Category: Fiction

I read Tono-Bungay for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn’t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of “a pragmatic narrator divided…

The paragraph-long review of Her Fearful Symmetry in the New Yorker calls it a “gothic story,” and it is, which is why I was willing to forgive some sort of over-the-top plot developments. (I disagree, though, with the last line of that review: I saw a few of the big revelations coming.) But, right: the…

I wanted to love this novel, which is set in 1966-1967 and centers on a twenty-nine-year-old book conservator who goes to Florence to restore damaged books after the Arno floods, but either it’s just not the book for me or I wasn’t in the right mood. Maybe my problem is mostly structural: after starting really…

At the start of Codex, Edward, a twenty-five-year-old investment banker with an English degree from Yale, is about to take the first vacation of his working career. Not that he’s actually going anywhere: he’s about to transfer to a different position at the company he works for, in the London office rather than in New…

I read Station Eleven in three days, and over the course of those three days I was entirely engrossed in this book’s story, in this book’s world. On the day I finished it, I read while eating my breakfast, closed my office door at lunchtime to read while eating lunch, and was so caught up…

Hotel World is a novel divided into six sections, each named for a grammatical tense (e.g. “present historic” or “future in the past”), and each (well, except for the last, which is broader) centered on a character with some connection to a particular hotel. As the back cover puts it: “Five people: four are living;…

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is the story, basically, of 10:04 being written, except fiction, not fact: the book’s narrator is an author who’s gotten a big advance for his second novel; he thinks he’ll expand a story of his that was published in the New Yorker (which is itself a story of Ben Lerner’s that was…

At the start of The Laws of Murder, Charles Lenox is optimistic: it’s the start of the year (1876) and he’s in the midst of helping Scotland Yard catch a murderer. The new detective agency he’s set up with his friend and protégé, Dallington, along with two other detectives, is about to open, and he’s…

The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means…

I like the humor and atmosphere of A Long Way from Verona, which is basically a coming-of-age story set in England about a year into WWII. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jessica Vye, is solitary and quirky: she starts off by saying she is “not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”…