Featuring 386 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 4 | 15 FEBRUARY 2020 REVIEWS Jenn Shapland reclaims a queer icon in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers p. 62 Also in the issue: Colum McCann, Saeed Jones, Naomi Shihab Nye from the editor’s desk: Beyond Biography Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas Biography is perhaps the trickiest of the literary arts. In addition to # Chief Executive Officer possessing dogged reporting and research skills, the biographer must MEG LABORDE KUEHN also be a shrewd psychologist, getting inside the mind of the subject and [email protected] Editor-in-Chief understanding their motivations. This involves a lot of evidence-gathering TOM BEER along with, inevitably, some highly educated guesswork. [email protected] Vice President of Marketing “Biography is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of SARAH KALINA [email protected] imaginative faith,” writes Richard Holmes in This Long Pursuit: Reflections Managing/Nonfiction Editor (Pantheon, 2017), a collection of essays on his cho- ERIC LIEBETRAU of a Romantic Biographer [email protected] sen craft. Holmes, who has written biographies of Romantic poets Percy Fiction Editor Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, likens biogra- LAURIE MUCHNICK [email protected] phy to “a handshake across time,” emphasizing the deeply personal nature Tom Beer Children’s Editor of the work. VICKY SMITH [email protected] Jenn Shapland, the author of (Tin House, Feb. 4), My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Young Adult Editor knows just how intimate biographical work can get. As she explains to Kirkus in an interview on LAURA SIMEON [email protected] p. 62, while doing archival research on McCullers, she came across the novelist’s letters to Swiss Editor at Large MEGAN LABRISE photographer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach; she recognized them instantly as love letters, [email protected] though most McCullers scholars have obscured the author’s lesbian attachments and focused Vice President of Kirkus Indie KAREN SCHECHNER on her two marriages to Reeves McCullers. The discovery led Shapland to a deeper recognition [email protected] of her own queerness along with her subject’s, and the book she ultimately wrote is a self-aware Senior Indie Editor DAVID RAPP hybrid of memoir and biographical meditation. [email protected] Biographers have been popping up in their own work ever since Indie Editor MYRA FORSBERG Edmund Morris somewhat notoriously made himself a character—and a [email protected] fictional character, at that—inDutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Random Associate Manager of Indie KATERINA PAPPAS House, 1999). In the preface to her recent memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel [email protected] (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2019), Elaine Editorial Assistant Beckett, Simon de Beauvoir, and Me JOHANNA ZWIRNER Bair writes, with a note of distaste, that “contemporary biographers who [email protected] find little or no information about their subjects feel scant compunction Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH about inserting themselves into lives in which they played no part, either Contributing Editor as authoritative characters or commentators.” Bair didn’t inject herself GREGORY McNAMEE into her biographies of Beckett and Beauvoir per se, but is Copy Editor Parisian Lives BETSY JUDKINS a vivid, stand-alone recollection of her encounters with these two literary Designer titans and a glimpse at Bair’s own progress as a scholar. Would-be biogra- ALEX HEAD Director of Kirkus Editorial phers can learn a lot from it. LAUREN BAILEY In the 1980s, New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler set out to write a series of profiles of [email protected] Production Editor the author Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) for the magazine, HEATHER RODINO meeting with his subject over the course of four years. Sacks, who was gay, was uncomfortable [email protected] Website and Software Developer coming out so publicly, and the profiles were killed. Last year, four years PERCY PEREZ after his subject’s death, Weschler published And How Are Yo u , Dr. Sacks?: [email protected] Advertising Director A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). MONIQUE STENSRUD Note that “biographical memoir” in the subtitle—this is no straightfor- [email protected] Advertising Associate ward, cradle-to-grave account of Sacks’ life, but rather a recollection of TATIANA ARNOLD the author’s one-time subject, who became a friend and godfather to his [email protected] Graphic Designer daughter. Weschler, in an interview with Kirkus last year, called himself a LIANA WALKER “beanpole Sancho to his capacious Quixote.” [email protected] Controller We live in a word with fewer boundaries—and greater transparency— MICHELLE GONZALES than ever before, and our books reflect it. These complex hybrids of biog- [email protected] for customer service raphy and memoir, when done scrupulously and honestly, can make for or subscription questions, please call 1 800 316 9361 rich reading. - - - Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/print-indexes Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/submission-guidlines Kirkus Blog: www.kirkusreviews.com/blog Subscriptions: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/advertising- Newsletters: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription/newsletter/add Cover photo by opportunities Chelsea Weathers 2 | 15 february 2020 | from the editor’s desk | kirkus.com | you can now purchase books online at kirkus.com contents fiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ...........................................................4 The Kirkus Star is awarded REVIEWS ...............................................................................................4 EDITOR’S NOTE.....................................................................................6 to books of remarkable INTERVIEW: COLUM MCCANN ........................................................ 14 merit, as determined by the INTERVIEW: ARAVIND ADIGA ......................................................... 18 MYSTERY ............................................................................................. 41 impartial editors of Kirkus. SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY .........................................................49 ROMANCE ............................................................................................51 nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ..........................................................55 REVIEWS ..............................................................................................55 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 56 ON THE COVER: JENN SHAPLAND ................................................. 62 INTERVIEW: GRETCHEN SORIN ..................................................... 68 QUEERIES: SAEED JONES ................................................................ 74 children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ......................................................... 95 REVIEWS ............................................................................................. 95 EDITOR’S NOTE...................................................................................96 INTERVIEW: NAOMI SHIHAB NYE ................................................102 INTERVIEW: MICHAEL REX ........................................................... 108 BOARD & NOVELTY BOOKS ............................................................136 CONTINUING SERIES ......................................................................147 young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ....................................................... 149 REVIEWS ........................................................................................... 149 EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................150 INTERVIEW: SHERRI L. SMITH ......................................................154 INTERVIEW: LORENCE ALISON .....................................................158 CONTINUING SERIES ..................................................................... 166 indie In her latest book, celebrated cultural critic INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................167 Olivia Laing offers a stellar collection of REVIEWS ............................................................................................167 essays and reviews. Read the review on p. 80. EDITOR’S NOTE.................................................................................168 INTERVIEW: MERRITT GRAVES ......................................................174 Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre-publication reviews as INDIE BOOKS OF THE MONTH ....................................................... 189 they are released on kirkus.com—even before they are published in the magazine. Kirkus Reviews SEEN & HEARD ................................................................................. 190 You can also access the current issue and back issues of on our website by logging in as a subscriber. If you do not have a username or password, APPRECIATIONS: RAY BRADBURY’S THE MARTIAN please contact customer care to set up your account by calling 1.800.316.9361 or CHRONICLES AT 70.......................................................................... 191 emailing [email protected].