The National Book Review

The National Book Review is an online magazine made by book enthusiasts for fellow book lovers. It serves as a platform for discussing literature and ideas, highlighting noteworthy new releases through our "5 Hot Books" segment. Our goal is to showcase exceptional books that deserve more recognition, featuring reviews, author interviews, and various articles that aim to draw attention to those hidden gems that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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Q&A: Alice Austen Talks About Her New Novel Set in Holocaust-Era Belgium — The National Book Review

3 weeks ago | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Alice Austen’s staggering debut novel 33 Place Brugmann, set during the Nazi invasion of Belgium, alternates narrators between residents of the titular Brussels apartment as each one; Jewish and gentile, European and American, children and adults; reckon with what their future under occupation may look like and what they must do to survive it.
Q&A: Navigating a Life Through Books: An Interview with Donna Seaman — The National Book Review

1 month ago | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Several years ago, I attended a riveting Chicago Public Library event for Donna Seaman’s groundbreaking book, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. In person, Seaman exudes a quiet intensity, easily ignited by her many interests, and marked by her quick wit. In the huge auditorium, to a rapt audience, she shared photographs and tales of the seven accomplished artists she had spent years researching.
Q&A: Talking with Sasha Vasilyuk about Ukraine, Nazi Prisoners, and Novel Writing — The National Book Review

2 months ago | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

The figure at the center of Sasha Vasilyuk’s stunning debut novel Your Presence is Mandatory is Yefim Shulman: a veteran, academic, and patriarch of a Ukrainian Jewish family. Following his death, Yefim’s family discovers that he had been taken prisoner by the Nazis while serving in World War II, a secret he had kept his entire adult life. Shocked and confused, his family must now reckon with what this discovery reveals about their father, their country, and themselves.
REVIEW: An Extraordinary Story of Land, Money, and Energy in the New West — The National Book Review

Jan 13, 2025 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

By Ann FabianThere’s a note “about the author” at the end of Amy Gamerman’s remarkable book, The Crazies: The Catttleman, the Wind Prospector and a War Out West. Gamerman “has written about real estate and culture for the Wall Street Journal for more than two decades”—twin beats that have given her a perfect skill set for this meticulously reported story about a decades-long lawsuit over wind turbines in the shadows of Montana’s Crazy Mountains.
Q and A: Bach, Burns, and Bildungsroman: An Interview with Justin Courter, Author of 'Cadenza' — The National Book Review

Nov 12, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Each year I receive two or three dozen forthcoming books from writers or their publicists who are hoping I’ll read and help to promote these titles. It’s flattering to be asked, and although I wish I could, I don’t have time to read them all. Most readers know, whether or not they’re also writers, that the number of books published each year is staggeringly high.
REVIEW: An Unforgettable Novel of South Africa, a Queer 'Trouple,' and Loneliness — The National Book Review

Oct 19, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Award-winning Afrikaans writer S. J. Naude’s slim, stunning Fathers and Fugitives (with a very Turgenev-like title) starts with a queer throuple. If the unsettling novel were a rom-com, the meet cute moment would occur when Daniel, a gay journalist living in London, encountered a same-sex Serbian couple—Oliver and Yugo—at the Tate Modern during a retrospective exhibit of Agnes Martin, an American minimalist. Oliver is a film enthusiast; Yugo, a waiter.
Q & A: Talking About John Adams, Who Deserves More Credit for the American Presidency — The National Book Review

Aug 20, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Q. One of the things that your fine book about John Adams poses is what can be learned from the first transfer of executive power in U.S. history, from George Washington to John Adams. And then from Adams to his rival Thomas Jefferson. You write that the "Adams presidency was bookended by the first two peaceful transfers of power..."there was no tradition of peaceful transition; it had to be crafted from scratch." What can be learned?
Q & A: Talking About the Enigmatic Pat Nixon, Her Husband's Loyalist and . . . a Feminist — The National Book Review

Aug 6, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Pat Nixon stood stoically as her husband, Richard, the Republican nominee for vice president in 1952, furiously sputtered that there were no mink coats for the Nixons and that he was proud that his wife wore “a good Republican cloth coat.” In 1960, she visibly choked up and held back tears as he conceded the presidency to John Kennedy.
Q & A: Mickey Rathbun on Her Book about her Grandfather, a Real-Life Jay Gatsby — The National Book Review

Aug 1, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Since it was published nearly a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become a cultural touchstone, as a story of reinvention and persistence or one of duplicity and fraud. Mickey Rathbun heard that Fitzgerald had modeled Jay Gatsby after her maternal grandfather. Rathbun’s curiosity and narrative flair animate The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir (White River Press).
REVIEW: The Immigrant Experience, through an Ethiopian Lens — The National Book Review

Jul 28, 2024 | thenationalbookreview.com | Adam Cohen

Someone Like Us by Dinaw MengestuKnopf, 272 pp. By Jane Rosenberg LaForge Toward the end of a fevered odyssey that comprises most of Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, the protagonist finds a manuscript written by his uncle and long-time father figure. “It’s hard to read,” says the man, a journalist who has pilloried his own career through a combination of drugs, alcohol, and procrastination. “There isn’t one story.