August’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite, Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky, Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox 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. The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya
(Pantheon)

6 Rave • 8 Positive

“Glides among time frames and points of view … Formal complexity is what elevates The Hypocrite from a straightforward novel of prosecution and rebuttal … Is instead invested in the phenomenon of subjectivity, portraying a world of mutual self-involvement in which people are not only driven but tragically blinded by their individual truths. As such, The Hypocrite elevates style above argument, and its pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters’ thoughts and the past and present.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

2. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
(Knopf)

9 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 2 Pan

“The risk with multiple overlapping narratives is that the reader can become more invested in one. The pace of the longer descriptive passages is slower than the character-driven sections, but no less forceful or imaginative … This novel moves between continents, centuries, cultures and communities with intelligence and ease. Shafak raises big ideas around artefacts and ownership of cultural heritage and handles them with care … A tribute to the power of language.”

–Henrietta McKervey (The Irish Times)

3. Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, trans. by Stephen B. Snyder
(Pantheon)

8 Rave

“Not only a compelling tale, but it is also beautifully written and constructed. The prose is clear, graceful, and engaging. Ogawa deftly weaves various motifs and themes throughout the novel.”

–Ariel Balter (The New York Journal of Books)

4. Hum by Helen Phillips
(Mary Sue Rucci Books)

5 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Helen Phillips here

“Intense and propulsive … Reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism, an intimate and tender portrait of one mother’s day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe, and to find a little joy, in a damaged and dangerous world … This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.”

–Karen Thompson Walker (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen
(St. Martin’s Press)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“Pedersen maintains a sense of doom, building suspense and expectation … Pedersen weaves eerie sentences together from archaic language, and the novel builds with a gruesome, anxious energy as the author reveals its connection to Chinese mythology … The novel’s final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance and viscera.”

–Heather Scott Partington (The Los Angeles Times)