March 9, 2024
This week we cover stories about family, love, and characters who are haunted by their pasts and potential futures. Visit a Caribbean island in a posthumous novel from a beloved Colombian writer; revisit hijinks on the campaign trail; plunge into a Gothic tale with vampires from Argentina; follow the heart’s desire of a marine biologist; and encounter Russian ghosts in the afterworld. And enjoy the extra daylight!
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Until August
By GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Published by KNOPF
Translated by ANNE MCLEAN
An exciting publishing event—a new novel by García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian master of magic realism who passed away in 2014. Read it in one go (it’s under 200 pages) and relish this surprising gift. In the story, a long-married woman goes to the same island each year and takes a lover for one night. It has all the hallmarks of Márquez’s talents and obsessions: love, desire, sensuality—and is a welcome and inspiring capstone to the author’s legacy. Also available in Spanish.
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Mother Doll
By KATYA APEKINA
Published by OVERLOOK
Apekina is a Moscow-born, L.A.-based writer who, in her clever sophomore effort, creates several generations of women who you’ll be interested to meet. Zhenia, a young woman in L.A. working as a medical translator, is unexpectedly pregnant. Her mother Marina is in New York, taking care of her own mother, Vera, quietly receding into dementia. And her great-grandmother Irina is apparently trying to contact her from beyond the grave. Like the Russian nesting dolls of the title, this quartet of women interweave and time periods collapse as we follow the contemporary story of Zhenia’s family as well as the fascinating world Irina grew up in during the 1917 February Revolution in Russia.
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Great Expectations
By VINSON CUNNINGHAM
Published by HOGARTH
Cunningham (who worked for Obama) captures the energy, excitement, hope, despair, chaos, and boredom (not to mention the sex that diffuses the intensity of the workplace) behind the scenes on the 2008 American presidential campaign. We all know how that turned out, but it is nonetheless a thrilling insider’s view and a spot-on portrayal of ‘the candidate.’ Our narrator’s religious upbringing and his passion for music add texture to the story of a young Black man’s search for his place in the world. The cover’s striking use of Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream” movingly captures the enormous challenges, past and present, that Cunningham explores here.
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In Ascension
By MARTIN MACINNES
Published by GROVE/BLACK CAT
Leigh, a Dutch microbiologist who suffered an abusive childhood, is torn between family obligations and the allure of her career investigating anomalies. She explores deep sea trenches of the Atlantic Ocean which may answer questions about the beginning of life, and later discovers anomalies in space. MacInnes’s ambitious novel was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. He “was always interested in writing an epic…but also a book which is about intimacy…and the struggle to find connections.” In his blending of science, environmental change, and speculative fiction he creates a monumental story with a sense of wonder about the natural world and the very survival of humanity.
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Thirst
By MARINA YUSZCZUK
Published by DUTTON
Translated by HEATHER CLEARY
We open in a Buenos Aires cemetery where our narrator and her son wander among the gravestones and grand, crumbling mausoleums of famous people, when she spots a disheveled woman staring right at her. “There’s something about her that doesn’t belong here… Not that she doesn’t belong in this place—she doesn’t seem to belong…in this reality.” These two women, from different time periods, haunt Yuszczuk’s first novel to appear in English. One is a grieving mother conflicted by her desires, and the other is a lustful vampire. Alienation and eroticism abound in this queer-horror-fantasy—a dark feminist Gothic tale which has had an enormous success across the globe.
