October’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

André Aciman’s Roman Year, Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy, and Sarah Moss’ My Good Bright Wolf all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.

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

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1. Roman Year: A Memoir by André Aciman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Roman Year here

“This is not, in style or spirit, a sad book. It’s filled with canny adaptiveness and invention … Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume’s packed with human incident … A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle.”

–Joan Frank (The Boston Globe)

2. My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

8 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from My Good Bright Wolf here

“Full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom … A lesser writer would overdo these refrains. But Moss wears them lightly, subtly using the doubting voice and the heroic wolf to tangle preconceptions of reality as she forges her own way of writing memoir.”

–Ellen Peirson-Hagger (The Observer)

3. Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 2 Positive

“Honest, full of penetrating wit and with a nice ear for mockery, he was nonetheless as cheerful and empathetic as Putin is malevolent and threatening. He wielded cheerfulness as a weapon and never lost faith that the right side must eventually prevail, even if he might no longer be around to see it.”

–Will Englund (The Washington Post)

4. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Aaron Robertson on Black utopias here

“Elegant, vigorous … The author dodges the pitfalls of nostalgia and sentimentality; his anecdotes crackle with immediacy … His eye on pacing and detail, he charts the intellectual odysseys of his cast, upending our expectations … An extraordinary achievement in narrative nonfiction.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)

5. Sonny Boy by Al Pacino
(Penguin Press)

1 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Discursively soulful … The eccentricity of Sonny Boy is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff … Shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.”

–Chris Vognar (The Los Angeles Times)