What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Month

Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life, Emma Cline’s The Guest, Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson, and Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water all feature among May’s Best Reviewed Books.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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Fiction

1. The Guest by Emma Cline
(Random House)

13 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed • 2 Pan
Read an interview with Emma Cline here

“Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat. It’s a novel driven by the suspense of what it takes to survive—a suspense that can take the pleasure out of anything, even a day at the beach … Alex is a quiet heroine—almost like a mist of a person, barely there … Cline does a pitch-perfect job of keeping Alex’s understanding of herself in sync with the reader’s. We are deprived of much of her backstory because Alex is someone who prefers not to dwell … Cline avoids a simplistic eat-the-rich story on a number of levels … Cline has written a beach read for the people who clean up once the party is over.”

–Jennifer Wilson (The Nation)

2. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
(Grove)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Abraham Verghese here

“When you come to the end of Abraham Verghese’s new novel, The Covenant of Water, you will feel that you have lived among the Indian and Anglo-Indian characters who populate its pages for almost a century. It’s that long. But it’s also that immersive—appropriately enough for a book so steeped in the medium and metaphor of water, as the title suggests…. These lives, so finely drawn and intensely felt, are at once singular and inextricably bound together within the immensity of fate and faith—like ‘the water that connects them all in time and space and always has.’”

–Ellen Akins (The Star Tribune)

3. Shy by Max Porter
(Graywolf)

7 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
Listen to Max Porter read from Shy here

Books about troubled teenagers are rarely good; this one is sublime. Porter is a writer drawn to the challenge of finding forms of language best suited to conveying intense psychological and emotional states … What a miracle of language this book is … Whilst in another writer’s hands such techniques might seem merely pretentious, they are precisely what allows Porter to conjure with such intensity the see-saw motion of Shy’s thoughts as they leap from one thing to the next, his momentary losses of reason and, above all, the rushing tempests of unmanageable feeling and desire. Porter seems never to set down a single sentence, paragraph or scene without asking if there might be a richer, stranger, more evocative way of doing things—and it is here that he ultimately proves more linguistically inventive than his modernist-inspired peers.”

–Doug Battersby (The Irish Times)

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Nonfiction

1. King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 3 Positive

The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently … It’s a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current. He does not dispense two-dollar words; he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum; he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him … This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait … Eig is adept at weaving in other characters, and other voices. He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC … Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

2. Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg
(Knopf)

10 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Winnie and Nelson here

“Behind the cover of his book lies an intense, unsparing and at times almost unbearably intimate exploration of one of the world’s most famous, most mythical marriages … This is a book to make one wince, and gasp, and turn the page–a book that slowly, remorselessly, tears the bandages off South Africa’s carefully constructed image of itself, and of a partnership that lies at the heart of this country’s ‘miraculous’ transformation from racialized tyranny to democracy. Above all this is a book about rage … Unflinching to the point of intrusiveness … Steinberg admits that much of his freshest material–the most furious exchanges between the couple–comes from scribbled records taken by apartheid prison officials, then stolen and hidden for decades.”

–Andrew Harding (The Times Literary Supplement)

3. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan
(W.W. Norton and Company)

8 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Red Memory here

“At the heart of Branigan’s book is a series of remarkable interviews which she says would not be possible to conduct under the more restrictive environment for reporters in Xi Jinping’s China today … Branigan tells her subjects’ stories well and she is an excellent listener, so that they speak frankly about how they felt then and now as well as describing what they experienced.”

–Denis Staunton (The Irish Times)