July’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, and Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End 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. Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday)

17 Rave • 4 Positive

“A dizzyingly brilliant measure of the versatility and depth of the acclaimed author’s literary talent … The intricacy with which Whitehead details the planning and execution of this caper marks him as a top-tier researcher—he’s drawn on many primary sources to ground this work of fiction in historical fact … A modern masterpiece and an ode to New York, no matter that rats skitter and cockroaches scamper underfoot.”

–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)

2. It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)

10 Rave • 1 Positive
Read a profile of Sigrid Nunez here

“It Will Come Back to You should make you want to imbibe every word Nunez has ever written. In a publishing landscape ravaged by the cult of celebrity and algorithmic shallowness, the fact that such a profound, quirky writer still garners so much acclaim, not to mention a sizeable readership, is similarly a source of hope.”

–Hirsh Sawhney (Times Literary Supplement)

3. Country People by Daniel Mason
(Random House)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Country People here

“Mason favors an elastic, lightly ironic voice that drifts among observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative structure is playful, occasionally intrusive, and permissive; it wanders, doubles back, incorporates fragments that seem, at first, peripheral. The humor—dry, humane, occasionally absurd—is ever-present … The Vermont setting, spare and bracing, acts as a quiet amplifier of these idiosyncrasies, while Mason remains attuned to the natural world. Into this landscape he introduces a thread of the uncanny, a local legend that hovers between conspiracy theory and genuine mystery.”

–Bill Kelly (Booklist)

4. Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Delightful wit … I take some not insignificant degree of comfort in the fact that an artist of Luiselli’s remarkable thoughtfulness and intellect is around to document whatever will come, especially whatever will end.”

–Cory Oldweiler (The Boston Globe)

5. Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich
(MCD)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“A boisterous new novel that’s equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness … Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I’ve read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation … Helps us see the actual, earthbound workings of the magical-sounding cloud, and he gets us thinking about the perils of our needing it so badly.”

–John Powers (NPR)