February 5, 2022
February is an often-gloomy month. Thankfully we offer you a mélange of love, music and two epics—one historical novel concerning mysticism and heresy in Poland, and another family feud set in modern Lisbon. It’s a short month so start reading now!
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Free Love
By TESSA HADLEY
Published by HARPER
Hadley’s novels introduce people you are certain you have crossed paths with before. Her newest set of characters live around London during the countercultural revolution of the ’60s, but this well-heeled family hasn’t been drawn in by the turmoil around them. When wife Phyllis’s mid-life ennui flings her into an affair with a friend’s son everything changes. By novel’s end we are in a rather different configuration with lots of revelations, rash decisions, serious consequences, sex, drugs, new babies and new frontiers. It is utterly enthralling and, as usual for Hadley, spot on.
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The Books of Jacob
By OLGA TOKARCZUK
Published by RIVERHEAD
Translated by Jennifer Croft
Need a big, juicy, historical tome to hunker down with this winter? Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) is your writer. Her new novel takes the reader back to the 18th century and a captivating character, Jacob Frank, whose multiple religious conversions (from Judaism to Islam, then to Catholicism) ultimately led to imprisonment and his death as a Polish baron. This real historical character fascinated Tokarczuk for years, as did the subject of heresy, and though she never planned to make his life into a novel, the rebellious, messianic character proved irresistible as a subject. I think you’ll agree.
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The Violin Conspiracy
By BRENDAN SLOCUMB
Published by ANCHOR BOOKS
Slocumb, who says that music saved his life and kept him off the streets, always loved the classic mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. He has put these two passions into the plot of his debut mystery. Ray is a young Black man in North Carolina who has always wanted to be a classical violinist despite his rough, rural beginnings. His grandfather’s old fiddle, which turns out to be a valuable Stradivarius, is stolen just as Ray has entered an important competition. This promising first novel brims with a lively energy that keeps the reader riveted to the page.
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Xstabeth
By DAVID KEENAN
Published by EUROPA EDITIONS
Xstabeth seems to reinvent the fictional form, from grammar to punctuation to syntax. Packed into a slight page count are all manner of obsessions. Surrounding the story of a famous musician father and his daughter, and a ‘famouser’ musician, there is ever-present music, lots of vodka and stout, golf, a fierce intellect and the ghostly muse Xstabeth who shakes up their lives. Yes, it’s rather indescribable, but that makes this novel, which moves from Russia to Scotland, even more extraordinary. There is additional commentary woven within to put Keenan’s work in context. This ambitious but clever novel could well become an underground hit.
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The Wind Whistling in the Cranes
By LÍDIA JORGE
Published by LIVERIGHT
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott
Never having come across Lídia Jorge, I was intrigued to read of her many prizes and accomplishments. This gripping saga about two families in Portugal takes place both in the 90s and a century before, recounting the fate of a canning factory in the beautiful coastal area of the Algarve. From great-grandfather José Joaquim to contemporary Milene Leandro we learn the story of the rise and fall of the family business, and the Cape Verdean immigrants who eventually reside in the vacant factory. It’s a dramatic, sweeping chronicle which mirrors the colonial and post-colonial history of Portugal. Though it’s the first time her work appears in English, one hopes it will not be the last.
