September’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil all feature among the best reviewed books of the months.

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1. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
(Knopf)

10 Rave •  6 Positive •  3 Mixed

“Brash and busy … It’s a piece of late-career showmanship…from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing … I’m hesitant to call What We Can Know a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
(Hogarth)

9 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Not so much a novel as a marvel … Here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent—a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness—might take time … Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? … One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters … Among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

3. Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin
(Knopf)

8 Rave • 1 Mixed

“Masterly … Quiet, devastating lucidity is a hallmark of Schweblin’s prose, captured with magnificent precision in a long-standing collaboration with translator Megan McDowell … We have the impression of a writer absolutely and entirely in control, as Schweblin’s meticulous clarity is never compromised by the horror of her subjects. But if we trust her to take us to the bottom, almost always she will reward us with a glimmer.”

–Francesca Segal (The Financial Times)

4. The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
(Mariner Books)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Wilderness here

“Expansive and intimate … This is not your generic book club selection, celebrating four friends living, laughing, loving. But if you want a ruminating, clear-eyed look at friendship as a means of survival, this is it … The rigorous work of authentic friendship asks us if we’re doing all we can for ourselves and the world we live in. Flournoy holds this mirror up to her characters and shows how modern life distorts those images despite everybody’s best intentions … Galvanizing and sustaining.”

–Lauren LeBlanc (The Boston Globe)

5. One of Us by Dan Chaon
(Henry Holt & Company)

7 Rave

“It works! As One of Us gleefully samples multiple registers—comic, tragic, satiric, elegiac, poetic—its mesh of archaic and contemporary styles becomes something quite arresting, a joy to read … Chaon’s beautiful novel insists on answers. We must not look away.”

–Hamilton Cain (The New York Times Book Review)