WHAT TO READ IN JUNE
From big-bet debuts to money-in-the-bank authors (not to mention a book about fish that might change the way you feel about your favourite breaded filet) here’s the National Post’s Books Editor’s recommended reading for June.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Bond Street Books, 320pp; $32, June 7 Ghana-born, Alabama-raised author Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is one of the most anticipated debuts of the year. A visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, a door of no return in the slave trade, inspired Gyasi to write about seven generations of descendants from two half-sisters: one living in the castle itself, married off to a British slave trader; and another held below before being shipped to America. “It would have been easy to be didactic about it,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said in a recent Vogue profile. “Instead she created great art.”
End of Watch by Stephen King, Scribner, 448pp; $36.99, June 7 Some people plan to write a book when they retire. Stephen King announced his retirement f rom writing books about 15 years ago — also about 15 books ago: including three Bram Stoker Award- winners, a British Fantasy Award- winner and an Edgar Award- winner (Mr. Mercedes, which began a trilogy that End of Watch completes). It’s a shame how he’s wasting his golden years.
What a Fish Knows by John Balcombe, Scientific American/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp; $ 28.99, June 7 Though many books have been written about fish and about fishing, Jonathan Balcombe — inspired by wondering if the catch feels pain — has written the first book “on behalf ” of fish. Did you know that most of our senses evolved first in fish? Did you know that you are related more closely to a tuna than a tuna is to a shark? Balcombe’s book may not turn you vegan, but it will appeal to the “humane” part of being human.
Barkskins by Annie Proulx, Scribner, 736pp; $39.99, June 14 Honorary Canadian Annie Proulx returns with a novel that follows the descendants of two indentured servants in New France and traces the fall of the great forests. “As a child I was enamoured of the woods,” the author said recently in The New Yorker. “and lucky enough to spend much time among trees as my mother was a self-taught naturalist.” That inspiration may well have produced her masterwork.
The Girls by Emma Cline, Random House, 320pp; $32, June 14 The Girls takes place on a California ranch in the 1960s — one that evokes the Manson Family’s. Cline’s novel is a tale of youthful obsession between narrator Evie and her older friend Suzanne, an aspirational figure whom she follows into this nightmare. The Girls, in averting its gaze from the cult leader, imagines much of what is left out of the Manson story.