September’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Richard Powers’ Playground 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. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

14 Rave • 7 Positive • 6 Mixed • 2 Pan

“I admire Intermezzo almost without reservation … Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work…is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive … Wise, resonant, and witty … There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea … A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you … Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading … This book charmed and moved me.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

2. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
(Scribner)

19 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed • 3 Pan
Read an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring … The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit … The story, told in short chapters that feel punchy even when they’re highly cerebral, slides around the labyrinth of Sadie’s mind, which is equally deceptive and deceived … Kushner inhabits the spy’s perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun she’s having … Bore through this noir posing and wry satire of radical politics, and you feel something vital and profound prowling around in the darkness beneath.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

3. Colored Television by Danzy Senna
(Riverhead)

10 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Colored Television here

“Well-oiled, precisely choreographed … Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person … Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.”

–Tyler Austin Harper (The Atlantic)

4. Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
(Grove)

8 Rave • 4 Positive

“Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter…into transcendent beauty … Rather than pitting these seeming polarities against each other, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between them, the realms of ambiguity that are far more indicative of the human experience … Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple.”

–Melissa Broder (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Playground by Richard Powers
(W. W. Norton and Company)

7 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence … Any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment … Compelling … He writes without a drop of mawkishness about guilt and grief and the sorrow endemic to caring about the natural world … Even with faith that its parts would at some point cohere, I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)