Fine new fiction that surprises
Call Me Zebra Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24
In this wickedly smart novel, narrator Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini, the daughter of a multilingual translator, learns Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, English, Farsi, French and German — the languages of the oppressed and oppressors alike — because, as her father told her, “the wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next.” After his death, she renames herself “Zebra” and sets off on a darkly funny picaresque adventure to retrace her family’s journey from Iran after they were exiled. Van der Vliet Oloomi, recipient of a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honor, has delivered a slightly screwball novel with a quirky, irrepressible narrator, full of literary theories, boundless curiosity and biting humor.
The Château Paul Goldberg Picador, $26
Fired journalist Bill Katzenelenbogen heads to Florida to investigate the mysterious death of his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known as “The Butt God of Miami Beach,” and moves in with his father, Melsor, a refusenik Russian Jewish poet and Trump fan. Melsor was indicted for Medicare fraud in New York but is now campaigning against corruption at his Florida condo, enlisting his son to help overthrow a condo board. Add Russian prostitutes, some old ladies who may be terrorists and some possible Nazis, and Goldberg’s absurd novel smartly evokes America in the age of Trump.
The Friend Sigrid Nunez Riverhead, $25
Don’t be fooled by this sly novel’s title; this is a brilliant work of fiction about the writing, reading and literature of grief. “The Friend” features an unnamed narrator whose best friend and mentor commits suicide, leaving her (a cat person) with his grieving dog, Apollo in her rent-controlled, no-dogs-allowed apartment, dumped by mentor’s Wife Three. This intense, ingenious tale unfolds inside the narrator’s scattered, literary head, and evolves as she becomes obsessed with Apollo’s care while they connect in their grief — and the huge hound proves worthy of his name.
Munich Robert Harris Knopf, $27.95
This engrossing thriller set during the 1938 Munich Agreement negotiations between Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is told through the eyes of two young men — one German and the other English — who had once been students together at Oxford. Reunited at the summit, the young civil servants work together behind the scenes to thwart Hitler’s war machine. Harris brings history to life, particularly the diplomatic bargaining on the eve of World War II, and he introduces a revisionist view of Chamberlain, suggesting that he was not an appeaser but rather may have played a critical role in engineering Hitler’s downfall.
Silver Girl Leslie Pietrzyk Unnamed Press, $17.99 paper
Female friendship, as Elena Ferrante has recently shown, is the stuff of dynamite, and Pietrzyk adds a fraught class dynamic to “Silver Girl,” a gripping campus novel set in the 1980s. The unnamed narrator, an abused girl from small-town Iowa, arrives at a stately Evanston, Ill., university (think Northwestern), where she becomes entangled with a socialite roommate and her dysfunctional upper-class family, just as Chicago’s Tylenol killer has set off on a rampage of drug tampering that terrorizes the region. Against this rich backdrop and the conflicting feelings and mysteries of this constellation of charged relationships, Pietryzk builds a dark, suspenseful and multidimensional twist on the coming-of-age story.
White Houses Amy Bloom Random House, $27
In her intensely moving and engrossing novel “White Houses,” Bloom exquisitely reimagines the complex, intimate relationship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok, from the perspective of “Hick.” Bloom has vivified Hickok, from her climb from an impoverished life on the Great Plains to work as a housemaid, making her way to Chicago journalism and a prominent post covering politics for the Associated Press until she moves into the White House and works in the Roosevelt administration.