LATE:Tuesday’s New Releases
As I said in yesterday’s post, I’ve been coping with a depressive episode. I’m behind. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and please enjoy these choices I’ve made from this week’s new releases — choices you can also find in my sub-Substack, Book Wag! (That waggish weekly update is free, bee tee dubs.)
The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni
I’ve already given this one a shout out on NPR Books and I am thrilled to give it more of a lift here on Book Wag, because Trussoni (The Ancestor) once again delivers a cerebral standalone horror novel that will surprise you at every turn – and there are quite a few turns. It starts out with a cryptographer manqué whose attempts to decode a mute prisoner’s drawings lead him further and further into a realm of spiritual madness. It’s can’t-put-it-down excellent.
Loot by Tania James
Speaking of shout outs, here’s a list featuring one I gave Tania James in the LA Times. James – whose debut novel The Tusk That Did the Damage is a must read – takes a historical automaton of a tiger attacking a British soldier and uses it as a central metaphor for a novel about colonial plunder and its evils. Abbas, the protagonist who carved the automaton, travels from India to France to England in a journey that mimics that of the British en route to imperial glory.
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
Oh, you love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, do you? If you’re someone without childbearing organs, I hope you’ve given a thought to how that great novel speaks to the stages of conception, pregnancy, and birth. Louisa Hall’s character Anna tries to write a book about Shelley and soon realizes how closely tied her own procreative process is the author’s. She winds up working on a new kind of monster tale, dark and relevant to pandemic times.
To Name the Bigger Lie by Sarah Viren
The subtitle is “A Memoir in Two Stories,” and one of them is about Viren’s wife standing accused of sexual misconduct, the other about Viren’s book project on her high-school philosophy teacher. As the author writes into the tangles surrounding each, she investigates how we learn the idea of truth, and how that affects our ability to understand wrongdoing from any time period. This might be the one memoir of 2023 that everyone should read.
Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis
Amber and Kevin live in Vancouver and both grow and do a lot of weed, but when Amber decides to take part in a reality TV show that offers a trip to Mars as its prize, their relationship is upended. Run by billionaire tech guru Geoff Trask, the competition (like all of its nonfictional kin) reveals less about outer space and more about the seven sins. Greed, love, pride: it’s all here in a funny, smart look at how even infinity has its limits when it comes to human nature.