisherman husband. She fights with her highhanded spouse, hides from elf women, makes art when she can, despairs: “Was she focused on art, after all—or were there artists who thought of clotheslines?” But the true heart of the book belongs not to its eponymous heroine but the strong-willed women of Iceland generally. Life here is hard, death swift and ubiquitous. Through every loss and setback, the brutal winters, the months the men spend at sea with the fishing fleet, the women endure. As Karitas’ mother says: “We fight, we Icelanders, we fight.”

A convincing portrayal of the lives of Icelandic women during an important period in the country’s history.

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

traveling the world via fiction

About 25 years ago, I read a novel called Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen. Set in the Faroe Islands, an isolated archipelago near Denmark, the book is a fairy tale about a Harvard grad student who arrives to do his anthropology fieldwork carrying nothing but the clothes on his back, his suitcase having been lost en route. I had never heard of the Faroes and even consulted an atlas to make sure they exist, but after reading Kaysen’s book I developed a yearning to visit. I haven’t made it—yet—but that reading experience has stuck with me for decades. Fiction is one of the best ways to travel the world, and these days it’s easier to find books that aren’t travelogues written by Americans but are international novels published in the U.S. If you’re interested in Iceland, you can choose from two recent novels: Quake by Auður Jónsdótti, translated by Meg Matich (Dottir Press, Feb. 8), tells the first-person story of a woman who develops amnesia following two epileptic seizures, while Karitas Untitled by Krístin Marja Baldursdóttir, translated by Philip Roughton (Amazon Crossing, March 1), set in the early 20th century, follows a woman from a poor family who struggles to get an education and become an artist.

“I’ve never felt a sense of security in Ukraine,” says the narrator of one of the stories in Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’ debut collection translated by Eugene Ostashevsky (New Directions, March 1). Our review says “a sense of unease pervades every corner of this book, which spotlights women affected directly and indirectly by the violence in Eastern Ukraine.” From nearby Poland comes Nobel Prize–winning Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead, Feb. 1), which our review said “tackles the mysteries of heresy and faith, organized religion and splinter sects, 18th-century Polish and Lithuanian history, and some of the finer points of cabalist and Hasidic theology.”

From Nigeria comes Eloghosa Osunde’s debut, Vagabonds! (Riverhead, March 15), a series of interconnected stories about the “vagabonds” of Lagos, the people who refuse to conform. Our review says, “Osunde revels in the joys of storytelling to render a city and its outsiders in all their flaws and glory.”

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s Trinidad-set debut novel, When We Were Birds (Doubleday, March 1), “unspools at the stormy crossroads that separates the living and the dead,” according to our review. “Blending sobering urban realities with Caribbean-infused magical realism, Banwo has created a unique world expansive enough to contain a ghost story, a love story, a mysterious mythology, and a thoughtful examination of how family bonds keep us firmly rooted to our pasts.” From the Middle East, two books that are subversive in different ways: Love, by Israeli Maayan Eitan (Penguin Press, Feb. 15), is an “intensely vivid, lyrical, and raw” first-person tale told by a sex worker; while Seasons of Purgatory, by Iranian Shahriar Mandanipour and translated by Sara Khalili (Bellevue Literary Press, Jan. 25), is a collection of short stories “with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule,” according to our review.

Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 1) follows three men from the so-called New India as they try to reinvent themselves; our review calls it “an intense, probing novel examin[ing] rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy.” Lídia Jorge’s epic The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott (Liveright, Feb. 8), is both a family saga and a portrait of 20th-century Portugal. Chilean Poet by Aejandro Zambra is “a playful, discursive novel about families, relationships, poetry, and how easily all three can come together or fall apart.”