Fiction News The Ridgefield Library’s Fiction Newsletter April 2020
Fiction in Hoopla ALA Notable Books 2020
Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Lily King Council of the American Library Novelist Lily King writes intimate and Association has been to make available to perceptive character studies about young the nation’s readers a list of 25 very good, women and their families. With acute very readable, and at times very important psychological details, nuanced observations, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books for the and insightful discussions of complex adult reader. These are the 2020 fiction emotions these leisurely paced stories selections. examine how young women deal with dysfunctional families, haunting memories, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. and the pursuit of personal fulfillment. King's A performing arts high school serves as a backdrop for young love vivid, evocative, and lyrical prose is simple and its aftermath, exposing persistent social issues in a manner that and direct, but it conveys both powerful and never lets the reader off the hook. subtle moments with keen precision. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A gifted young man, born into slavery, becomes the conduit for the emancipation of his people in this meditative testament to the power of memory.
The Innocents by Michael Crummey. On an isolated cove along the Newfoundland coastline, the lives of two orphaned siblings unfold against a harsh, relentless, and unforgiving landscape.
Dominicana by Angie Cruz. In this vivid and timely portrait of immigration, a young woman summons the courage to carve out a place for herself in 1960s New York.
Everything Inside: Stories by Edwidge Danticat. This searingly emotional collection explores the complexities of the Haitian Writers & Lovers (2020) diaspora.
See Staff Picks Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. A sweeping look at black British life through a symphony of female voices, young and Euphoria (2014) old, conventional and iconoclastic. In King's nationally bestselling breakout novel three young, gifted anthropologists of the '30's are caught in a passionate love triangle that Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. This debut collection threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives. Inspired captures and preserves the beauty in the lives of Latinas of by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, indigenous descent working through change, violence, love, and Euphoria was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in family in a gentrifying Denver and the American West.
2014. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. This stylistically complex novel opens in 1990s Kansas and delves into themes including Father of the Rain (2010) relationships, aggression, and masculinity. Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who is beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. A summer road trip him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, captures a moment when both a country and a family are in danger of Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating splitting in two in this meditation on the immigration crisis and the her parents' conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of role of artists bearing witness. her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. As she grows into adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that Lanny by Max Porter. This is the story of an English village, three nourished her father's fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own people, and a child around which everything revolves. Inventive, raw and insightful, it is more to be experienced than just read. separate life, until he hits rock bottom. Normal People by Sally Rooney. Two Irish high school students The English Teacher (2005) take up an intense relationship that wavers between love and Lily King's novel is a story about an independent woman and her friendship as they move on to college. The deceptively simple style fifteen-year-old son, and the truth she has long concealed from him. plumbs the depths of human nature in a coming-of-age story of Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer uncommon grace and power. Academy. She has since become a fixture and one of the best teachers Fayer has ever had. By living on campus, on an island off the New On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. In a letter from England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the a son to his mother who cannot read, Little Dog unearths a family’s outside world and from an inside secret. history rooted in Vietnam, also revealing his journey of self discovery.
Annotations from BookLetters, Novelist, and ALA Notable Books. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. This powerful and unforgiving portrait of a school for boys in Florida sheds light on the cruel and dehumanizing legacy of the Jim Crow Era.
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The Ridgefield Library’s FICTION Newsletter– Page 2
New Fiction Trace Elements: A Commissario Guido Brunetti (Annotations from NoveList and BookLetters) Mystery by Donna Leon. A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire A historical novel based on the life of the National region in Donna Leon’s haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the novel. experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card. A transporting debut novel that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations. These
Ghosts Are Family explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent Actress by Anne Enright. identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother's celebrated is an engrossing portrait of a family and individuals caught career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more secrets, both her mother's and her own. Enright takes personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret. readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter. Staff Picks
Greenwood by Michael Christie. A magnificent generational saga that charts a Elise’s Pick family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré. fortune–trees. From one of Canada's most acclaimed novelists. Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun- After 25 years of recruiting and running double agents in dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of Eastern Europe, Nat, a veteran M16 operative, fears that money and love, wood, and blood–and the hopeful, he is about to be retired from the field. Offered the chance impossible task of growing toward the light. to try and turn around a hapless substation nicknamed the Haven, Nat reluctantly agrees, only to find himself facing three simultaneous crises: his talented, but rebellious, A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler. The single mother of a mixed-race college student and second-in-command quits when her promising Ukrainian a thriving business owner with a troubled daughter project is mysteriously canceled by higher-ups, the clash over a historic oak tree on their property line and Russians become suspicious of one of Nat's sleeper the blossoming romance between their children. agents, and most troubling of all, his young seemingly innocent badminton partner, appears to be involved in a treasonous plot. A master of the long game, and outmaneuvering his superiors, Nat uses all of his persuasive
powers and geopolitical experience to mount a counter offensive. Similarly, le Carré uses this sophisticated spy novel to vent his indignation at the The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel. resurgence of Russian power three decades after the end of the Cold War. Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who Dorothy’s Picks climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest Apeirogon by Colum McCann. between present and past, between royal will and a McCann’s thought-provoking and moving new novel is common man's vision: of a modern nation making based on the lives Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin. itself through conflict, passion, and courage. Rami is an Israeli whose 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing. Bassam is a Palestinian The King’s Justice: A Maggie Hope Mystery by whose 10-year daughter Abir was killed after being Susan Elia MacNeal. struck by a rubber bullet. Bound by loss, the two men Can a stolen violin lead secret agent and spy Maggie became close friends and went on to co-found Hope to a new serial killer terrorizing London? Combatants for Peace in 2007. In 1,001 chapters, Maggie Hope started out as Winston Churchill's McCann incorporates ruminations on history, nature, and art as he secretary, but now she's a secret agent–and the only immerses the reader in the human toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one who can figure out how the missing instrument through the stories of these men and their families. In the words of The ties into the murders. New York Times Book Review, “Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener…. Separation Anxiety by Laura Zigman. "Separation Anxiety is a hilarious, heartbreaking and Writers & Lovers by Lily King. thought-provoking portrait of a difficult marriage, as Casey Peabody is a 31 year-old writer who feels she needs fierce as it is funny.... My advice: Start reading and to take a detour from the current trajectory of her life. She don't stop until you get to the last page of this wise mourns the sudden death of her mother, she has been and wonderful novel.”–Alice Hoffman working on the same novel for six years, her love life is in turmoil, and even her job as a waitress in an upscale restaurant is in jeopardy. As she feels her life unraveling, she is torn between the romantic attentions of an established For a more extensive list of new fiction, mystery, and science fiction and older writer and a struggling young one, and she questions fantasy titles, visit our website at www.ridgefieldlibrary.org what price she is willing to pay to pursue her art. With both humor and compassion, King provides a pitch perfect portrayal a young woman trying to define her self-worth and her place in the world.