Top Ten Land welcomes William Boyd while the Scottish writer is firing on all cylinders. His 16th novel, Trio, is receiving glowing reviews for its tale of three people leading secret lives – a movie producer, a novelist and an actress – who are making a disaster-plagued British film in 1968, a year when Britain was still swingin' as the world was coming apart.
Try writing a paragraph without using an “e.” I’ll wait. It’s hard, right? Now wrap your mind around the difficulty of fashioning a full book without it! The French writer Georges Perec accomplished that feat in his 1969 novel, A Void. The brilliantly experimental writer followed that up with a novella, The Exeter Ghost (1972) in which every word has “e” as its vowel.
Iain Pears – whose appreciation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels appears at right - is an English novelist who often draws on his expertise as an art historian to craft literary mysteries. His first novel, The Raphael Affair (1991), introduced Jonathan Argyll, a detective art historian who works with the Italian Art Squad. The six other novels in the series include The Titian Committee (1992), The Bernini Bust (1993) and The Immaculate Deception (2000).
“Would you be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Trump?”
That’s the opening question in David Leavitt’s daring new comedy of manners, Shelter in Place, which revolves around a group of New Yorkers who have gathered in a stately Connecticut home just four days after the 2016 election.
That question itself is not what it seems – rather than an invitation to murder (Siri can’t do that, yet) it is a test of the group’s moral compass and its willingness to speak freely – and neither is the novel.
John Banville’s new novel, Snow, begins with this magnificent grabber: “‘I’m a priest, for Christ’s sake – how can this be happening to me?’”
We learn straight away what happened to him on a snowy Irish night in 1957 – a mutilative murder most foul.
The urgent question, of course, is whodunit? Banville moves toward the answer in a suspenseful, beautifully written story that invokes many of the classic elements of Agatha Christie-era mysteries.
Edinburgh’s mandatory retirement age for police forced Inspector John Rebus to retire in 2007, as Ian Rankin detailed in Exit Music. That was six books ago. A Song for the Dark Times, the 23rd installment of the internationally acclaimed Rebus series, finds the cantankerous crime stopper with a bum heart and lungs, a broken down Saab and two mysteries to solve.
Bestselling author and Top Ten contributor Sue Miller is receiving glowing reviews for her latest novel, Monogamy. It’s no surprise since this story showcases what Miller does so exquisitely: provide a richly detailed, poignant and surprising portrait of the contemporary family, through an engrossing story.
Among the wondrous passages in the wondrous novel—The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—by our newest Top Ten contributor, Junot Díaz, is this one:
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois introduced the idea of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” DuBois applied this sense of “two-ness” in 1903 to black people, who he says were both “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” But Top Ten contributor Laila Lalami reminds us in her new book of essays, Conditional Citizens, that double-consciousness is experienced by many people in this land of immigrants who believe they are seen as outsiders.
Congratulations to Top Ten contributor Lydia Millet whose latest novel, A Children’s Bible, has been named a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
The novel, her 13th book of fiction, follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders—including Eve, who narrates the story—decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside in a landscape ravaged by environmental degradation.