Also of interest... in memorable antiheroines
A Certain Hunger
Let’s hope there aren’t too many connoisseurs like the protagonist of this “audacious” debut novel, said Josephine Livingstone in The New Republic. A former food critic narrates from prison, sharing memories of the sensual pleasures of food and of the men she lured in, murdered, and ate. “I’m sure a handful of readers will find A Certain Hunger insulting to their masculinity.” Many more will find it “a refreshing antidote to the anxious moral calculus so popular in much contemporary fiction.”
Here Is the Beehive
(Little, Brown. $26)
Sarah Crossan’s novel in verse is “quite unlike anything I’ve read before,” said Julie Myerson in The Observer (U.K.). It opens with an unhappily married lawyer learning of the death of a client she has been sleeping with. Unable to move on, she tries to befriend the widow while neglecting her own family. We don’t get to know much about Anna or her lover beyond what we see of them in intimate flashbacks, but “it’s hard to mind when the writing is so bright and alive.”
The Woman Who Stole Vermeer
(Pegasus Crime, $28)
Rose Dugdale is spoken of as a former Patty Hearst–like dilettante, said Katharine Weber in The Washington Post. But in this “engrossing” new biography, museum security expert Anthony Amore clarifies how serious the born aristocrat has always been about her radical politics. In 1974, Dugdale masterminded a landmark heist of 19 masterworks to support the Irish Republican Army. Free from prison since 1980, she declined to speak to Amore. Still, he’s painted a fascinating portrait of a rebel.
The Talented Miss Farwell
(Custom House, $27)
Emily Gray Tedrowe’s new novel is part homage to Patricia Highsmith, part fictionalization of a real scam, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Residents of a small Illinois city know Becky Farwell as a bland public servant; artists in New York, Chicago, and abroad know her as a deep-pocketed buyer; “unbeknown to all, she uses money from the first life to finance her second.” Tedrowe’s granular storytelling tightens the screws as Becky “falls deeper and deeper into her life of deception.”