Book Reviews

Rosalie Knecht’s debut novel, Relief Map, published in 2016 by Tin House Books, drops a sixteen-year-old girl into the kind of crisis that forces growing up in real time. Set in the fictional rust-belt town of Lomath, Pennsylvania, the novel follows Livy Marko through a sweltering summer that begins with babysitting, creek-swimming, and hanging out…

Summary Pamela Erens’s third novel, published by Tin House Books in 2016, takes a single setting and holds it for the length of the book. Eleven Hours unfolds entirely in a hospital labor and delivery ward over the course of, as the title announces, eleven hours. The novel follows two women: Lore Atlas, who arrives…

Signal Fires is Dani Shapiro’s first novel in fifteen years, published by Knopf in October 2022. Shapiro spent the intervening decade writing memoir, most notably Inheritance (2019), the book about her discovery through DNA testing that the man who raised her was not her biological father. That memoir made her one of the most discussed…

David Szalay’s All That Man Is, published in 2016 by Graywolf Press, is a novel built from nine interconnected stories that follow nine men across Europe, each one older than the last. The youngest is seventeen, backpacking on a shoestring with a friend through the hostels and train stations of Central Europe. The oldest is…

Stephen King published Holly on September 5, 2023, through Scribner, and it marks the first full-length novel devoted entirely to Holly Gibney, one of King’s most enduring characters. Holly first appeared as a supporting player in Mr. Mercedes back in 2014, then returned in Finders Keepers, End of Watch, The Outsider, and the novella If…