Editorial reviews

A smart, fun and lovely read, Landline is Rainbow Rowell at her best.

In her pensive first novel, “Time of the Locust,” Morowa Yejidé, a native of the District, offers an original take on the disorder — as a symbol of generational loss and imprisonment of body, mind and soul.

“Nobody Is Ever Missing” gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. It’s an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, “trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.”

Gould details exactly how an overactive mind, with nowhere to land, runs wild in a rarefied vacuum.

"Everything I Never Told You" is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together — and that finally end up tearing it apart.

"The Great Glass Sea" suffers from a few excesses of ambition, then it is redeemed by Weil's greatest gift to the reader: a deep understanding of family, personal loss and the abiding love between siblings.

Lepucki's cautious dystopia never quite asks the right questions of us, ultimately to the detriment of the novel.

"The Girls From Corona del Mar" is a slim book that leaves a deep impression.

In this literary but unpretentious book, Makkai has created a juicy and moving story of art and love and the luck it takes for either to last.

Dept of Speculation is a wonderful novel about getting older and losing that brief and mostly illusory freedom that children believe all adults enjoy.

I wish it were possible to get amnesia so I could read California again and again.

As both postmodern epic and ultimate sports novel, “Red or Dead” is a winner.

I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You is an awkward first novel, but if it weren’t it would somehow be disingenuous to its own literary ambitions of embracing the mess of our lives and welcoming it into our homes, calling the mess a work of art.

Lepucki places enough breadcrumbs along the way that the truly dramatic revelations aren’t particularly surprising, but that lack of suspense doesn’t make the story any less affecting.

She should have let us get to know a few of the unknown Americans here, without twisting their story into a political parable, and without trying to tell everyone's story at once.

“Falling Out of Time” identifies these mourners, the ones who are a few years out, as walkers moving into another stage of grief. They are everywhere shadowed by what has happened to them.

There is genuine tenderness and complication between Bev and Amy, and the novel’s best moments occur when the pair are allowed to just sit and chat about their imperfect starter lives.

“The Great Glass Sea” is not an alternative history, then, but a fantastical vision inspired by bits and pieces of Russian language, history and culture. It is beautifully baffled by the mysterious Russian soul.

[A] brilliant and intriguing new novel.