April’s Best Reviewed Fiction
Featuring Katie Kitamura, David Szalay, Laurent Binet, and More
Katie Kitamura’s Audition, David Szalay’s Flesh, and Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Flesh by David Szalay
(Scribner)
14 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Flesh here
“A gentle yet deeply affecting novel about a taciturn man who overcomes abuse and loss early in life to stumble into transitory contentment—if not quite true happiness—as an adult … Fascinating and unexpected … If you’ve ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you’ll likely find Flesh all too human.”
–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)
2. Audition by Katie Kitamura
(Riverhead)
12 Rave • 4 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Katie Kitamura here
“A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace … Kitamura…writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance … A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted … Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
3. Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Perspective(s) here
“Seriously enjoyable … The epistolary novel can be a stodgy form, but in Sam Taylor’s translation from the French the letter writers here are brightly charismatic … From this delectable book’s clamor of voices and versions, Mr. Binet arrives at the truth of the crime.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
4. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
(Harper)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an essay by Louise Hegarty here
“Terrific … A witty, knowing homage to classic detective fiction, but also a deeply sensitive examination of the loneliness and confusion of grief … Readers will enjoy the Easter eggs hidden in the underbrush … Serve[s] as a bracing meditation on the different ways we perceive death (and fiction).”
–Sarah Lyall (The New York Times Book Review)
5. The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Austin Kelley here
“It’s a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity … One of the novel’s charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments—wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants—of an increasingly ‘Big Box Manhattan.’”
–Alexander Jacobs (The New York Times)
