THE MUTUAL FRIEND by Carter Bays

THE HOMEWRECKERS

Andrews, Mary Kay St. Martin’s (448 pp.) $26.09 | May 3, 2022 978-1-2502-7836-4

A young Georgia widow flips a historic house and finds evidence of a long-missing woman while developing a growing attraction for a co-worker. Hattie Kavanaugh married her high school sweetheart and lost him to a motorcycle accident after just a few years of marriage. Almost seven years on, she’s still living in her unfinished bungalow renovation near Savannah, grieving her husband, Hank, and flipping houses with his dad, Tug; her best friend, Cassidy Pelletier; and Cass’ mother, Zenobia. After a disastrous flip where she loses all her savings on a gorgeous—but dilapidated—157-year-old home, Hattie decides to take an offer to star in a Home Place Television Network production with Cass that will bring in a steady paycheck as she works on her next flip and tries to earn back the money she’s lost. The catch—which she doesn’t know but her producer, Mo Lopez, does—is that the show she signed on for has changed in concept from a straight house-flipping show to a house-flip–meets–dating-show, where the goal is for the handsome designer, Trae Bartholomew, to seduce her over the course of the series. Hattie digs deep to fund the flip, pawning her engagement ring and taking a loan from her father, a wealthy ex-felon who has served time in prison for embezzlement. Author Andrews has packed a lot into this story: Not only is there drama from the reality show and Hattie’s growing attraction to a co-worker, but 17 years earlier beloved local schoolteacher Lanier Ragan went missing, and the story follows both the renovation of the long-abandoned beach home Hattie buys and the discovery of evidence in the cold case of the teacher’s disappearance.

A fun story with twists and turns that will appeal to romantics and cold-case fans alike.

THE MUTUAL FRIEND

Bays, Carter Dutton (480 pp.) $27.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-593-18676-3

Several New Yorkers struggle to put down their phones in this debut comic novel. There’s an abundance of characters in Bays’ novel, and almost none of them know what they want. There’s Alice, a 28-year-old nanny who thinks she wants to go to medical school but takes forever to register for the MCAT. There’s her new roommate, Roxy, a 34-year-old Manic Pixie flibbertigibbet with a City Hall job whose desires are even more amorphous: “Roxy wanted what she wanted to want, nothing more, nothing less.” Alice’s brother, Bill, is at loose ends after leaving MeWantThat, the shopping app he founded; he takes a sudden interest in Buddhism, which is met with skepticism by his wife, Pitterpat, who “made an activity of wanting” but also seems to realize that the tony real estate she covets won’t fill the emptiness inside her. The lives of the four characters (and several more, who move in and out of the novel) are all thrown into disarray when Roxy becomes embroiled in a scandal that transfixes the internet, Pitterpat gets diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and Bill impulsively makes a sudden, drastic life change. Throughout the novel, the characters wrestle with their addictions to their smartphones and social media: “Something’s happened to my brain,” Alice laments. “I don’t know what it is. But I think it has to do with this phone I can’t stop looking at every thirty fucking seconds.” Bays was a co-creator of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, so it’s no surprise his novel is highly comic—sometimes darkly so. (The characters watch a reality show called Love on the Ugly Side, one episode of which forces the contestants to watch “deepfake videos of their parents having sex in order to win a couple’s massage.”) What is surprising is how beautifully written it is and

how deftly the author balances humor and heartbreak. Bays writes with real compassion that never turns sentimental, and the structure of the book, told from the point of view of a mysterious omniscient narrator, is ingenious. This is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that’s not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up.

A major accomplishment.

ASHTON HALL

Belfer, Lauren Ballantine (416 pp.) $28.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-593-35949-5

A woman’s attempts to uncover an archaeological mystery lead to a bigger discovery: herself. Hannah Larson and her 9-year-old son, Nicky, have packed up their Upper West Side bags and moved into Ashton Hall, a stately manor near Cambridge, England. They were intending to keep Christopher, Hannah’s honorary uncle, company while he undergoes cancer treatment, but unbeknownst to Hannah, he has made other plans to get care in New York City. Thus Hannah has Christopher’s apartment to herself, as well as the time and space to work on her long-put-aside dissertation and to contemplate her husband’s betrayals. That is until Nicky, a quirky child with troubling outbursts of violence, makes a

“A scholarship competition goes horribly awry in this unusual academic suspense novel.”

the finalists

shocking discovery: Hidden away in an enclosed room in the walls of Ashton Hall is a redheaded skeleton. A team of archaeologists descend on the manor to learn more about the skeleton, whom they discover lived in the 1500s and is named Isabella Cresham: “Isabella Cresham has never been a ghost, haunting us,” one of the manor’s other residents says to Hannah. “Tells you something about ghosts. If you don’t fear their presence, they leave you alone. We’ll see if she starts haunting us now.” Hannah, clearly haunted from the moment she lays eyes on Isabella, begins to see parallels between their lives as she deals with the nagging question: Did Isabella choose this life, or was she locked away? Hannah pours over Isabella’s sketchbooks and letters, piecing together Isabella’s life while interweaving her own anxieties and dreams into Isabella’s story. The first third of the book drags, and somehow the discovery of a skeleton in a hidden room is the least compelling part of the entire novel. That said, its strength comes from the archaeological details (did you know that the pigment that creates red hair is the slowest to break down?) as well as the grace and attention given to both Hannah and Isabella—two women separated by hundreds of years but bound by a common humanity.

A touching story about the themes that resonate through centuries.

THE FINALISTS

Bell, David Berkley (416 pp.) $17.00 paper | July 5, 2022 978-0-593-19870-4

A scholarship competition goes horribly awry in this unusual academic suspense novel. Six ambitious students agree to lock themselves up in an old Victorian building for eight hours in hopes of winning a full ride to the fictional Hyde College. Totally secluded and far from campus, they have to impress college vice president Troy Gaines, a man nearly as desperate for money as they are, and Nicholas Hyde, the delinquent heir to the Hyde family fortune. Before they even step inside the house, though, things start to go wrong. Outside, there’s a political protest concerning new discoveries about the college founder’s activities in the Civil War. Nicholas Hyde shows up late and inebriated. Campus police escort the protestors away from the building as the crowd starts to get violent. Once the competitors—an eclectic group of students with nothing in common but financial need— give up their electronics and are locked in the house by the campus chief of police, things quickly get even worse. There is a clear and ever present distaste for Nicholas Hyde and his money among the house’s other inhabitants, despite it being the thing everyone is there to compete for—even Gaines, the narrator, who, in addition to helping run the competition, is desperate to convince Hyde to make a large donation to keep the college afloat. Gaines strives to remain neutral and understanding toward every student, but it might be harder for the reader to remain sympathetic to many of them. It’s certainly realistic for college students to be pretentious and grandiose, but it can be grating. Once people inside Hyde House start to drop like flies, the book takes a turn for the better, pitting the students and even Gaines against each other while exploring age-old questions of morality and duty.

A little slow in the beginning but ultimately a compelling account of how far some people will go to achieve their dreams.

THE MOST PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE ON EARTH

Bhat, Shashi Grand Central Publishing (272 pp.) $28.00 | June 28, 2022 978-1-5387-0791-3

Bhat’s candid novel follows Indian Canadian teenager Nina from ninth grade through her mid-30s as she slowly comes to terms with a devastating secret. In 1990s Halifax, Nina is an awkward 14-year-old dealing with her loving but often worried parents, who are pious Hindus; her growing alienation from her best friend; and an experience with a teacher, the consequences of which will continue to ripple beneath the surface of her life for years. The novel, which is divided into 13 impeccably titled, short story–like chapters including “Why I Read Beowulf” and “You Are Loved By Me,” follows Nina as she goes in and out of an MFA program in Baltimore, teaches high school English (which is sometimes “almost a high” and other times “like being an air traffic controller—just…too much”), and joins Toastmasters to try to manage her self-loathing. She navigates the alternately cringey and threatening world of modern dating with guys who would “take whatever [they] could.” Bhat approaches her weighty subject matter with grace and humor and, in doing so, finds a way of exploring trauma that is both realistic and tender. Unlike other coming-of-age novels that focus on the teenage or young adult years, in this one Bhat takes readers downstream and examines how those pivotal times continue to shape the protagonist as she approaches middle age. Suffused with popculture references including To Catch a Predator and the iconic line “We are the weirdos, Mister,” from the 1996 film The Craft, the novel could also be a parable for a modern world struggling to come to terms with its own secrets amid the reverberations of the #MeToo movement.

An empowering and liberatory coming-of-age novel for “the girls who stay quiet.”

WHERE DOGS BARK WITH THEIR TAILS

Bulle, Estelle-Sarah Trans. by Julia Grawemeyer Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $27.00 | July 5, 2022 978-0-3742-8909-6

Three siblings are buffeted by family drama, culture, and history in Guadeloupe. Bulle’s debut novel is framed around a young woman seeking to understand the lives of her father, known to his family as Petit-Frère, and her aunts, Lucinde and Antoine. Some of the disruption is a function of colonization: France’s possession of the Antillean archipelago is at once a source of social identity (Antoine long aspired to own a shop in Paris) and division, leading to a violent clash between police and citizens in 1967. There are cultural challenges too, as the siblings are mixed-race, complicating their status in a closed and class-conscious society. And then there is simple family drama—in alternating narratives, the siblings debate the causes of various incidents in Rashomon-like fashion. (Antoine’s urge to leave her impoverished home at 16 was either rash or necessary, depending on who’s talking.) Antoine calls the place “this little island where immorality reigns,” and the novel’s title refers to the backwardness of the family’s hometown. Still, Bulle conveys a deep sense of affection for the place in all its frustrations; translator Grawemeyer includes thoughtful, unobtrusive footnotes about Guadeloupean history and folklore while preserving much of the flavor of the original French and Creole in the text itself. So the novel’s flaws are largely matters of structure: Splitting the voices across the three siblings and Petit-Frère’s daughter diffuses the narrative, which at its heart is about Antoine’s struggles. But Antoine’s thread feels clipped; there’s a truncated subplot involving diamond smuggling and moments of magical realism that pass without much development, while