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Apr 1, 2024 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Paul Lynch |Lee Polevoi
Prophet Song: A NovelBy Paul LynchAtlantic Monthly Press309 pagesIn Prophet Song, Paul Lynch’s 2023 Man Booker-prizewinning novel, the setting is present-day Dublin (or soon thereafter). Larry and Eilish Stack, happily married professionals, have a teenage son and daughter, and two younger children. Eilish is a molecular biologist, Larry a teacher and fervent trade union official.
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Mar 6, 2024 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Lee Polevoi
The End of the World is a Cul De Sac: Stories by Louise KennedyRiverhead Books289 pagesThe men and women who inhabit Louise Kennedy’s new story collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, lead lives of not-so-quiet desolation. In these stories, the women are often pregnant, worried about the state of their existence, and/or perplexed as to what to say or do about their life partners.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Samantha Harvey |Lee Polevoi
Orbital: A NovelBy Samantha HarveyGrove Press207 pagesIn Samantha Harvey’s extraordinary new novel, Orbital, six men and women aboard the International Space Station—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—travel through space at 17,500 miles an hour. Over the course of a single day, encompassing 16 orbits some 250 miles above the Earth, the crew aboard the ISS conducts experiments, works out, and tracks a monster typhoon headed for the Philippines.
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Jan 12, 2024 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Margaret Renkl |Lee Polevoi
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard YearBy Margaret RenklSpiegel & Grau288 pagesNo one needs reminding of our perilous times, from the onslaught of natural and manmade ecological disasters to wars of religion and the spectacle of an indicted grifter running for president. For that reason, among others, Margaret Renkl’s new book of essays, The Comfort of Crows, offers welcome relief from endless bad news.
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Nov 29, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Burkhard Bilger |Lee Polevoi
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Consciences, and Family SecretsBy Burkhard BilgerRandom House 314 pages“I was twenty-eight years old when my mother first told me that her father had been imprisoned as a war criminal.”So Burkhard Bilger, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells us in the early pages of his new memoir, Fatherland. Bilger’s maternal grandfather, Karl Gönner, served as a school principal, responsible for “re-educating” local children on behalf of the Third Reich.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Dwyer Murphy |Lee Polevoi
The Stolen CoastBy Dwyer MurphyViking288 pagesIn The Stolen Coast, a new crime novel blurbed as “neo-noir,” author Dwyer Murphy resurrects the mood of that literary genre sparingly but effectively. Early on, the narrator describes the environment in and around the seaside village of Onset, Massachusetts:“Sometimes it seemed like just about everyone you saw there was on the run from something.
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Sep 12, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Rory Carroll |Lee Polevoi
There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed HistoryBy Rory CarrollPutnam416 pagesOn October 12, 1984, 100 pounds of gelignite exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was staying for the annual Conservative Party Conference. The hotel was devastated, five people died, and many more were wounded.
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Aug 28, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Nick Harkaway |Lee Polevoi
(Photo credit: Depositphotos.com)Titanium NoirBy Nick HarkawayKnopfAll forms of fiction require from the reader a willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to let go of “reality” and just have fun. Sometimes, authors crank up that level of disbelief to towering heights. British author Nick Harkaway’s growing body of work forthrightly makes this demand on readers.
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Aug 9, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Lee Polevoi
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder Doubleday 329 pages At the outset of his new book, The Wager, about a shipwreck and subsequent events set in 1740, David Grann notes, perhaps needlessly, that “I did not witness the ship strike the rocks or the crew tie up the captain,” and neither did he “see firsthand the acts of deceit and murder.” But it’s equally true that Grann has undertaken exhaustive research, scouring old journals, “washed-out logbooks” and many pages of courtroom...
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Aug 2, 2023 | 
highbrowmagazine.com | Tessa Hadley |Lee Polevoi
After the Funeral and Other StoriesBy Tessa HadleyKnopf240 pagesIn her new collection, After the Funeral and Other Stories, Tessa Hadley excels at describing small details, the way light falls in a room, the substance and texture of family life. This blends wonderfully with the characters she creates—smart women, sometimes attractive, sometimes indifferent about their beauty—and their busy inner lives. Her stories, if read too quickly, can seem to move in slow-motion.
