September’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, and Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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1. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
(Penguin Press)

17 Rave • 7 Positive • 8 Mixed • 1 Pan

“It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters … Touchet is the most morally intelligent character Smith has written … The book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently … But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing … As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.”

–Karan Mahajan (The New York Times Book Review)

2. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright
(W. W. Norton & Company)

17 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an interview with Anne Enright here

“So convincingly has Ms. Enright conjured the archetype of the wandering Irish bard who leaves behind him a legacy of abandoned women and melodious, honey-tongued verse … Is it possible for poems to be fictitious? In fact, these nostalgic odes to love and Ireland are limpid, lilting, wholly credible stand-alone works … One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity. The fullness of Ms. Enright’s talent is reflected as well in her treatment of what has come to be known, a bit glibly, as the ‘art monster.’”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

3. North Woods by Daniel Mason
(Random House)

15 Rave • 2 Mixed

“Haunting, haunted … The literary gods are inscrutable—the book club overlords even more so—but I’m praying you’ll consider getting lost in North Woods this fall. Elegantly designed with photos and illustrations, this is a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic … Mason isn’t just passively watching the evolution of this site in the forest. Each chapter germinates its own form while sending out tendrils that entwine beneath the surface of the novel … Revelatory.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

4. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
(Riverhead)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 4 Mixed • 2 Pan
Read an excerpt from The Vaster Wilds here

“Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds is a radical disruption to the male-dominated cliche. In her wilderness tale, survival involves learning to become part of the vast networks of community that nurture entire ecosystems … A fully-realized historical milieu … Groff acknowledges her character’s troubled past without turning pain into spectacle … Her surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page … A terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.”

–Lorraine Berry (The Boston Globe)

5. Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
(New York Review of Books)

8 Rave • 3 Positive

“Always witty and unexpected…she has a clear perception of the passion, pain and particularities of female existence … The novel’s ending is unexpectedly positive. Who would have thought that a story about drug addiction and self-destruction would leave its reader feeling optimistic?”

–Amanda Craig (The Spectator)