What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Featuring Anne Tyler, the German Peasants' War, Charlotte Wood, and More
Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional 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. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
(Knopf)
8 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“A svelte, finely constructed novel … In my carping youth, I regarded the recurrent elements of Anne Tyler’s stories as a flaw. But I’ve grown to see her decades-long focus on quirky families and wounded people as no more limiting than the rules for writing a sonnet. With a sufficiently powerful microscope, a drop of water reveals the ocean.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
2. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
(Riverhead)
8 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Stone Yard Devotional here
“Somber, exquisite … The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil … The wrestling in this novel is with the nature and meaning of penance, atonement … Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another.”
–Lauren Christensen (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Casualties of Truth here
“Piercing and provocative … Illuminating … Frank and unnerving … She pushes her characters to the edge, where they must confront the moral costs of their darkest desires.”
–Nadia Owusu (The Boston Globe)
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1. Talk to Me: Lessons From a Family Forged by History by Rich Benjamin
(Pantheon Books)
2 Rave • 1 Positive •1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Talk to Me here
“Benjamin is a vivid writer whose honesty spares no one, including himself in his party-boy years … Violence, whether in war, politics, crime or families, has a long afterlife that is dangerous to overlook.”
–Anne Bartlett (BookPage)
2. Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
(Basic Books)
2 Rave • 1 Positive
“Roper’s close reading of the texts presents a rich, multidirectional history of an important historical period. And she writes like a dream. An exciting history book that’s likely to be the go-to study for years to come.”
–David Keymer (Library Journal)
3. After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall
(Mariner)
1 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from After Lives here
“Poignant … She draws sustenance from the women in her biographies, all of whose lives were bordered with calamity and loss.”
–April Austin (The Christian Science Monitor)
