This week we have Sarajevo-set fiction about art’s capacity to provide hope amid war; the novelized life of an influential art collector; a thriller about a young artist who gets drawn into a mysterious death; an historical novel ranging from Mesopotamia to present-day London that demonstrates how fiction can transform its readers; and a biography of a writer whose legacy endures through her art. Feel the power.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
By ELIF SHAFAK
Published by KNOPF
Shafak’s rich new novel has three main characters connected by a drop of water. We have a 19th-century Englishman based on the translator of the Epic of Gilgamesh; a girl from Yazdi traveling from Turkey to Iraq in 2015; and a hydrologist in 2018 London. Their journeys interweave around the theme of water, which the author has described as a leveler throughout time, breaking down geographic boundaries. Shafak, a Turkish-born novelist, has been prosecuted twice in her homeland—for ‘insulting Turkishness’ and ‘crimes of obscenity,’ both due to the content in her fiction. Her dedication to her craft and the art of storytelling is valiantly present in this hypnotizing novel.
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Peggy
By REBECCA GODFREY & LESLIE JAMISON
Published by RANDOM HOUSE
Peggy Guggenheim was a member of one of the wealthiest families in high-society New York at the turn of the 20th century. Godfrey gives us a fictional portrait from her early years in NYC (her father perished on the Titanic) to her success as an art collector (the beautiful museum in Venice stands as her legacy). Godfrey sadly passed away in 2022, but planned for her friend Jamison to complete the novel. The finished product is compulsively readable as we follow this fiery early feminist who blazed her way through antisemitism and misogyny, to become an astonishing, independent proponent of modern art.
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Black Butterflies
By PRISCILLA MORRIS
Published by KNOPF
In 1992 in Sarajevo, it is the eve of the Bosnian War. Morris’s debut novel opens with Zora, a Bosnian Serb, and her husband finding her mother’s flat taken over by intruders. Soon Zora, who is both an artist and a teacher, sends her family to safety in England where her married daughter lives. She intends to wait out what she assumes will be a temporary conflict in their Sarajevo apartment building. But the war escalates. Though she keeps painting, almost a year of unbearable depravation and fear ensues. Morris was inspired by two threads of her family to tell this powerful tale of resistance, resilience, hope, and survival.
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Scrap
By CALLA HENKEL
Published by OVERLOOK PRESS
Here’s a fun one—a thriller by a novelist (Other People’s Clothes) and playwright about an artist at loose ends and in financial straits. Esther takes a job making a scrapbook for a wealthy woman to give to her husband. When her boss ends up murdered, the book takes off. Regarding her second novel, Calla says “I’m interested in this strange belief that questions in life can be solved by consuming someone else. Esther can’t be close to people but it’s all she wants. She can’t have healthy relationships so instead she consumes them, becomes them.” Dark humor, revenge, and questions of art and power abound in this engaging offbeat mystery.
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Survival Is a Promise
By ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS
Published by FSG
Audre Lorde, a self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ continues to play an essential role in literary discourse. Here she is given the biography she deserves. Gumbs, also a poet, brings style and substance to her portrait of this important writer and her contributions through poetry and essays. Though she eventually moved to St. Croix (where she died in 1992), Lorde was raised in Harlem where ever-present police violence had an impact on her future work. Her feelings about race, the influences on her writing, her life and loves are all explored as part of Gumbs’s promise to respect her legacy “so that future generations could hold the fragile and eternal life of Audre Lorde.”
