The days are dark, but books bring brightness. Here are promising new paperbacks to read as autumn settles in.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. This novel shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwoods The Testaments. Set among a group of black women friends in contemporary England, its a big, busy novel full of interconnected stories, drawing comparisons to Alison Bechdel. Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughess Hollywood by Karina Longworth. Longworth, a film critic and creator of the podcast You Must Remember This, is a masterful storyteller of Old Hollywood; here, she places millionaire and movie mogul Howard Hughes at its center. Longworth allows the conflicting versions of Howard Hughes to stand side by side, revealing his desire for control, sex and fame, and in so doing she creates a vibrant history not just of Hughes but of Hollywood itself, its sins and glories, its darkness and light.
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. I fell hard for this charmer. McCracken, in her first novel in 17 years, creates an irresistible world in an early-20th-century New England town, following the fortunes of a multigenerational family and their connection to a local six-lane candlepin bowling alley. Everyones an oddball in Salford, Mass., in the very best of ways; I loved the playfulness of the language, and the way McCrackens narrator takes you by the hand, hurrying you into an inviting, curious world that youll be sorry to leave.
Feast Days by Ian MacKenzie (Little, Brown, $15.99). MacKenzies follow-up to his 2009 debut, City of Strangers, takes place in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where a wealthy American couple have moved; the wife, who narrates the book, is restless and unhappy. This is an expansive book tangling big ideas on class and race, marriage and politics, wrote a reviewer in The Guardian. Noting a delight in words that is wonderful to read, the review concluded, Feast Days is not a thriller, but reads a little like one, moving swiftly from one kind of experience to the next with brutal, dazzling effect.
The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown, $15.99). Pelecanos divides his time between detective fiction and TV writing (hes an Emmy nominee for Treme and The Wire); his latest book, set in Washington, D.C., involves a private eye, a woman who runs a jail book-group program, and a recently incarcerated young man. The book is a modern storytelling masters paean to the power of books, literature, librarians, and booksellers, wrote an NPR reviewer. Pelecanos, who has spent time volunteering with prison literacy programs, understands how important the right story can be at the right time for a person, how it can provide the strength and determination to get past deprivation and ignorance and mistakes.
Everythings Trash But Its Okay by Phoebe Robinson (Penguin, $16). In this essay collection, the actor, author and comedian (2 Dope Queens) is telling on everybody, wrote Seattle Times writer Crystal Paul, including (and mostly really) herself. In essays about money, sex, interracial dating, loving our bodies and being an ally, Robinson presents a sometimes hilarious, sometimes dead serious, argument for radical honesty and radical self-love in an era when everything is trash. But, as she demonstrates with her own story, if we can be honest, kind to ourselves, and laugh a little, itll be OK.
