Editorial reviews

Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment.

Alam’s two previous novels, “Rich and Pretty” and “That Kind of Mother,” have proved he’s gifted with an acidic wit, one he uses to break down contemporary life at the cellular level.

This ecological horror story (particularly horrifying now) explores painful regions of the human heart.

It is tight, stark, visceral, beautiful — rich where richness is warranted, but spare where want and sorrow have sharpened every word.

Gerard’s unflinching look at youthful desperation marks an exciting turn in her work.

At once a mind-bending puzzle and a profound meditation on love, fate, ambition, and regret.

Incisive social commentary rendered in artful, original, and powerfully affecting prose.

At times terrifying, always gorgeously captivating, Thomas’ debut is one not to be missed, and perhaps to be revisited frequently.

Surreal imagery, spare characterization, and artful, hypnotic prose lend Thomas’s tale a delirious air, but at the book’s core lies a profound portrait of depression and adolescent turmoil.

To read this novel of shrouded pilgrimages is also to arrive at a meaning that is “bewitching, and utterly private, a secret for me, a single ship, a single concealed place”.

Complex and resonant.

A timely and resonant novel.

The Gimmicks impressively characterizes the enduring nature of Armenian contradictions in which “everything you’ve heard is true, everything you’ve heard is false.”

The setting is marvelous. Venice isn’t just a scenic background for the action of A Beautiful Crime. Its capricious tides and twisty, deceptive geography seem to mirror the characters’ secrets and intrigues.

The result is engrossing, but McCormick doesn't quite get the ratio right. Fewer gimmicks, ultimately, would have served The Gimmicks well.

This is a beautiful, intensely moving debut.

This is a penetrating, fresh look at the indomitable spirit of black pioneers and their descendants.

It's the sweetness of this novel that will melt you, even when it ventures dangerously close to flaming schmaltz, and despite its somewhat predictable (but still satisfying) ending.

If dystopian stories serve as thought experiments, the best ones also function as heart experiments. And with The Divers' Game, Jesse Ball has unsettlingly accomplished both.

Magnificently disorienting and meticulously constructed, Triangulum couples an urgent subtext with an unceasing sense of mystery. This is a thought-provoking dream of a novel, situated within thought-provoking contexts both fictional and historical.