Six of the seven new books are fiction. Except where noted the summaries are from Goodreads.
BARKSKINS, Annie Proulx, 2016
In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, RenĂ© Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a “seigneur,” for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters—barkskins. RenĂ© suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.
Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid—in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope—that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.
END OF WATCH (Bill Hodges Trilogy No. 3), Stephen King, 2016
Following is a review from Goodreads:
Seven years have passed since Brady Hartsfield drove a stolen Mercedes through a crowd of people, killing many, and paralyzing one survivor by the name of Martine Stover. Despite her disability, she still lives a peaceful life with her mother who is her primary caregiver. That is until the day the police are called to her residence in what appears to be a murder/suicide, but is in all actuality anything but. This crime has Brady Hartsfield written all over it, but he’s in a mostly vegetative state in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, how could such a thing even be possible? But when more and more suicides begin popping up, the only thing that connects them is Brady and Bill Hodges just might be the only one that could believe such an impossibility.
The gang is all back together for one last hurrah: Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson. Hodges and Holly were doing their fair share of investigating the strange evidence piling up around the recent increase of suicides, but it’s not until one of these attempted suicides hits close to home that the ante has been upped. Despite the impossibility of Brady being the backstage conductor, readers that have been with this series from the beginning will have been given a glimpse at where King was heading at the end of Finders Keepers. Mr. Mercedes, the first installment, seemed to at first be a bit of a departure from King’s typical style, going for your basic mystery/detective thriller, yet slowly but surely he deftly infused it with his trademark supernatural horror. Whether it’s due to the blow that Holly landed or the experimental drugs being delivered by his doctor, Brady has developed the ability to influence the minds of others. With his technological genius, he manages to find a way to increase the way he spreads his infectious thoughts so that he can finally commit the massive crime he was prevented from carrying out before.
Despite the fact that King doesn’t fully flesh out the supernatural aspects of the novel, it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief for it to still work. The powerful effects of video games are evident in society even without the supernatural aspects involved and King uses this to bring that effectiveness to life in this novel of horror. Suffice it to say, the cover may have been intriguing before reading the story, but after? You won’t want to maintain eye contact for long. And this song is definitely ruined. So, King subsequently ruined the ice cream man and a Mickey Mouse song in one fell swoop with this series. A most impressive feat.
The initial working title for this book was The Suicide Prince and while I was disappointed when it was announced it would actually be End of Watch instead, it’s so much more fitting. King didn’t disappoint with this ending, not leaving us hanging with unresolved questions but not coating the ending in unlikely perfection. I may have started this trilogy skeptical that King could pull off a convincing mystery but by the end I’m hoping that he experiments with this genre more in the future
HOT MILK, Deborah Levy, 2016
Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant—their very last chance—in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis.
But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective—tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain—deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.
Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.
NUTSHELL, Ian McEwan, 2016
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers
The following is from a review of this short novel in the Washington Post:
“Nutshell,” Ian McEwan’s preposterously weird little novel, is more brilliant than it has any right to be. The plot sounds like something sprung from a drunken round of literary Mad Libs: a crime of passion based on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” narrated by a fetus.
If you can get beyond that icky premise, you’ll discover a novel that sounds like a lark but offers a story that’s surprisingly suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound. To the extent that “Hamlet” is an existential tragedy marked with moments of comedy, “Nutshell” is a philosophical comedy marked by moments of tragedy.
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, Colson Whitehead, 2016
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned and, though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven - but the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Following is part of a review from Goodreads:
About halfway through The Underground Railroad, I started to see the next turn around the bend. I knew what was going to happen next. This isn't because of lazy writing, it's because the story rises beyond itself and becomes almost an allegory or fable. What happens to Cora simply becomes inevitable. The beauty of this book is that while it has that deep communal feel of folk tale, it also lives vibrantly through its characters. This is not archetypes and cardboard cutouts going through motions to make a moral point. This is a book whose characters are fully alive. The details of their lives are richly expressed. It feels new and interesting. These are not characters you've met before. These are not the same old staunch abolitionists and earnest slaves in the stories we tell ourselves of our history. I cannot remember another book about this era that so completely brought the world to life in my mind.
Choosing to read a book about slavery means choosing to immerse yourself in brutality, violence, and inhumanity. But there's something essential about reading this kind of book. In the United States it's too easy to forget the dark times in our history. While this book isn't easy or light, it is deeply moving and very powerful.
RAZOR GIRL, Carl Hiaasen, 2016
When Lane Coolman's car is bashed from behind on the road to the Florida Keys, what appears to be an ordinary accident is anything but (this is Hiaasen!). Behind the wheel of the other car is Merry Mansfield--the eponymous Razor Girl--and the crash scam is only the beginning of events that spiral crazily out of control while unleashing some of the wildest characters Hiaasen has ever set loose on the page. There's Trebeaux, the owner of Sedimental Journeys--a company that steals sand from one beach to restore erosion on another . . . Dominick "Big Noogie" Aeola, a NYC mafia capo with a taste for tropic-wear . . . Buck Nance, a Wisconsin accordionist who has rebranded himself as the star of a redneck reality show called Bayou Brethren . . . a street psycho known as Blister who's more Buck Nance than Buck could ever be . . . Brock Richardson, a Miami product-liability lawyer who's getting dangerously--and deformingly--hooked on the very E.D. product he's litigating against . . . and Andrew Yancy--formerly Detective Yancy, busted down to the Key West roach patrol after accosting his then-lover's husband with a Dust Buster. Yancy believes that if he can singlehandedly solve a high-profile murder, he'll get his detective badge back. That the Razor Girl may be the key to Yancy's future will be as surprising as anything else he encounters along the way--including the giant Gambian rats that are livening up his restaurant inspections.
AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS. A CONTINENTAL HISTORY, 1750-1804, Alan Taylor, 2016
The following review is from SLATE:
As long ago as the Progressive era, historians argued that the
Founding Fathers’ war against Britain was waged not for lofty democratic
ideals but rather to suit their own material interests. In recent
decades, academic historians have exposed the critical role women,
blacks, and Native Americans played in the War of Independence, as well
as the larger imperial struggles of which the Revolution was just a bit
part. In American Revolutions Taylor synthesizes this more
recent scholarship but astutely combines it with the Progressive-era
argument about the way the Founding Fathers manipulated populist anger
to their own ends. Written with remarkable clarity and finesse, this
will be the gold standard by which all future histories of the period
will be compared.
Taylor’s not interested in a triumphalist account of the nation’s origins; instead, his core arguments deliberately overturn the notion that the Revolution was fought for egalitarian, democratic principles. Most colonists, Taylor highlights, felt deeply attached to the British monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. There was no distinct American identity to speak of, and everywhere Britain’s American colonists looked—north to French Canada, south to Spanish America—they saw settlers with virtually no political autonomy. Their king, meanwhile, granted them greater civil liberties than any other European ruler; for much of the 18th century, British monarchs allowed elected Colonial assemblies to run their own affairs. But rather than inculcating a sense of independence, these Colonial assemblies only made American colonists cherish more deeply their status as “free-born Englishmen.”
Taylor’s not interested in a triumphalist account of the nation’s origins; instead, his core arguments deliberately overturn the notion that the Revolution was fought for egalitarian, democratic principles. Most colonists, Taylor highlights, felt deeply attached to the British monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. There was no distinct American identity to speak of, and everywhere Britain’s American colonists looked—north to French Canada, south to Spanish America—they saw settlers with virtually no political autonomy. Their king, meanwhile, granted them greater civil liberties than any other European ruler; for much of the 18th century, British monarchs allowed elected Colonial assemblies to run their own affairs. But rather than inculcating a sense of independence, these Colonial assemblies only made American colonists cherish more deeply their status as “free-born Englishmen.”
British policymakers in London “concluded that settlers, rather than
Indians, posed the greatest threat to imperial peace.” In consequence,
they drew a firm line in the sand—the Proclamation Line of 1763, running
along the Appalachian Mountain chain, across which colonists could not
venture. But it wasn’t the poor white settlers whose complaints stoked
patriotic fervor: George Washington, a wealthy Virginia slaveholder and
Seven Years’ War veteran, and Benjamin Franklin, an affluent publisher
and slaveholder as well, had bought western land now deemed
inaccessible. As speculators, they had no intention of moving west
themselves; they simply wanted to flip the real estate, cashing in on
the backs of poor settlers. Now, thanks to the crown, they couldn’t.
Meanwhile, in port cities such as Boston and New York, artisans,
laborers, and decommissioned soldiers bore the brunt of the new taxes
Parliament imposed on the Colonies. But it was the better-off Colonial
elite who came to their defense, “pos[ing] as Patriots to champion the
rights of common people.” These wealthier elite controlled the cities’
printing presses and could quickly popularize the idea that Parliament
had taxed the colonists without fair representation. Never mind that the
increased taxes were the necessary result of the costly Seven Years’
War, or that they still amounted to only two-thirds of what mainland
Britons paid. The affluent Patriot merchant John Hancock even encouraged
a boycott against British goods while surreptitiously continuing to
import those goods himself, hoping the boycott would destroy his
competitors. When a pro-British newspaper called out Hancock’s
hypocrisy, a Patriot mob nearly killed the publisher.
We are used to thinking about the War of Independence itself, which
lasted from 1775 to 1783, as fought between Americans and Britons. But
Taylor argues that it was truly our first “civil war.” He estimates that
20 percent of colonists were Loyalists—colonists loyal to Britain—and
40 percent Patriots. Another 40 percent constituted the “wavering”
middle, a silent plurality who, like many in wartime, chose their
allegiance not out of principle but out of their own safety and “based
on relationships with neighbors and kin.” Moreover, many Patriots
committed themselves to the revolutionary cause not in pursuit of
freedom but out of fear: The “committees of safety” that emerged at the
war’s outset to replace the discredited Colonial assemblies imposed
crushing boycotts on those who did not swear allegiance. They were
imprisoned and tarred-and-feathered; many received what was called
“Hillsborough paint”—a smattering of shit thrown on their homes. None of
this ought to be surprising. “As in other revolutions,” Taylor reminds
us, “a committed and organized minority led the way, demanded that
others follow, and punished those who balked.”
Taylor perhaps spends too much time on the battlefield, but he gives a
central role to women, blacks, and Native Americans in determining the
war’s fate. The wives and daughters of Patriot soldiers took over the
shops, farms, and slave plantations of those who left to fight. For the
first time in their lives, white women became public participants in
politics, organizing boycotts and participating in street protests.
If Taylor portrays women as helping to save the Patriot cause, he
suggests that black Americans nearly destroyed it. In 1775, blacks
numbered half a million, making up 20 percent of the entire Colonial
population. Ninety-nine percent of them were enslaved. Shrewdly,
Virginia’s Loyalist governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any male
slave who fought for the British, and by the war’s end between 30,000
and 40,000 slaves escaped to British lines. As Taylor emphasizes, the
arming of slaves proved a turning point. Up until Dunmore’s
Proclamation, Southerners were ambivalent about the Patriot cause. But
after it, whites in the South felt Britain had rescinded one of their
most cherished liberties: the liberty to own property. In the most
literal sense, they fought for freedom to maintain someone else’s
enslavement.
Taylor rightly underscores that slavery—its protection and
extension—was a central fact of the Revolution and its aftermath. But he
tends to downplay the simultaneous restructuring of black life that
happened in the war’s wake. As he notes, enslaved blacks in the North,
often with the help of white allies, petitioned their new state
governments to ban slavery. Elizabeth Freeman,
enslaved in Massachusetts, used the new state constitution’s language,
which stated that “All men are born free and equal,” to sue for and win
her freedom in 1781. Her victory set the precedent that abolished
slavery in Massachusetts, and by the end of the century, all the
Northern states would abolish slavery. In focusing on the
contradictions, indeed the hypocrisies, of the white Patriot elite,
Taylor inadvertently overshadows this quieter revolution in freedom that
that was growing up alongside it. The truth is that when we talk about
liberty and equality for all today, we mean it in the way these black
founders meant it, not the Patriot elite. It is a point worth
emphasizing.
But Taylor deserves unqualified praise for vividly capturing what the
more mainstream Revolution was about. The contradictory impulses that
triggered the Revolution were, he suggests, replayed in the making of
the Constitution. The Framers, all of them wealthy elite men, realized
that someone had to pay for the war against Britain. Someone also needed
to pay for defense against potential enemies—the French, Spanish, their
likely Native allies, and that always internal enemy: the enslaved.
Only a powerful central government could achieve all that, so the
Framers devised a federal constitution that took away some local
autonomy from the states in order to achieve a stronger whole.