February 15, 2025
As Rebecca Solnit has said, “Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.” In South Africa, Montana, the American Southwest, Dublin, and a French colony in North America, you’ll find yourself enthralled with landscapes that often determine the political and personal histories in these five novels.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Casualties of Truth
By LAUREN FRANCIS-SHARMA
Published by ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
Johannesburg during post-Apartheid ’90s haunts this thrilling new novel by Francis-Sharma (Book of the Little Axe), informed by her experiences during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty hearings. After a startling first chapter from that period, we jump ahead twenty years later to a ‘perfect’ Black couple in Washington, D.C., en route to a restaurant in a bad storm. Their harrowing trip to this business dinner foreshadows what happens when Prudence meets her husband’s newly hired colleague—and how the long arm of systemic violence and racism can continue to plague the present. It’s a powerful story of vengeance and justice.
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Nesting
By ROISÍN O'DONNELL
Published by ALGONQUIN
In this striking first novel by a young Irish writer, the protagonist, Ciara, is in a psychologically abusive marriage, with two small children and another on the way. Even though there is no apparent physical violence, the scars are there. She is trapped in a society that allows her to slip between the cracks. We follow Ciara in her endeavors to leave her marriage as she lives in temporary housing (where she meets sympathetic mothers and a sweet Brazilian cleaner), and as she fights to keep custody of her children. You will not be able to look away—she is an incredible, unforgettable heroine.
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Dream State
By ERIC PUCHNER
Published by DOUBLEDAY
In the summer of 2004, Cece is about to marry Charlie at his family home in northwestern Montana. A cardiac anesthesiologist, Charlie has asked his best friend, Garrett, a baggage handler at the airport, to officiate. Cece’s first encounter leaves her unsettled (Garrett “was wearing a truckers’ cap that looked like it had been chewed up by a donkey, then spat back on his head.”) Puchner’s ability to create deeply dimensional, flawed protagonists is immediate. This triad of characters form and reform a triangle in a story that spans five decades. It is full of beautiful prose, bursting with surprises and insights about the meaning of friendship, and the malleability of hopes and dreams.
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Isola
By ALLEGRA GOODMAN
Published by DIAL PRESS
Goodman’s (Sam) latest is a historical feminist saga set in the 16th century and features a French heroine, an heir to a fortune, inspired by a real person. It mostly takes place on a small, deserted island off the coast of ‘New France’ (Canada) where Marguerite has been exiled with her lover. A wealthy orphan, she becomes involved with her terrible guardian’s servant. Once their affair is discovered, her hot-tempered custodian sells all her property and dumps them in a remote, forbidding landscape. It is a page-turning adventure set against an icy backdrop where our wily protagonist tries to ensure the two isolated souls survive a godforsaken place.
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Elegy, Southwest
By MADELEINE WATTS
Published by SIMON & SCHUSTER
At the heart of Watts’s affecting third novel is a road trip during which Eloise and Lewis navigate the impact of Lewis’s mother’s death on their lives. The breakdown of their relationship echoes the breakdown of the environment as they drive along the Colorado River. The Southwestern landscape is a major character. Watts states, “anything that [I] write is going to have that awareness [of climate change] in it because it’s in the ambient atmosphere of my social relationships….” The novel is intense and moody. And, like the title, it is a lamentation for loss and death of both people and places.
