June’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin, and Rachel Cusk’s Parade 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. Godwin by Joseph O’Neill
(Pantheon)

10 Rave • 4 Mixed

“O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.”

–Anthony Cummins (The Guardian)

2. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
(Mariner)

8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Absorbing and affecting … Thanks to the economical grace and emotional force of Ms. Perry’s writing, we are also held fast by other crises, inserted like tiny detonators in her narrative. Death and desolation, though all too familiar, are freshly affecting … A novel of ideas, however, as well as one of emotion … It is hard to think of another modern novelist who portrays religious faith with such intelligent sympathy.”

–Anna Mundow (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
(W. W. Norton)

5 Rave • 6 Positive • 6 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Caledonian Road here

“Halfway through Caledonian Road the deaths start to occur and the tone, so far lightly satirical, with the odd epigrammatic flourish, darkens in turn … Wildly readable, brimming with energy and filled with enjoyable contemporary detail. Brash, prating characters stalk its pages, demanding attention and understanding; yet, in Andrew O’Hagan’s redistributive narrative justice, the most heartfelt, and heart-rending, moments tend to involve those whose fate is to lurk on the periphery.”

–Suzi Feay (Times Literary Supplement)

4. Parade by Rachel Cusk
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

6 Rave • 8 Positive • 6 Mixed • 3 Pan

“An icy thought experiment … Intellectually, these thoughts can be exhilarating. Instead of plot or character development, Cusk offers a gimlet-eyed analysis of what it is to be the creator of a world in which nobody really exists … This Cuskian narrator’s voice – cold, detached, judgmental, excoriating – emerges as a dominant and distinctive energy, an individual … This deepening of chaos is Cusk’s artistic project here, and she delivers it coldly. No doubt she’s pausing now to observe our pain.”

–Lucy Atkins (The Guardian)

5. Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
(Tin House Books)

5 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Morgan Talty here

“Works wonderfully well. At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man’s life—while it also entertains what that life could have been … Talty is an outstanding new voice with a lot to say.”

–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)