May 4, 2024
The novels this week play with time in different ways—one a follow-up to a prize-winning book from Eastern Europe, another a much-anticipated time-traveling first novel. Colm Tóibín revisits the past in the eagerly awaited continuation of his bestselling novel. A debut puts its characters in small-town Vermont under a microscope. And Mexico and Brooklyn are settings for an inquiry into magic realism and the history of drug cartels.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Ministry of Time
By KALIANE BRADLEY
Published by AVID READER PRESS
I cannot stop thinking about this book. The premise is that time travel has been discovered in a near-future England where five ‘expats’ have been extracted from five different time periods in history. Each of them is assigned a ‘bridge’—someone to help them adjust to the unfamiliar world of technological advances and foreign behavior. How to explain the Holocaust or the Twin Towers to someone from another century? Partly inspired by an 1840s Arctic expedition (one of the main characters perished on the trip), it is moving, historic, romantic, funny, and very thought-provoking—a bit like Cloud Atlas yet wholly original.
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Long Island
By COLM TÓIBÍN
Published by SCRIBNER
At last, a sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn. We get to catch up with the wonderful character of Eilis, the Irish girl who left her family to pursue her fate in America. Two decades have passed and she is now married with two children, living among an extended Italian American family in a Long Island cul-de-sac. We trace her trajectory from discontented housewife to a shattering event that will send her back to her homeland for her mother’s 80th birthday where she will rediscover a past love. How Tóibín crafts the character of Eilis with such simplicity, elegance, and profound emotional resonance is a wonder.
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The Physics of Sorrow
By GEORGI GOSPODINOV
Published by LIVERIGHT
Translated by ANGELA RODEL
Gospodinov was awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize—a coup for Bulgarian writers. In this earlier novel, the country’s reputation for dark views is on full display, but the author also has a wicked sense of humor. Here the myth of the minotaur is spun into the life story of a character named Georgi. The idea for the novel began, Gospodinov told the Guardian, “with the scene of a boy in the late 70s, feeling abandoned….The parallel…with the minotaur of Greek mythology unlocks a strange, vast and anarchic story of the 20th century.” From the ancient world to Eastern Europe, Gospodinov weaves a magical tale.
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Liquid, Fragile, Perishable
By CAROLYN KUEBLER
Published by MELVILLE HOUSE
A chorus of voices narrates this first novel that takes place over one year in a small Vermont town. It starts on an unusually beautiful spring day, a harbinger of good things to come. But beneath the surface of this sleepy village there roils much drama among the community’s denizens, including a family of beekeepers and an expat family who fled New York looking for some fresh air. Kuebler mixes future dreams with dashed hopes, past tragedies with ones to come as she quietly builds tension. Fueled by local gossip from the post office and the teenage angst of the local girls, the stakes rise dangerously in this compelling debut.
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Pages of Mourning
By DIEGO GERARD MORRISON
Published by TWO DOLLAR RADIO
Morrison begins with a rather excruciating meeting in a New York coffee shop between a novelist (undergoing “the stripping of my pride…”) and his editor, then jumps to Mexico City. “The present is always expiring…appropriate for a novel looking to shatter Magic Realism as a genre.” The writer in the book is trying to find answers to why his mother left in the 1980s—echoed by the 2017 vanishing of 43 students. And another mirror: an earthquake occurs much like the 1985 one that hit Mexico on the same date thirty years before. Disappearances, ghosts, and the brutal drug trade all enrich this powerful, haunting story of loss and literature.
