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

Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, Susan Orlean’s Joyride, and Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures 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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Fiction

1. Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor
(Riverhead)

5 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Minor Black Figures here

“Captivating … The brilliance here is in Taylor’s willingness, really his insistence, that we sit with Wyeth through both the mundane moments and the more thrilling times, as when he and Keating give in to their passions. What I most enjoyed while reading this book was the sense of connection and quietude in my mind as I read. Everything was deliberate, crafted with great care, and infused with life.”

–John Warner (The Chicago Tribune)

2. A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Manages superbly (and efficiently) to be many things: A beguilingly simple tale. A complicated morality play. A sensitive evocation of a time … Lots of novels twice as long have half as much heft … Majumdar offers readers the rare sophomore novel that outshines her justly celebrated debut. It’s a contemporary classic.”

–Claude Peck (The Star Tribune)

3. The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson
(MCD)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“It makes for an epic of extraordinary abundance, one that occupies an uncharted border region of history and supernatural invention. The cast of characters is drawn with an eye to multiplicity … Johnson is keenly alert to the dynamic, and often dangerous, potency of these stories … Such awareness lends a subtle metafictional framework to the novel, a hint of cautionary skepticism about its releases into fantasy and brushes with exoticism … Modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

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Nonfiction

1. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean
(Avid Reader Press)

8 Rave • 2 Positive

“Might be the best craft book on writing you will ever read. It’s not written as a craft book, of course; it’s a memoir, and an entertaining one at that. But it is a memoir about how Orlean became a writer … Orlean is engaging and generous, explaining how she found ideas, honed and reported them, overcame obstacles … It is the good fortune of the rest of us to be invited along on this ebullient ride.”

–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)

2. True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
(Pantheon)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Lance Richardson here

“Untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.”

–Terry McDonnell (Alta)

3. Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary by Stefan Fatsis
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

5 Rave • 3 Positive

“Erudite, fascinating … While obviously appealing to word nerds and writers, Fatsis’s narrative is more broadly relevant to anyone who speaks, reads, and writes in American English. It provides a thorough, thoughtful history of dictionaries and the language they both shape and record, while championing the dictionary’s continued relevance in the 21st century. Lively, well-researched, and often entertaining.”

–Katie Noah Gibson (Shelf Awareness)