Book Reviews

A review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel told in unconventional forms that maps the music industry from the 1970s to a near future.

A review of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of the Neapolitan novels, which follows two girls in postwar Naples whose friendship is the longest and most complex relationship of their lives.

A review of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, the 2020 Booker Prize winner about a boy’s devotion to his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow. Devastating, tender, and unforgettable.

A review of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the formally radical novel that narrates the collapse of a Southern family through four wildly different perspectives, including a man with an intellectual disability.

A review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner that transports David Copperfield to Appalachia and the opioid crisis with devastating contemporary force.

A review of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the groundbreaking time-travel novel in which a Black woman from 1970s California is pulled back to the antebellum South to keep her enslaver ancestor alive.

A review of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, a tightly wound mystery about a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio whose favorite daughter is found dead, and the secrets that surface.

A review of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the speculative fiction masterwork about a theocratic America that controls women’s bodies, and one woman’s account of surviving it.

Marilynne Robinson published Housekeeping in 1980, her first novel, and it arrived like nothing that had come before it. The book is quiet where most debut novels are eager, slow where most are propulsive, and written in prose so precise and so strange that it continues to unsettle readers decades after its publication. It won…