Cost
by Roxana Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)
Roxana Robinson’s “scarily good” new novel creeps into corners of family life that most of us are “terrified to approach,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. When three generations of a small clan receive word that one of their own is spiraling into heroin addiction, a vacation in Maine turns into a “faltering, panicked” intervention. The myriad anxieties conjured by Robinson make Cost hard to cozy up with but “impossible” to put down.
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House of Wits
by Paul Fisher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
However much has been written about the James household that produced novelist Henry, philosopher William, and diarist Alice, said Hermione Lee in The New York Times, readers could use a contemporary update. Unfortunately, author Paul Fisher approaches the project with “a thoroughly infantilizing agenda.” No matter what the siblings accomplish, he portrays them as products of childhood rivalries and worries.
The Condition
by Jennifer Haigh (Harper, $26)
In Jennifer Haigh’s “rich, enjoyable” third novel, a family of five begins to unravel when the only daughter is diagnosed with a disorder that will trap her in the body of a child, said Kim Hubbard in People. Splitting the narrative five ways, the award-winning Haigh “sets many balls in motion and drops one now and then.” But each of her characters “evolves believably and satisfyingly” because none evolves predictably.
The Sister
by Poppy Adams (Knopf, $24)
It’s a “daring move” for a debut novelist to tell a story entirely from the point of view of a spinster recluse, said Charity Vogel in The Buffalo News. Twists abound, though, when the narrator takes her sister in after a five-decade separation, and we discover that these women “have a foul history between them, built of deception and pain.”
Apples and Oranges
by Marie Brenner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
Vanity Fair’s Marie Brenner “is a tougher-minded memoirist than most,” said Jennie Yabroff in Newsweek. That’s important, because this account of a last-ditch attempt to connect with a dying, irascible brother is more about her than him. Brenner doesn’t pretend that the siblings’ struggle to “see each other for who they are” is ever fully resolved.
