General Fiction
The Alternatives.
By Caoilinn Hughes.
Apr. 2024. 352p. Riverhead, $28 (9780593545003); e-book (9780593545027).
Olwen Flattery, the oldest of four sisters, has already been dealt a rough hand. Orphaned when the sisters were just teenagers, Olwen has had to see her siblings through to adulthood. In setting up a life with a widower and his two young boys she played savior yet again. So when the realities of the geology lessons she teaches at the University of Galway hit home, extreme climate anxiety does her in and she disappears. The sisters, accomplished professionals all, close ranks to track their missing sibling and to try to flesh out a more cohesive picture of their current adult lives. Hughes’ (The Wild Laughter, 2020) writing is simply brilliant: An opinion was “sculpted in brass in their youth and can never be changed beyond the inevitable tarnishing or a quick polish.” The dynamics of the sisters’ interactions and the easy way they anticipate each others’ needs while slipping into decades-old roles are the novel’s highlights. Frustratingly, the sisters come together and part again without really solving Olwen’s crisis. But perhaps that’s the point; in their years of functioning as a collective unit, they know that sometimes the best remedy is to know the limits of your own influence. —Poornima Apte
The Cemetery of Untold Stories.
By Julia Alvarez.
Apr. 2024. 256p. Algonquin, $28 (9781643753843).
Alvarez (Afterlife, 2020) brings the magic again in this nesting box of a novel. Writer Alma, Alvarez’s stand-in for a touch of autobiographical fiction, and her sisters Refuge, Consolation, and Pity, the English versions Alma often invokes for Amparo, Consuelo, and Piedad, have inherited property in the Dominican Republic. The sisters are not happy with Alma’s decision to make over one of the parcels in the eponymous cemetery. She and her sculptor friend, Brava, haul boxes of her unfinished manuscripts there, and she buries the pages that won’t burn, hoping to finally be free of them. As Alma and Brava transform the cemetery plot with statues and install a gate that opens only when a story is told, the surrounding neighborhood watches and wonders. Alma hires one of the neighbors to be the cemetery’s caretaker, and the restless ghosts/statues tell sensitive Filomena their stories. These tales surround and crisscross each other as Filomena and her family; Alma’s father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; and Bienvenida Inocencia, the discarded first wife of the brutal dictator Trujillo, are linked in surprising ways, most especially in a humanity that transcends pathos and passion. May Alvarez continue to excavate stories for many years to come! —Sara Martínez
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The bestselling Alvarez has a committed readership, and word of this inventive novel will also attract new followers.
Change.
By Édouard Louis. Tr. by John Lambert.
Mar. 2024. 256p. Farrar, $27 (9780374606800).
This coming-of-age story introduces readers to 17-year-old Eddy Belleguele, a closeted gay teen who lives with his working-class family in a small town in bleak northern France. An upper-middle-class girl named Elena befriends Eddy and “civilizes” him. Desperate nevertheless to escape his home and change his life, Eddy travels to the nearest big city, Amiens, where he meets the philosopher and writer Didier Eribon. The famous author becomes a kind of mentor to Eddy, who dreams of becoming an intellectual himself. Eddy’s desire for change continues when he is admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Having long dreamed of being rich and taking revenge on his past life, Eddy soon begins dating wealthy and powerful men. He realizes another dream with the publication of his first novel, The End of Eddy. Not coincidentally, this is also the title of author Louis’ own first novel, this book’s companion exercise in first-person autofiction. The author shares his character’s name and birthplace, Eribon is a real person, etc. Intriguing as it is to imagine what is “real” and what’s imagined, these questions don’t much enrich what is already a beautifully executed, memorable, and highly recommended novel. —Michael Cart
YA: Like The End of Eddy, this has crossover appeal to older teens who enjoy literary fiction. MC.
Christa Comes Out of Her Shell.
By Abbi Waxman.
Apr. 2024. 400p. Berkley, paper, $18 (9780593198780).
Christa Liddle prefers to be left alone to do her thing; in this case, studying snails on a small island in the Indian Ocean. But the discovery that her father, a scientist with a cultlike following, long thought to be dead, has been found in Alaska calls her home to her dysfunctional family. Christa wants only to return to her snails, but as more and more of her father’s stories become untangled in the public eye, she begins to realize that hiding from her past may be something they have in common. Readers who find comfort in Waxman’s likable nerds (as in The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, 2019) will enjoy smart and snarky Christa. Christa’s mother and sisters add delightful color and humor as they make clear where Christa’s personality originated, and Christa’s second chance at romance with an old family friend feels natural and genuine and full of heat. A scene describing a sexual assault feels a little out of place in this otherwise warm story. Give to those who like their rom-coms with smart characters and messy lives. —Tracy Babiasz
The Day Tripper.
By James Goodhand.
Mar. 2024. 368p. MIRA, $28.99 (9780778369646); e-book (9780369748706).
In the summer of 1995, Alex enjoys the best day of his life. He’s smitten with his first love, Holly, and has a bright future ahead of him. All is well until he runs into an old enemy. A tumble into the Thames River sends him 15 years into the future, where his life rests in shambles. He falls asleep only to wake up nine years later. Cursed to awaken in a different year every day, Alex searches for the disaster that spun him out of control. In doing so, he learns whether personal agency can outweigh fate. This is Goodhand’s adult debut following two YA novels. The timetravel element of Alex’s story offers a robust framework to examine how a young man shapes his destiny. The Day Tripper is a pageturner, even as it focuses on the mundanities of life: love, aging, the responsibilities of being a son and mentor. Empathetically told, with a bit of moralism, it offers a hopeful view of destiny and contemporary manhood. —Zeja Z. Copes
YA: Alex’s fate changes when he confronts his childhood, and commits to helping someone just as young and powerless as he is—something that will feel especially relevant to older YA readers. ZZC.
Dublin Tales.
Ed. by Eve Patten and Paul Delaney.
Feb. 2024. 272p. Oxford, paper, $16.95 (9780192855558).
A curated anthology of short fiction celebrates the city of Dublin as a literary setting and muse. Collecting 17 stories dating from the early twentieth century to the present (including a handful commissioned specifically for this volume), the editors intend a composite “variously humorous and haunting, intimate and violent, mundane and bizarre.” Canonical selections by James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, and Brendan Behan, among others, capture Dublin’s lively ferment, its churches and public houses, its many fault lines. But the collection’s true propulsion comes from its more recent arrivals. In Caitriona Lally’s “Tramlines,” an agitated young mother pushes a pram at delirious speed through the Phibsborough neighbor-hood in ironic contrast to the leisurely, chatty walks for which Dublin is often remembered. “Catastrophe,” by Kevin Power, in which a flailing writer interviews his literary idol, aches with vulnerability and shame. “Emigrant,” by Mirsad Ibiševic, reminds readers of the city’s ethnic diversity. And bilingual pieces, including Caitlín Nic Íomhair’s haunting pandemic-affair story, “Relentless,” reiterate the cultural importance of the Irish language. A pithy list of suggested further reading further underscores Dublin’s literary vitality. —Brendan Driscoll
Fervor.
By Toby Lloyd.
Mar. 2024. 288p. Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader, $28 (9781668033333); e-book (9781668033357).
In Lloyd’s unsettling debut, the death of Holocaust survivor and prickly patriarch Yosef sends the members of a strict Jewish family reeling in 1999 London. Fourteenyear-old Elsie, the favorite of her forbidding grandfather, alarms her family and teachers with her behavior after his death. Months later, she goes missing for several days, and when she returns, is emotionally disturbed to the extent that she is eventually institutionalized. Her mother, Hannah, a former journalist now consumed with writing a biography of her father-in-law, withdraws from the lives of her three children. Eight years later, youngest son Tovyah, who has rebelled against his family’s orthodoxy, enrolls at Oxford and meets Kate, who becomes wrapped up in Tovyah’s life and observes the continuing
