Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is a historical novel built around a real unsolved question: did Grace Marks kill anyone? In 1843, Grace Marks, a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant, was convicted along with a stablehand named James McDermott for the murders of their employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. McDermott was…
A review of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a darkly comic novel told through 15 voices about a poor Mississippi family hauling their matriarch’s corpse across county lines to keep a promise.
A review of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a labyrinthine, hypnotic novel that moves between parallel storylines and refuses to resolve them neatly. His most ambitious work.
A review of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a haunting, ingenious novel about a man who lives alone in an infinite house of tides and statues, and slowly discovers who he was before.
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.