The Cat’s Table
by Michael Ondaatje
The Week
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Nightwoods
by Charles Frazier
(Random House, $26)
“Sorry, haters,” but the author of Cold Mountain is not the overhyped pretender you hoped he might be, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Charles Frazier may have been wildly overpaid for the disappointing 2006 follow-up to his award-winning, best-selling debut. But this third novel, set in 1960s Appalachia, “is a fantastic book.” A “cleverly knitted thriller” about a reclusive young woman forced to shield a pair of strange twins from a violent pursuer, it’s wry at times and “superbly paced.”
Lost Memory of Skin
by Russell Banks
(Ecco, $26)
The “unlikely protagonist” of Russell Banks’s new novel is a young ex-soldier who lives under a Florida causeway because he and his shantytown neighbors are convicted sex offenders, said Linda Elisabeth Beattie in the Louisville Courier-Journal. We get to know “the Kid” through his relationship with a sociologist whose intervention greatly complicates the young man’s life. Throughout, Banks writes “with empathy, clarity, and humor about how we diminish ourselves by isolating the disenfranchised.”
We Others
by Steven Millhauser
(Knopf, $27)
This collection of new and selected older stories from Steven Millhauser showcases the Pulitzer Prize winner’s diverse gifts, said Dale Singer in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “In stories ranging from historical to modern, magical to realistic, serious to satiric, his masterful prose style slowly but inevitably weaves narratives that work their way into your consciousness and remain long after you’ve turned the last page.” The only thing a reader could wish for is more stories that weren’t available elsewhere before.