The Fishermen: Chigozie Obioma

Published by One (Pushkin Press), 2018, 352 pages. A madman prophesies that a boy will be killed by a fisherman. The fear created by the prophecy changes the boy. But will the fear itself lead to the murder or is the madman able to see the future? The Fishermen is narrated by Ben, looking back …

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1Q84: Haruki Murakami

Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage, 2011, 944 pages. Original version published in 2009-2010. Prepare to walk into Haruki Murakami’s strange world. You can slip through the thin barrier between this world and an alternate one simply by taking an emergency exit off a highway or ghost-writing a particular book. …

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Keeping Readers on Edge: An Interview with Stuart Turton

Photo: Charlotte Graham Stuart Turton is a British novelist and journalist. His first book, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, won the First Novel Award at the 2018 Costa Book Awards, and Best Novel at the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. His second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, won the 2020 Books …

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Consolations of the Forest—Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga: Sylvain Tesson

Translated from French by Linda CoverdalePublished by Penguin / Rizzoli International Publications, 2014, 243 pages. Original version published in 2011. “I’d promised myself that before I turned forty I would live as a hermit deep in the woods.” That was Sylvain Tesson’s promise to himself, a promise that he kept. Tesson spent six months in …

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Death in Her Hands: Ottessa Moshfegh

Published by Penguin Press, 2020, 259 pages. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Vesta, a woman in her 70s, has recently been widowed. After her husband’s death, she sells her house and buys an isolated cabin near a lake across the country, …

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Manhattan Beach: Jennifer Egan

Published by Scribner, 2017, 448 pages. New York, 1934. Eddie takes his 11-year-old daughter Anna to a meeting with Dexter Styles, a gangster who has married the daughter of a well-known New York senator. As they drive up to Styles’s house by the beach, Anna notices that her father is nervous, something that is unusual …

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