It’s still winter. Enjoy the reading season with a new paperback; here are six new ones that come highly recommended.
“The Evanescent Half”
by Brit Bennett (Penguin, $16.99).
No ill luck for Brit Bennett, who followed her widely acclaimed debut novel ‘The Mothers’ with one of the most acclaimed books of 2020, about a set of estranged twins leading very different lives. After reading it breathlessly that year, I wrote, “‘The Vanishing Half’ has a lot to say about race and identity, about family and kinship (there are many layers of sisters here), about performance, about a woman realizing that she could become ‘whatever woman she chose, whatever side of her face she tilted towards the light.’ And he says these things with a voice of quiet wisdom, a voice you miss when you realize the story is over.”
“Le Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance during the Blitz”
by Erik Larson (Crown, $15.99).
Larson, a former Seattle resident now based in New York, has a weird way of making history read like fiction (“In the Beast Garden,” “The Devil in the White City”). New York Times reviewer Candice Millard wrote of her new World War II saga: “Through remarkably skillful use of diaries as well as public records, some recently released, Larson has turned the record well-known 12 turbulent months, spanning May 1940 to May 1941, in a book that is fresh, fast-paced and deeply moving.”
“My Year Abroad”
by Chang-rae Lee (Penguin, $17).
The story of a college student seeing the world on a life-changing trip, Lee’s sixth novel has been named one of the best of 2021 by multiple outlets. Reviewer Frances Cha in The Washington Post described it as “a savage tale that moves chillingly between satire and thriller”, concluding, “Lee tells a story of what it means to be plucked from darkness into the light of recognition, and in doing so explores basic human desires to be seen and to be loved.”
“The Museum of Memories”
by Elizabeth McCracken (HarperCollins, $16.99).
Reading McCracken is always a joy (I especially liked his witty, big-hearted “Bowlaway” a few years ago); this collection of short stories, shortlisted for the National Book Award, seems to be no exception. In a collection “full of attractive eccentrics”, wrote NPR reviewer Heller McAlpin, McCracken is “an acrobat who dazzles with her verbal flexibility and lands the end of every well-composed story with incredible skill and feeling”.
“Just As I Am”
by Cicely Tyson with Michelle Burford (HarperCollins, $17.99).
This graceful but searing memoir by the legendary star of ‘Sounder’, ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’, ‘Roots’ and more was published just two days before its author died at 96; with an actor’s impeccable timing, his work seemed finally done. I read the book in awe of its honesty and accomplishments, writing last year: “It’s a life lived to its fullest, and reading it reveals to us – as great actors do – a complete person. “
“Educated: A Memoir”
by Tara Westover (Random House, $15.99).
It took a long time for Westover’s best-selling memoir to come out in paperback – the hardcover emerged, to immediate acclaim, in 2018. In it, Westover recounts his harrowing upbringing in a survivalist family and his path to university (and possibly a doctorate) without any prior formal schooling. New York Times reviewer Alec MacGillis writes: “In the end, Westover succeeded not only in capturing his unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but in making his current situation seem not all that exceptional and resonant to many. ‘others.”