August’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face, Jason Mott’s People Like Us, and Elaine Castillo’s Moderation all feature among August’s best reviewed fiction titles.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
(Faber & Faber)

8 Rave • 3 Positive • 4 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The City Changes Its Face here

“Extraordinary and exhilarating … McBride’s genius is to create a work whose innovation allows the reader to experience the sensation of feeling and thinking, instead of observing thoughts and feelings described. The sentences do not show themselves off … There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next.”

–Megan Nolan (The New Statesman)

2. Moderation by Elaine Castillo
(Viking)

9 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Moderation here

“Sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic … Castillo’s close third-person narration, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that detonate like precision-guided bombs … Castillo favors long sentences that twist and kink like a delirious garden hose, delighted by the unruly spillage of thought … Succeeds in rendering visible the often invisible dirty work of the digital era.”

–Rhonda Feng (The New York Times Book Review)

3. People Like Us by Jason Mott
(Dutton)

8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an essay by Jason Mott here

“Riveting … A hugely ambitious book. It takes big swings at topics many people like us are struggling to understand. It doesn’t always connect, but that barely matters in a work that insists we must keep trying to put together words that help each other make sense of the world.”

–Chris Hewitt (The Star Tribune)

=4. The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter by Peter Orner
(Little Brown and Company)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter here

“What he has constructed is a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”

–Adam Langer (The New York Times Book Review)

=4. Ruth by Kate Riley
(Riverhead)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Ruth here

“It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth … Ruth doesn’t speak to us directly, but Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible. In the early sections, the author’s wry voice never flattens the meringue tips of Ruth’s childlike wonder. And later, as Ruth feels increasingly cramped in the little church, Riley maintains ironic distance, careful to avoid collapsing into the character inspired by her own experience. Her epigraphic style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)