July 16, 2022
Forget about the books on your nightstand, this week we have the perfect vacation read for you. There is a wide range of styles and genres here from thriller to memoir to Chinese American short stories. Terrific narrative nonfiction in the form of a memoir adds to the mix. Take your pick.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Self-Portrait with Ghost
By Meng Jin
Published by Mariner Books
It’s clear you are in the hands of a very clever writer when you open Meng Jin’s (Little Gods) new story collection. In the title story, a writer is haunted by the ghost of a deceased friend who confronts her about the nature of reality. My favorite selection, “The Odd Women,” features three women’s voices: Vandana has stepped in front of a train and simply evaporated; Ursula has morphed into 13 corpses with identical DNA; and Octavia, living in a near-future lockdown, seems to be the projection of others. Is this the end of the universe? Identities keep shifting in these fantastical realities. There is material enough for an entire novel in this one brilliant story.
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published by Del Rey Books
Ever since the author’s Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia has risen to bestseller success. The new novel takes H.G. Wells’s classic science fiction/horror tale, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and transports it to 19th-century Yucatán. Carlotta lives with her evil genius father on a patron’s estate where he conducts experiments on animals, creating part-human/part-beast zombies. Carlotta is a rather fragile young woman, sulky, living in isolation and therefore naïve about the real world beyond her jungle abode. Their secluded world is threatened when the patron’s son arrives and sparks fly. Look out.
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Our Wives Under the Sea
By Julia Armfield
Published by Flatiron Books
This London-born writer (salt slow) firmly established herself as a favorite among writers and critics before she was 30. She has a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature and manages to blend otherworldly genres with a streak of feminism that makes her work fresh and relevant today. In her new novel, Leah, a marine biologist, experiences a near-death event when her research ship sinks. When she returns home, her wife finds her altered—distant and dreamy and worryingly unstable. From the depths of the sea to the inner depths of Leah’s psyche, we are plunged into a rich emotional story.
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Son of Elsewhere
By Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Published by Ballantine Books
In this frequently humorous essay collection that serves as a memoir, the author tells us, “It took two stopovers and nineteen hours of total flying time for me to become Black. I left Khartoum as a popular and charming (and modest) preteen, and I landed in Canada with two new identities: immigrant, and Black.” Abdelmahmoud learned, often from popular culture, a way to fit into this new world where color and religion determined every step in his search for a new identity. He is now a cultural critic and writes with both hindsight and insight to share the many ways in which he had to adjust.
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Two Nights in Lisbon
By Chris Pavone
Published by MCD
Pavone (The Expats) has been on both sides of the book world, both as an in-house editor and a novelist. Here he offers up a juicy revenge fantasy. It begins as a woman who has successfully reinvented her life finds that her new husband is missing from their Lisbon hotel room where they are staying while he is on business. The police perfectly encapsulate the plot when they say, “I think that this woman does not know her husband as well as she believes.” It’s a propulsive start to this international thriller. The suspense is palpable and the ending—well, you don’t see it coming.
