September’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Marlon James’s The Disappearers, Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party, and Emma Cline’s Switzy 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. The Disappearers by Marlon James
(Riverhead)

17 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read a profile of Marlon James here

“A harrowing, hilarious, magnificent novel that will stand the test of time … He invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes. He jolts the narrative sideways and backwards, thumping his suspense line like an expert bassist … His defiant queer epic belongs to us all.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Boston Globe)

2. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf)

18 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here

“Ambitious and captivating … Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds … feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.”

–Lincoln Michel (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Switzy by Emma Cline
(Random House)

8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed

“What’s hypnotic about this novel is the illusion that we’re watching a mind decaying even as it engineers its own expiration. Cline manages to pull the dramatic irony increasingly tight without letting us see the strings … She holds out her hand to the essential yearning in every human being, to that desire that persists until the very end.”

–Ron Charles Substack

4. Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Our Noble Selves here

“Atkinson’s lighthearted novel mines delicious humor from this mismatch of grizzled cynicism and national heritage. Our Noble Selves is in part a workplace comedy … Ms. Atkinson deserves to be rated as highly as her countryman Ian McEwan. Like him, she boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

5. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
(Transit Books)

6 Rave • 3 Positive

“…the novel asks us to admit that we can know almost nothing about history, or even about the lives of people with whom we live contemporaneously. To read May We Feed the King is to be richly entertained but forced to sit with frustration: we want clues, we want certainty, we want a story about the King that makes sense, and Perry withholds it, instead making us watch our own minds scrabble about, compulsively putting together the scattered pieces of the past.”

–Melissa Harrison (The Guardian)