February 1, 2025
These books share a common thread in the way they pull you into their narratives, making it hard to turn away. A Victorian psychopath; a Latin American speculative future; a love story starring Central Park; historical fiction set in the Gilded Age; and a splendid investigation into how the color blue has played a role in shaping the history of Black people. Settle in for some compelling winter reading and let’s hope the groundhog does not see its shadow.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Victorian Psycho
By VIRGINIA FEITO
Published by LIVERIGHT
Feito (Mrs. March) channels Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith in her new historical gothic novel. Our protagonist is Winifred Knotty, whose childhood sounds like a scene from The Bad Seed. When she becomes a governess for the Pounds’s children in an English Victorian manor it is only a matter of time before death creeps into their lives. She arrives at the station of Grims Wold and quickly decides, “Mr. Pounds is a mystery I am intent on solving.” Tropes of the evil governess are all accounted for with a delightfully perverse streak of comedy despite the ever-escalating violence that ensues. A truly accomplished piece of psychological horror.
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Black in Blues
By Imani Perry
Published by ECCO
Harvard professor Perry (South to America) is widely admired for her trenchant investigations into Black life. As Kiese Laymon puts it, “Dr. Perry […] has never written the same kind of book twice.” In this fascinating study, she traces the color blue from the African indigo trade to slavery in America, to “the blues” as an enduring musical genre, to blue’s association with religion and art up to today. Perry tells us, “This blue-black living and doing is a bittersweet virtue, mastery in heartbreak, and raw laughter from the underside.” She is a perfect anthropological guide through Black history with the prose of a poet.
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Dengue Boy
By MICHEL NIEVA
Published by ASTRA
Translated by Rahul Bery
Nieva sets his dystopian debut in the future, an expansion from the author’s highly praised O. Henry story. The wave of Latin American science fiction is gathering steam with COVID spawning a whole genre of ‘virus fiction’ and body horror stories (see also fellow Argentine Agustina Bazterrica). Our protagonist is the result of a virus gone wrong, a child/mosquito referred to as the Dengue Child. The world is transformed (Buenos Aires has sunk; the Antarctic has fused with the Caribbean) and there is big money to be made in predicting pandemics. Dengue Child’s journey to uncover their origins drives the outrageously surreal high-wire act. It’s a winner.
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This Is a Love Story
By Jessica Soffer
Published by DUTTON
This is the story of Jane, Abe, and their son, Max, that begins and ends in Central Park—the setting for many touchstones in their lives. Jane is a successful artist, Abe is an award-winning novelist, and Max is an accomplished art dealer. When Jane is diagnosed with terminal cancer they move out to the North Shore of Long Island where she and Abe play a game of remembering. This is a sad, beautiful book about life, death, marriage, and the power of art. Soffer’s delicate prose brings you inside the joys and regrets of these three very independent people bound by a sometimes uneasy but enduring love.
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Mutual Interest
By OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH
Published by BLOOMSBURY
Wolfgang-Smith’s (Glassworks) second novel is set in the New York Gilded Age of Wharton and James. Vivian flees Upstate New York for the high society of Manhattan and marries mousy Oliver Schmidt after several affairs with women. Her business acumen helps save his failing soap factory. Seeing an opportunity, she facilitates a merger with Squires Clancey, who has a burgeoning candle business, and creates a flourishing empire devoted to personal care. All parties prefer relationships with the same sex which in those times was kept quiet. They become an eccentric thruple. The novel reminds one a bit of Tóibín’s The Magician; it’s a tart, memorable story of ambition, sexuality, capitalism, and power.
