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

Julian Barnes’s Departure(s), Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s The Flower Bearers, and Brenda Navarro’s Eating Ashes all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 4 Positive

“The whole package is a culmination of sorts, shimmering with his silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart … Absence itself—absence of love, absence of the beloved—becomes a crucial locus of meaning.”

–Adam Begley (The Atlantic)

=2. Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro
(Liveright)

6 Rave
Read an excerpt from Eating Ashes here

“A novel that refuses to reduce grief to a scheduled tour through ennobling sorrows … This nonlinear structure accurately portrays grief as a cacophony of ricocheting feelings … Unlike peddlers of platitudes, Navarro is a major talent who knows that the most important stages of grief are ambivalence and guilt.”

–Nicolás Medina Mora (The New York Times Book Review)

=2. Everyone Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn
(FSG Originals)

6 Rave

“An original, compassionate exploration of grief, faith, forgiveness, heritage and the foundations of shared humanity … Ní Chuinn’s brilliance as a writer lies partly in their unexpected angles of approach. … Chuinn finds words and images for feelings that are hard to formulate.”

–Alison Kelly (Times Literary Supplement)

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Nonfiction

1. The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
(Random House)

6 Rave • 1 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Elegant and juicy … Storytelling unafraid of poetry. Like a pudding, the prose here is both plain and rich … It’s a lot, but it’s also gratifyingly lush. Griffiths gives us romance and romanticism.”

–Danyel Smith (The New York Times Book Review)

2. The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII by Mark Braude
(Grand Central Publishing)

4 Rave • 1 Mixed

“Timely, immersive … What a relief, after so many years of having this era defined by his lost generation of men, to come upon a different viewpoint—from a queer woman no less—of this charged time … Braude excels at capturing the small details … He is able to richly paint an era that strongly rhymes with our current moment … Braude has delivered the prescient Flanner to us, nearly five decades after her death, at exactly the right moment.”

–Glynnis MacNicol (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World by Jane Ziegelman
(St. Martin’s Press)

4 Rave

“Ms. Ziegelman weaves an animated tapestry of the daily routines, religious rituals and changing communal interactions among Jews and Christians as the Nazi rule of Eastern Europe spread. She doesn’t flinch from the brutal scenes from which her relatives had spared her when she was young … Like the memory books she describes, Ms. Ziegelman chronicles the journeys of those family members who found their way to the U.S., as well as the fates of those who remained.”

–Diane Cole (The Wall Street Journal)