All Fours. Instead, she makes a pit stop in a suburb an hour into her journey, rents a motel room that she lavishly redecorates, develops an intimate relationship with a young guy who works at Hertz, and ultimately decides to blow up her life. Colored Television. Boldly drawn characters leap off the page, grab a protein shake, get into their luxury electric vehicles, and drive off to their faux-Tuscan mansions. The God of the Woods. Rita Bullwinkel Viking.
Percival Everett Doubleday. Here, James is a voracious reader, devouring Kierkegaard and Voltaire and having internal discussions with them in his head. Long Island Compromise. A businessman is kidnapped, beaten, and held for ransom for a week in Decades later, he and his family struggle with the lasting effects. Darkly comic yet sympathetic, it nails the landing after nearly pages with big questions about family, trauma, and inheritance.
Here, in one of his more accessible books, he plumbs the depths of the ocean along with artificial intelligence, the future of the planet, and the nature of friendship. Various disparate storylines β a pioneering female SCUBA diver, a Navy brat who finds refuge in art, a Polynesian island that techies want to use to launch floating cities β come together in spectacular, mind-blowing fashion.
Wandering Stars. Tommy Orange Knopf. Here, he follows Star, a survivor of the Native American Sand Creek Massacre of who is forced to become a Christian and learn English, and how his trauma plays out in the generations that follow. The Women. Whether McGrath is waterskiing on the Mekong Delta, tending to orphaned villagers, patching men together in the OR, or struggling with drinking and depression after returning home, the novel drips with rich details that are both historic and cinematic.
Tony Tulathimutte William Morrow. In seven connected short stories, Tulathimutte brutally chronicles the lives of five losers, from an overweight woman with no friends to a something video game addict who was bullied as a child. Good Material. Dolly Alderton Knopf. In this pitch-perfect romantic comedy, Alderton ably and hilariously writes from the perspective of a year-old London man-child named Andy who was recently dumped.
