May’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, and Miranda July’s All Fours 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. This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
(W. W. Norton & Company)

17 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an interview with Claire Messud here

“This monumental novel, which is a work of salvage and salvation … Quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades … Regardless of how much Messud may have drawn from biographical details, though, this novel grips our interest only because of how expertly she shapes these incidents for dramatic effect … A novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

2. Long Island by Colm Tóibín
(Scribner)

12 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The characters in Long Island are constantly cautioning themselves not to say anything, for fear of upsetting that fine balance that exists in intimacy as much as in community. But not saying is an act with consequences, too—one that Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.”

–Ellen Akins (The Los Angeles Times)

3. All Fours by Miranda July
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Miranda July here

“About the binary of heterosexual love and the claustrophobia inherent in being a mother in a heteronormative family. More broadly, it’s a book about straddling two worlds … In a move that rejects the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, she never even leaves California. But transformation happens anyway. The narrator rediscovers herself not by driving across state lines, but by standing a shadow’s length away.”

–Jenessa Abrams (The Los Angeles Review of Books)

4. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
(Avid Reader Press)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“[Bradley’s] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre … Gradually, as the novel’s carbonated humor fizzes away, sharper elements protrude … Admittedly, Bradley is not a tidy writer. This plot eventually starts to shake like a Radio Flyer wagon traveling at DeLorean speeds. But by then nothing matters but the fate of this asynchronous couple brought together across cultures and eras.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

5. Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
(Pantheon)

4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Whale Fall here

“Blunt and exquisite … Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude … New and thrilling.”

–Maggie Shipstead (The New York Times Book Review)