The Likeness
by Tana French (Viking, $25)
Detective Cassie Maddox impersonates a grad student to solve a young woman’s murder in Tana French’s follow-up to last year’s In the Woods, said Sarah Weinman in Newsday. Five hundred pages afford Maddox plenty of time to develop an intriguing circle of friends, and readers plenty of time to enjoy French’s “wry humor” and beautiful phrasing. This arresting author makes her contrived plot “wholly believable” and builds her second award-worthy whodunit “toward epic-tragedy proportions.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Real World
by Natsuo Kirino (Knopf, $24)
The latest “morbidly fascinating” novel from the author of Out follows four teenage girls in Japan as they come to idolize a bright loner who has murdered his mother, said Joel Rice in the Nashville Tennessean. If the story’s brutality “seems staged, a pretext for meandering exposition,” that doesn’t ruin Real World. The “sinister plot” provides Kirino with myriad occasions to skewer the mores of middle-class Japanese adults and to deliver the “acute psychosexual portraiture at which she so excels.”
What Was Lost
by Catherine O’Flynn (Holt, $14)
Catherine O’Flynn’s compelling debut was an award-winner in her native England, said Kate Ward in Entertainment Weekly. In the U.S., it’s being marketed as if it were a “thriller-esque” mystery about a girl detective who goes missing in 1984 Birmingham. At heart, though, the book is a “subtle” and clever study of two forlorn British mall employees who take up the girl’s case two decades after her disappearance. “What was lost” refers to childhood but also to urban change.
The Three of Us
by Julia Blackburn (Pantheon, $26)
Julia Blackburn’s “bleakly funny” new memoir conjures the “most narcissistic, drunkenly bombastic” married couple since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” said Elaina Richardson in O magazine. Unfortunately for Blackburn, these people were her artist parents. Though she was only 12 when they split, in 1961, a fierce sexual rivalry with her mother almost immediately filled the vacuum. Built with the help of “copious journals and letters,” The Three of Us is a “stunning book,” a portrait of a generation as well as a family.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”