June’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book, Caroline Fraser’s Murderland, and Geoff Dyer’s Homework all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction books of the month.

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

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1. The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey*
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

6 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
Check out Catherine Lacey’s annotated nightstand here

“Deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention … Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play … The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form … The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing.”

–Sarah Moss (The Guardian)

2. Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
(Penguin Press)

6 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Murderland here

“Extremely disturbing … Intellectual framework underpins but never impedes the momentum of Fraser’s compelling, beautifully written text … This propulsive narrative is buttressed by extensive research documented in voluminous footnotes. With facts at her fingertips, she disdains to pretend objectivity … This is a cautionary tale, not a triumphal one, and Fraser closes with a passionate, angry passage whose biblical cadences ring with righteous fury.”

–Wendy Smith (The Washington Post)

3. Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television by Todd S. Purdum
(Simon & Schuster)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“Purdum’s deeply researched, insightful and enjoyable biography, gives Arnaz his due as an entertainer and a savvy businessman … With sympathy but open eyes Purdum chronicles Arnaz’s descent into alcoholism, which sapped his creative energy and the goodwill he had established over the years.”

–Douglass K. Daniel (Associated Press)

4. Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

3 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“A good memoir needs to be both particular and universal, which Dyer achieves by applying his idiosyncratic world view to experiences many of us will recognise … I was more or less constantly giggling for pages at a time … Extraordinarily moving … If you’ve read Dyer before then you’ll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven’t, it’s the perfect place to start.”

–John Self (The Times)

5. The Place of Tides by James Rebanks
(Mariner Books)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes … A tender, diaristic, inevitably elegiac account of his apprenticeship with Anna and her friend Ingrid … Each phase in this arcane process is meticulously described … From the precision of these descriptions an exquisite, limpid beauty gradually emerges.”

–Will Atkins (Financial Times)

*The Möbius Book is also partially a work of fiction, though its nonfiction section is lengthier.