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

Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Phillip B. Williams’ Ours, and Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s A Fire So Wild 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. Ours by Phillip B. Williams
(Viking)

3 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from Ours here

“…a vast and rapturous feat of fabulism … This is a 19th-century historical epic created with both a vivacious enthusiasm for folkloric traditions and a deep contemplation of what it means to be freed from the violent machine of slavery in the U.S. … Williams has a voice that soars across each page, breathing life into his dazzling array of characters–the lovers and the malcontents, the queer and the mystical, the brazen and the cautious.”

–Dave Wheeler (Shelf Awareness)

2. The Variations by Patrick Langley
(New York Review of Books)

2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Langley is a mesmerizing guide to Selda’s music and the fantastical world of the hospice, a ‘variously demonized, patronized, scorned, venerated, vilified, and today largely ignored and near-bankrupted institution.’ This is exquisite.”

–Publishers Weekly

3. A Fire So Wild by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
(Harper)

1 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s list of books for the climate apocalypse here

“As the characters’ paths twine with fervor, Ruiz-Grossman’s engaging tale offers a vivid exploration of modern-day disparities within the timeless and universal search for belonging and self-determination.”

–Leah Strauss (Booklist)

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Nonfiction

1. Splinters by Leslie Jamison
(Little Brown and Company)

6 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Listen to an interview with Leslie Jamison here

“This one is slimmer, less digressive, more focused on Jamison’s singular experience [than The Recovering]. But it, like its predecessor, makes a particular life ramify more broadly in intriguing and poignant ways … About the bewildering nature of new motherhood, the implosion of Jamison’s marriage, parenting solo, dating as a single mother, coping with illness and lockdown. But it is also about storytelling … Though this well of grief and guilt is not dramatized, it is not unglimpsed. Jamison writes around the hole in her story, and we can feel the gravity of its pull in her presentation of herself … Her ferocious honesty, her stringent refusal to sugarcoat, her insistence on inhabiting and depicting moments in all their evanescence and incandescence make her one of the most compelling and trustworthy memoirists we have.”

–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)

2. Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann
(Knopf)

5 Rave

“Terrifically insightful … There is so much telling detail in the story: the fluent legal nonsense, the struggle with authority, the inner psychological conflict, all tacitly overshadowed by the recent memory of the Third Reich … This book runs to 838 pages, but barely a word is wasted. Trentmann is a skillful and unflashy storyteller with flickers of gentle irony.”

–Oliver Moody (The Times)

3. Strong Passions: A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York by Barbara Weisberg
(W. W. Norton & Company)

2 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Riveting … Weisberg reassembles the story with the clear determination to treat both sides equally, and without leering … She cloaks the jagged facts of the case in the soft trappings of their social backdrop to soften their impact. Nevertheless, sharp edges pierce the velvet veil … By letting public and private records reanimate this vivid chapter of the past, Weisberg tells a story that fiction could not touch.”

–Liesl Schillinger (The New York Times Book Review)