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

Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, Lauren Collins’s They Stole a City, and Julie Buntin’s Famous Men 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. It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)

9 Rave
Read a profile of Sigrid Nunez here

“It Will Come Back to You should make you want to imbibe every word Nunez has ever written. In a publishing landscape ravaged by the cult of celebrity and algorithmic shallowness, the fact that such a profound, quirky writer still garners so much acclaim, not to mention a sizeable readership, is similarly a source of hope.”

–Hirsh Sawhney (Times Literary Supplement)

2. Famous Men by Julie Buntin
(Random House)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Superb, incendiary … There are numerous ways to characterize this superb novel. It’s a bildungsroman that explores the dynamics of power, ambition, and sexuality with the pulse and complexity of an intricate thriller, in exquisite prose. Each sentence is diamond cut … Buntin has outdone herself … leases and provokes from every vantage point, but what is especially remarkable is Buntin’s audacity, her gutsy choices, and her clarity. She’s pumping her fist in the air, and we can hear her roar.”

–Leigh Haber (The Boston Globe)

3. Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich
(MCD)

4 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“[A] rambunctious, thoroughly entertaining heist novel … Daddy issues go hand in glove with the surveillance state, and they give welcome ballast to Cloudthief’s buddy comedy.”

–Dan Pipenbring (Harper’s)

4. I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder
(Farrar, Staus and Giroux)

3 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from I Want You to Be Happy here

“What’s fresh about it is the book’s precise attention to the environment in which such a story now takes place … In some ways, under the surface, this is a warm and quite an old-fashioned sort of thing: a proper novel. Its protagonists have inner lives; their feelings are important to them, and us. The turn-and-turn-about third-person narration allows Calder unobtrusively to make clear the disjunctions between how they see each other and how they see themselves, and to watch their attempts to mediate their personae in the digital spaces in which we now half live. Man, you find yourself thinking: it’s tough out there for singles.”

–Sam Leith (The Guardian)

5. Please Don’t Touch the Body by Emily Doyle
(Bloomsbury)

4 Rave

“The 11 stories in Emily Doyle’s bracing debut collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body, vibrate with undercurrents of guilty desire, delicious rage, and the bewildering mysteries of the underworld … Doyle’s writing, elegant and mesmerizing, results in a curious, alluring combination of high drama and supernatural mystery … Spanning an impressively diverse demographic range, Doyle’s characters seek and often find relief from life’s demands by turning inward, succumbing to the seductive allure of their own startlingly active imaginations.”

–Shahina Piyarali (Library Journal)

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Nonfiction

1. They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy by Lauren Collins
(Penguin Press)

6 Rave

“Remarkably successful in its scope and depth, They Stole a City is an urgent argument for reckoning with history in order to understand the present backlash and rising white nationalism.”

–Laura Chanoux (Booklist)

2. The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal by Catherine Ostler
(Atria Books)

3. Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff
(Knopf)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“One of the fascinations here is Skalnik’s psychic makeup … Lacking actual cooperation, Colloff instead deploys her prodigious investigative reporting skills … Its unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an engrossing read; the public policy implications make it important.”

–Ted Conover (The New York Times Book Review)