In our second-to-last issue of the year, we feature recent books from acclaimed authors that paint vivid pictures of lives in retrospect. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings spans a British actor’s memories from the 1960s to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and André Aciman’s Roman Year recounts a period spent in Rome as a young adult after his Jewish family was exiled from Egypt. Weike Wang’s upcoming Rental House also travels through time, examining American society through a couple’s fraught vacations five years apart.
In addition to new or soon-to-be-released books, we cover a sprinkling of lesser-known gems from earlier in 2024, including Maureen Sun’s The Sisters K, a modern gender-flipped retelling of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s But the Girl, which follows an Australian PhD student on an artist residency in the UK as she ponders creativity, her Malaysian heritage, and her complicated academic relationship with Sylvia Plath. Alongside these two classic-inflected contemporary debuts, we bring you a Beyond the Book article on the unique publisher they share, Unnamed Press, as well as one on beloved poet Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar.
Another glowing debut, Before the Mango Ripens by Afabwaje Kurian, tells the complex and hopeful tale of a village in 1970s Nigeria under the influence of American missionaries.
And Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s powerful posthumous memoir Patriot lays out a vision for the “normal country” he imagined his homeland could become.
You can also enjoy other reviews and articles, recommendations for book clubs, author interviews, a roundup of Our Most Anticipated Books for 2025, a new Wordplay, and more.
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Davina & Nick
Founder & Publisher