November 16, 2024
With the holidays around the corner and the air turning frigid, one might crave fiction that warms the heart as well as the soul. Two seasonal fables do just that this week: a Scandinavian novel you won’t soon forget, and one from an Irish writer revisiting characters from an earlier bestseller. New fiction from a Japanese literary genius features characters from previous work as well. In nonfiction, a Frenchman’s courtroom drama will fascinate true crime fans, and the first volume of a musical icon’s memoir rounds out the selection. Wrap them up in shiny paper (we have that at The Center too!) for your favorite readers.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
By HARUKI MURAKAMI
Published by KNOPF
“In this town, people lack shadows. Once you get rid of your shadows, you really understand… that shadows have their own weight.” Murakami picks up where his 1980 novella of the same title and 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World left off in his newest fiction. In those works the main character and his shadow escaped from a walled city. The author has stated: “The biggest difference this time is that they—the shadow and the main body—don’t know who is actually whom. The point is that their roles are reversed.” Our protagonist is a Dream Reader who becomes a librarian, and the quest for love hums along underneath the many literary puzzles.
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Brightly Shining
By INGVILD RISHØI
Published by GROVE PRESS
Translated by Caroline Waigh
When Grove published Claire Keegan’s lovely Christmas story Small Things Like These, it was an instant success (also a wonderful new film—don’t miss it). Rishøi’s equally touching holiday tale (in a gifty little hardcover) stars Ronja, a motherless Norwegian girl, whose alcoholic father cannot hold a job. Her teenage sister must take over for him selling Christmas trees. Ronja is fiercely independent, innocent but smart. She shares her fears and dreams (to have a cozy warm cabin in the woods) as she navigates a precarious life with the help of her big sister, a kindly neighbor, and others in the community. It is a heartwarming gem
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Cher: The Memoir, Part One
By CHER
Published by DEY STREET BOOKS
This much-awaited memoir requires a two-part publication. In the first volume, Cher—singer, actress, activist, and philanthropist—illuminates her early childhood through her marriage to Sonny Bono, and her career as a singer and actress into the 1980s. As she sang in the 2011 song “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me”:
I’m staying right here
Oh, no, you won’t see me beg
I’m not taking my bow, can’t stop me
It’s not the endFans (and who isn’t a Cher fan?) will devour this one, and enjoy some new revelations, too. It is sure to be the memoir of the season.
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Time of the Child
By NIALL WILLIAMS
Published by BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Set in Williams’s beloved County Clare in an insulated community where everyone knows your business, the novel features residents encountered in This Is Happiness. Similar to the film The Banshees of Inisherin, each character (and I do mean character) is fully realized with their multiple idiosyncrasies and stubborn ways, and ties to tradition that keep them behind the times. The protagonist is a country doctor like his father before him with fierce attachments to opinions and ideas. We also meet a young man who finds an abandoned infant at a Christmas fair that changes all their lives. Rich and satisfying, it is a must-read for Hibernophiles.
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V13: Chronicle of a Trial
By EMMANUEL CARRÈRE
Published by FSG
Translated by John Lambert
Carrère (Yoga) has always been fascinated by the psychology of psychopaths, the effects of extreme religion, and the meting out of justice in both his fiction and narrative nonfiction. V13 follows the nearly yearlong trial (which he covered for the paper Nouvelle Obs) that retells the harrowing story of the slaughter of people at the Bataclan in Paris on November 15, 2015. He profiles the players involved (family members, survivors, lawyers) and the terrorist defendant Salah Abdeslam, who failed to detonate his suicide vest. Talked about as ‘the trial of the century,’ the sessions were a circus of media coverage. The intimacy and power of his account is riveting.
