In this issue, Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club, a mystery centered on a murder at a boardinghouse in 1950s Washington, D.C., brings the McCarthy era to life through a striking cast of complex women. Our accompanying Beyond the Book article covers the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which inspired the film A League of Their Own.
A different major American city features in Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, the bizarre story of a Palestinian woman pursuing glamour, control, and cleanliness in contemporary New York. Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties gives readers a vivid summer tour of Philadelphia through the eyes of Dennis Monk, a young man from suburban Bucks County who has finally gotten sober. In Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga, two women with starkly different pasts team up to go on the run from the yakuza in 1970s Tokyo. Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin alternates between upstate New York during pandemic lockdown and London of the late 20th century while following the life trajectories of a group of artists. The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas is set in an unnamed city that forms a backdrop for the quiet reflections of narrator and documentary filmmaker Asya. Henry Wise’s Holy City refers with its title to Richmond, Virginia, where deputy sheriff Will Seems spent the last ten years, but takes place in the rural Southside region where he is faced with solving a crime intertwined with his own past. Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays satirizes modern Hollywood and skewers the use of AI in the entertainment industry.
Another novel commenting on the dangers of AI is Toward Eternity, the debut of Korean-to-English translator Anton Hur, which considers the ties between language and humanity through artificial beings. And for those who long to escape the constraints of the city and technological strife, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time is a lush, wild adventure of a book exploring how private and public interests have been bound up in the creation and maintenance of gardens.
Besides these, we bring you many other reviews and articles, a piece on how authors have responded to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the latest book news, a fresh Wordplay, and much more.
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