BookBrowse Editorial Review
Like This, But Funnier: A Novel
by Hallie Cantor
(4/8/2026)
Like Jane, the fictional teacher she's writing about, Caroline keeps digging herself deeper into a guilt-ridden hole, unable to stop and unable to tell anyone the truth about what she's doing—especially Harry. Fittingly, there are sections of this book that are legitimately tense and gripping, thriller-like in their execution. While the book is a page-turner, it never becomes actually creepy, and Cantor never lets Caroline indulge in truly absurd or surprising behavior—every time she
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Lost Lambs: A Novel
by Madeline Cash
(1/14/2026)
Madeline Cash's debut novel, Lost Lambs, takes place in an unnamed coastal town in an unspecified year, an ambiguous setting that gives the story the twinge of an alternate reality. Against this backdrop, the five members of the Flynn family are navigating distinct but overlapping plotlines. The setup is funny; the characters feel real and well-developed; the jokes land. It's a fun ride—and refreshing to read a domestic dramady that expands into new settings and genres—but the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Ten Year Affair: A Novel
by Erin Somers
(11/19/2025)
In an unnamed town in the Hudson Valley, thirty-year-old Cora is living two lives. In one life—reality—she's a mother to two young children and a content manager at a digital marketing company. While on maternity leave, she befriends Sam, the sole father in her local baby group. Cora's other life is her fantasy life, in which she and Sam do decide to have an affair. This other "timeline" runs parallel to Cora's real life, but The Ten Year Affair is not
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Ruth: A Novel
by Kate Riley
(8/27/2025)
As the book goes on and Ruth grows older, Ruth and the reader put together a fuller—although still constantly surprising—picture: the Dorf is a Hutterite colony in which "the Sermon on the Mount was their only charter, all goods were held in common, and a young person such as herself had no task other than discerning whether to accept Christ into her heart and seek baptism." This last part is difficult for Ruth—she loves Christ (she thinks), but she never feels or says the righ
BookBrowse Editorial Review
London Fields by Martin Amis
(7/16/2025)
In Martin Amis's London Fields—one of his most acclaimed and beloved novels—Samson Young, a struggling American novelist, comes to London and finds the perfect story. Nicola Six, a self-styled femme fatale, knows that she's going to be murdered soon. She can see it, the scene: the murderer in a car on a dead-end street, telling her to get in…She wants it, is not afraid of it, knows both that it is inevitable and also that she has to make it come true, that she has to fin
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America
by Mark Whitaker
(5/21/2025)
The drama of Malcolm's life and death is fascinating. Whitaker has pulled together a rich, expansive tapestry of the characters and relationships involved. But The Afterlife of Malcolm X also traces the influence Malcolm had on people who were not directly involved in his life and death, and indeed, some who never even knew him, extending his tapestry further and further out, through decades and generations. By the time he gets to our present movement, featuring an Afrofuturistic opera ab
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Hunchback: A Novel
by Saou Ichikawa
(3/26/2025)
Saou Ichikawa's debut novel, Hunchback, is acerbic and sexy and lightly provocative, partly because of the "twisted" thoughts of its narrator and partly for its depiction of the erotic relationship between a disabled woman and her able-bodied nurse, a relationship that resists easy categorizations and legible power dynamics. I thought it was genius. Hunchback is an illuminating, challenging exploration of the intersection between disability rights, reproductive rights, sex work, an
BookBrowse Editorial Review
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
by Haley Mlotek
(3/12/2025)
Mlotek is sharpest when discussing a specific person or people: her chapter on Audre Lorde, who married a man but "didn't think her marriage was exactly opposed to her relationships with women," is great, as is her chapter on the "excruciating" thirty-hour documentary The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, about two artists' staged but legally binding wedding, short marriage, and subsequent breakup. She turns, too, to books and cinema, what she calls "divorce content"; I loved her critic
BookBrowse Editorial Review
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(1/29/2025)
Like many Dostoyevsky works, it's very funny; the narrator, a friendless and unnamed 26-year-old man, is a sympathetic but also satirical and somewhat silly figure. The narrator's exaggerated pathology and the satirical way he's written make him somewhat cartoonish. These extremes, however, also make the story entertaining, with humor that helps offset the pathos.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Playworld: A Novel
by Adam Ross
(1/15/2025)
Griffin's relationship with Amanda is the good stuff of fourteen-year-old boy fiction, familiar but heartfelt, and richly drawn. For all the great aspects of Playworld, though, the book fails to cohere into a great novel. The voice that holds these scenes together is often grating to me. Ross writes in this smooth, falsely literary style, at times inexplicably grandiose; his sentences have the cadence and sheen of "good" writing—important writing—but I kept getting snagged on
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Canoes by Maylis De Kerangal
(11/6/2024)
These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational. Their preoccupations are different than what I normally encounter in fiction, but the feelings and dynamics that de Kerangal describes are familiar and convincingly rendered: the awkwardness between two women in their twenties who used to be close friends and somehow aren't anymore; an older sister's pride and sympathy f
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Suggested in the Stars by Yoko Tawada
(10/2/2024)
In Suggested in the Stars, Knut brings Susanoo—successfully found, but seemingly unable to speak—to a speech loss doctor he knows in Copenhagen so that Susanoo can regain his native language and speak with Hiruko, although this ongoing plot device that worked so well in the first book loses its luster a bit over the course of this one. The hospital in Copenhagen, as well as the speech doctor Velmer, are explicitly cribbed from Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, a Twin Pea
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Liars: A Novel
by Sarah Manguso
(8/21/2024)
Jane is a writer and John is an artist, and their union, she believes, is one of equals, of two likeminded artists, unlike, say, the marriages of women who "changed their names and used the word hubby." And yet immediately after marriage her life is consumed by the practical and emotional labor of wifehood: she handles John's taxes, his travel logistics, shipments of his art, all the housework—because it needs to get done, because her financial life is now intertwined with his, because Joh
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Change: A Novel
by Édouard Louis
(4/3/2024)
Change, Louis's latest novel, picks up where The End of Eddy leaves off and finishes the story, detailing the difficult, intensely intentional process by which Louis's autofictional alter ego transforms himself from Eddy to Édouard and attempts to do what his younger self thought he'd already done—leave his old world behind. The Eddy of Change is motivated solely by his desire to avenge his past—to show everyone who bullied him and underestimated him and tra
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Martyr!: A novel
by Kaveh Akbar
(1/24/2024)
As a protagonist, Cyrus is rather disappointing; the chapters that follow him, in close third person, are the least interesting of the book. One expects the prose writing of a poet like Akbar to be lively and surprising, but the Cyrus chapters of Martyr!, perhaps crushed by the weight of narrative exposition, mostly left me cold. Luckily, Martyr!'s other characters are more compelling, and Akbar's writing is more playful and stylish when he's not in Cyrus's head. Akbar also include
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Wellness: A Novel
by Nathan Hill
(10/4/2023)
Hill's own theory, evidenced also by his debut novel, The Nix, is that we can understand our present selves by understanding our pasts. That's why he gives us ample episodic flashbacks that shed new light on what we've already read, showing Elizabeth and Jack's lives to be more painful, or fraudulent, or complicated than we'd previously realized, and in so doing, creating a kind of unified theory of their lives. We get long scenes of Jack's upbringing on the Kansas prairie and Elizabeth's
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The History of a Difficult Child: A Novel
by Mihret Sibhat
(8/23/2023)
Only in the book's emotional climax, in which Selam experiences a tragic loss, is there little to no humor, no lightness—only attempts at communicating grief, all the more moving for their childlike bluntness. The question of freedom, and why adults so often relinquish theirs, subtly animates the book. To witness Selam mature over 400 pages, and to catch glimpses of a vast, complex world that extends beyond her perceptions, is a real pleasure. She's pure entertainment.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Librarianist: A Novel
by Patrick deWitt
(7/12/2023)
Bob is not some loveless, angry Houellebecq character; his aloneness doesn't read as a failure to him or to the reader. Quietude and reading are his life, not an escape from it. Instead of taking solace in his ability to turn pain into art, using books to justify his loneliness, Bob turns to literature to recognize himself in others, and to not be alone. His reading is described as "a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to e
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The New Earth: A Novel
by Jess Row
(6/7/2023)
The New Earth works for a few reasons, one of which is Row's unequivocal condemnation of Israel's occupation of Palestine and apartheid state, from a Jewish-American perspective (the Wilcox family is culturally Jewish but barely religious). The other is his wide-ranging curiosity and deep research. There's so much context here—so much to learn and to consider—about everything from the Zapatista movement to Israel's colonial history, to quantum entanglement to ocean science. Th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Victory City: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
(4/5/2023)
Rushdie's account of the history of Bisnaga is truly interesting and entertaining. Sometimes his strokes are too broad and his movement too plodding, but for the most part there are interesting characters, engaging dialogue and enough detail to flesh out the world without being overwhelming. And the novel works as a subtle satire of contemporary politics—especially in its observations about dictatorial leaders, and about religion as a tool of social control and oppression—but isn't o
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The World and All That It Holds: A Novel
by Aleksandar Hemon
(2/15/2023)
The World and All That It Holds is Hemon's best novel, I think. It combines his interests—war and displacement; fables and storytelling; making sense of history; Sarajevo; espionage in East Asia—into a coherent, emotionally consistent narrative, unlike the incongruent chapters of Nowhere Man or the cynical, affected parallels of The Lazarus Project. And his prose is more freewheeling here: the repetitious phrases, the medley of languages, Pinto's attempts at reli
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Dr. No: A Novel
by Percival Everett
(11/16/2022)
Dr. No playfully acts out the question of how meaning is constructed, and of whether there can be a reality independent of perception. "What is the function of identity?" Wala asks his graduate class. "Let's focus on the fact that identification and identity have nothing to do with each other." Naming things gives them power, or life, as Everett narrativized in his previous novel, The Trees, where the act of writing out the names of America's lynching victims causes them to ris
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn
(10/19/2022)
The constant girl-power references and callouts feel a bit stale and inorganic, but the premise is a good vehicle for an action-mystery-assassin story, and the book delivers on everything we might want: Tricks of the trade (if you're disoriented underwater, breathe out and then follow the bubbles to the surface; soak tobacco in water to make poison), a detailed scene of losing a tail in New Orleans' French Quarter, another of escaping bodyguards in the Paris catacombs, an elaborate scheme in Zan
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Afterlives: A Novel
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
(9/7/2022)
Gurnah's playing the long game here; the more important effect is the cumulative one. Like in life, watershed moments are buried deep within paragraphs; plotlines are dropped and forgotten until hundreds of pages later. Sometimes the book rushes through years and distance so quickly that the narration seems breathless, and yet, without any big dramatic moments, the world feels static—like when you're on a plane and you look at the motionless squares of land beneath you. I think there's som
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Cult Classic: A Novel
by Sloane Crosley
(7/13/2022)
Cult Classic isn't as cynical as some contemporary novels about youngish, often millennial women succumbing to the dark forces of social media, capitalism or general misanthropy. Lola isn't depressed so much as confused. Social media enables her worst tendencies but doesn't ruin her life. People describe her as cynical, but they just don't know her that well. Indeed, Cult Classic is very much a conventional romantic comedy, with a faint love triangle structure: Lola is choosing bet
BookBrowse Editorial Review
We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets
(6/8/2022)
Unlike other recent novels that feature the workplace under late capitalism—I'm thinking of
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada,
Severance by Ling Ma and
The Employees by Olga Ravn, which all satirize the simultaneous life-consuming intensity, drudgery and absurdit
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Trust by Hernan Diaz
(5/18/2022)
The novel is like a feminist retelling of a classic, male-oriented story, except that the original story is also one that Diaz wrote. Look at what is missing from these accounts, he implores us. Who do you believe?
Trust is conventional in that our most pressing questions of plot are answered at the end, but there is no climactic eureka moment, where some crime is solved and the criminal is dramatically exposed—although there is one reveal, late in the book, that provides that sati
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Vladimir: A Novel
by Julia May Jonas
(3/2/2022)
There are barbs about the zeitgeisty, near-constant use of the word "liminal," and the rise of creative nonfiction among students—is it due to narcissism or fear, the narrator wonders. These aren't cruel jokes, though—just recognizable observations if you've been near a college campus recently, lightly mocking but also sympathetic and even appreciative. Yes, sometimes the narrator comes off as a bitch, and her students clownish, but Vladimir is neither a skewering of campus po
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Fortune Men: A novel
by Nadifa Mohamed
(1/19/2022)
The narration of The Fortune Men roams freely, often leaving Mahmood behind and dipping into the perspective of Violet or her sister, or briefly into that of a minor character. In its most effective moments, this omniscient narration allows Mohamed to capture the expansiveness of her characters' inner lives: how much love and regret they can harbor; how their personal, individual struggles are magnified, not diminished, by the important events surrounding them. If sometimes the historical
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Anomaly: A Novel
by Hervé Le Tellier
(1/5/2022)
The Anomaly is a fun book, if not a hilarious one; it's playful in its self-referentiality (there's a book within the book, also called The Anomaly) and its engagement with different fiction genres and tropes (political satire, family man who's secretly an assassin). Le Tellier pokes fun at the more risible aspects of contemporary Western society—late night talk shows, Saturday Night Live, action and alien movies, teenage vampire books, political leaders—but also
