A taste of new fiction about family and fate
Fall is a good time for reading fiction. Here’s a handful of can’tmiss titles.
The Fortunes Peter Ho Davies Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 288 pp., $27
Though classified as a novel, this powerful and expansive new book from the author of the critically acclaimed “The Welsh Girl” is structured as a suite of four novellas. It reaches from the 19th century to the present day, from railroads built by Chinese workers to early film-industry California to the dying, seedy Midwest. Davies links his characters subtly, through parts titled “Gold,” “Silver,” “Jade” and “Pearl,” and finds interconnections between different historical eras in this carefully crafted, emotionally rich work of fiction.
Every Kind of Wanting Gina Frangello Counterpoint Press: 350 pp., $26
Frangello’s charming novel involves the quest for a baby, specifically three families working on creating a “community baby.” She has subverted the old-fashioned suburban narrative and filled it with a constellation of quirky characters — the guys who want the baby, the sister who offers the egg and the surrogate who will give birth to the baby — all of whom have their own marriages, relationships and pasts to navigate. Frangello threads conflicts over ethnicity, class and sexuality into the novel, and injects a smart topicality that gives it special resonance.
Mischling Aff inity Konar Lee Beaudreaux Books/Little, Brown: 352 pp., $27
In this stunning novel, identical 12-year-old twin sisters are deported from their home in Lodz, Poland, to Auschwitz, where they are targeted by Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele for his cruel experiments. Obsessed by genetic abnormalities — in particular, by twins — and by the building of a master race, Mengele wants to know if these fair-haired twins are
“mischling,” German for halfbreed. Pearl and Stasha are a mix of another kind: one is happy, one sad, one future-focused, the other fixated on vengeance. Konar structures her novel in alternating chapters and focuses less on the atrocities than on the resilience necessary to survive horror.
Mercury Margot Livesey Harper: 336 pp., $26.99
At the center of this engrossing, provocative novel is a Scottishborn American optometrist, inculcated with the values of “thrift, industry, integrity” but inoculated against American optimism. The novel’s animating spirit is a stunningly beautiful thoroughbred horse named Mercury who disrupts the tranquil veneer of suburban Boston in profound ways and exposes the fault lines and deceptions that have gradually developed in a marriage. Livesey, author of such acclaimed earlier novels as “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” and “The House on Fortune Street,” once again demonstrates her gift for writing psychologically astute fiction that gallops with intensity, and “Mercury” should win her the readers her work so richly deserves.