Warm up with new winter fiction
Who Killed Piet Barol? Richard Mason Knopf, $27.95
Mason takes Piet Barol, the bad-boy fop from his excellent previous novel “History of a Pleasure Seeker,” and brilliantly places him and his avaricious wife as fraudsters living as French aristocrats in Cape Town, South Africa, beforeWorld War I . The charismatic huckster comes up with a scheme to get himself out of debt by exploiting a coastal village with a pristine mahogany forest — a plan that involves convincing the Xhosa people who worship it that it is dangerous and inhabited by threatening creatures. Mason elevates the novel beyond a typical story of suspense with rich, multiple story lines and a clear explication of the colonial greed that underlay the Native Land Act of 1914, which undergirded apartheid. With an omniscient voice and multiple viewpoints — even trees and spiders tell their stories — the result is an ambitious, elegantly written novel with a touch of magic.
Always Happy Hour Mary Miller Liveright, $24.95
In this stunning collection of short fiction involving complicated, unprivileged women on the precipice of adulthood, Mississippi author Miller explores lives that feel simultaneously destined and precarious. Miller’s firstperson narrators are keenly aware — if not fully conscious — of class distinctions. In the story “Instructions,” the narrator is taking care of her absent boyfriend’s cats. She has never owned a pet and has not told him that her family was poor and that in her childhood she collected frogs, snakes and turtles and then let them die in shoe boxes and jars. “When you grow up poor, even if you do everything thereafter to be not-poor,” she thinks, “there’s no way to shake it completely.”
Collected Stories E.L Doctorow Random House, $30
When E.L. Doctorow died in 2015, the world lost one of its greatest writers. In a career spanning half a century, he was best known for his novels — “Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate,” “World’s Fair” and “The March” — that electrified history and reimagined the present. It is less well known that Doctorow was also a gifted shortstory writer. Fortunately, not long before his death, Doctorow selected, revised and ordered these stories as a collection, and they remind us of his singular talent. Versions of these 15 stories have been published before, and some grew into novels. They come together here and underscore a genius at work.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Lindsey Lee Johnson Random House, $27
For writers, high school is the well that never runs dry, and with her smart, psychologically astute novel, Johnson descends deep into those roiling waters. Set in an affluent Marin County enclave, it focuses on an ensemble of cyberbullying middle schoolers who carry their demons to ninth grade and beyond. Johnson adroitly introduces a new teacher into this toxic mix of hormones and privilege, and she has a keen eye for the peculiar hierarchy that governs relations in high school. Social media adds a 21st century dimension to the relationships, but what makes the novel so effective is its power to evoke the age-old transition to adulthood in all of its terrible drama. The National Book Review is an independent online book review.