2020 BOOK HIGHLIGHTS
With winter temperatures and stay-at-home orders bidding people to stay inside, it's a good time to catch up on the year's best books. These are some titles worth cuddling up with.
Walter structures his book about two lovable, penniless brothers trying to make ends meet in Spokane, Wash., as a concoction of tales swirling around the violent repression of labourers in the early 20th century. The result could have been an earnest historical novel about the brutal struggle for fair wages, but Walter has instead created a rip-roaring work of harrowing adventures and irresistible characters, including the real-life Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a pregnant 19-year-old who's also an indomitable union firebrand.
Hamnet Maggie O'farrell, Knopf Fiction
This richly drawn portrait of 16th-century English life is set against the arrival of one devastating event: the loss of William Shakespeare's only son to the plague. O'farrell is not intimidated by the presence of the Bard's canon, and she makes no effort to lard her pages with intimations of his genius. Rather, she constructs a suspenseful and moving story about the way grief viciously recalibrates a marriage.
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker, Doubleday
Non-fiction
The author of Lost Girls explores how 12 siblings — half of them diagnosed with schizophrenia — and their parents navigated illness, unspeakable violence and the crushed promise of the American dream during the 1960s and 1970s. Interwoven with this harrowing familial story is the history of how the science on schizophrenia has fitfully evolved, from the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy to the profound disagreements about the cause and origins of the illness, to the search for genetic markers.
Homeland Elegies Ayad Akhtar, Little, Brown & Co Fiction
Akhtar, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, blurs the line between fact and fiction with this autobiographical novel that speaks to the agony of trying to articulate a nuanced critique of faith and politics in an age of shrieking partisanship. The story's sinuous plot concerns the lives of a playwright and his Pakistani immigrant father, assessing their attitudes toward the United States as their fortunes rise and fall. Personal episodes mingle with engaging disquisitions on the dilution of antitrust law and other arcane economic issues. Somehow, Akhtar makes it all work brilliantly.
Transcendent Kingdom Yaa Gyasi, Knopf Fiction
The Homegoing author's new novel works in a completely different register, following a young Ghanaian-american neuroscientist pulled between the data-driven beliefs of her colleagues and the religious dogma of her family. A book of profound scientific and spiritual reflection, it recalls the works of Richard Powers and Marilynne Robinson, though it's anything but derivative. Gyasi's ability to interrogate medical and religious issues in the context of America's fraught racial environment makes her one of the most enlightening novelists writing today.
Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald, Grove Press Non-fiction
“So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it,” Macdonald writes in Vesper Flights. In the 41 essays that make up this collection, the naturalist and author of H Is for Hawk seeks to tell another type of nature story, one that asks readers to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of themselves. Doing so, she believes, may just help us save it.
Writers & Lovers Lily King, Grove Press Fiction
The author of Euphoria breaks all the rules with her new book: It's a novel about trying to write a novel and it's dangerously romantic, bold and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness. According to the penal code of literary fiction, that's a violation of Section 364, Prohibiting Unlawful Departure from Ambiguity and Despair. And yet, this story of a grieving, struggling writer torn between two suitors delivers such pure joy that there may be no surer antidote to 2020's woes.