Robert Gammon's Blog, page 2

New books coming in February 2018

From The Guardian

Non-fiction;

FEEL FREE: Essays by ZADIE SMITH (Hamish Hamilton). Smith is as accomplished an essayist as she is a novelist; her subjects here range from Quentin Tarantino to Karl Ove Knausgaard.

BRIT(ISH): ON RACE, IDENTITY and BELONGING by AFUA HIRSCH (Cape). An examination of everyday racism in Britain and why liberal attempts to be “colour-blind” have caused more problems than they have solved.

THE WIFE’S TALE: A Personal History by AIDA EDEMARIAM (4th Estate). A narrative of Ethiopia over the past century that centres on Edemariam’s remarkable and long-lived grandmother.

ENLIGHTENMENT NOW by STEVEN PINKER (Allen Lane). In a follow-up to his bestselling The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Harvard psychologist argues that our turbulent times require not despair but reason and Enlightenment values.

Fiction

THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN by DENIS JOHNSON (Cape). The cult American author, who died last year, was most celebrated for his only short story collection, Jesus’ Son; this posthumous collection, completed shortly before his death, sees him contemplating memories and mortality.

THE ONLY STORY by JULIAN BARNES (Cape). A man looks back on how, as a disaffected youth, he fell gloriously in love with a married older woman at the local tennis club; the book gradually darkens into the tragedy of a destroyed life.

THE MELODY by JIM CRACE (Picador). From the author of Harvest, a fable about grief, myth, music and persecution, in which a widowed musician indavertently sparks a campaign of violence against the paupers scratching a living on the fringes of town.

FORCE OF NATURE by JANE HARPER (Little, Brown). The Dry was one of the stand-out crime debuts of 2017; Australian author Harper follows it with a story of women hiking in the bush – five go out, but only four come back.

Children’s

THE WREN HUNT by MARY WATSON (Bloomsbury). YA debut about a girl caught between rival magical factions.

Reviews of new books coming in February 2018, from www.themillions.com:

THE FRIEND by SIGRID NUÑEZ: In her latest novel, Nunez (a Year in Reading alum) ruminates on loss, art, and the unlikely—but necessary—bonds between man and dog. After the suicide of her best friend and mentor, an unnamed, middle-aged writing professor is left Apollo, his beloved, aging Great Dane. Publishers Weekly says the “elegant novel” reflects “the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present.” (Carolyn)

FEEL FREE by ZADIE SMITH: In her forthcoming essay collection, Smith provides a critical look at contemporary topics, including art, film, politics, and pop-culture. Feel Free includes many essays previously published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and it is divided into five sections: In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free. Andrew Solomon described the collection as “a tonic that will help the reader reengage with life.” (Zoë)

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? by MARILYNNE ROBINSON: One of my favorite literary discoveries of 2017 was that there are two camps of Robinson fans. Are you more Housekeeping or Gilead? To be clear, all of us Housekeeping people claim to have loved her work before the Pulitzer committee agreed. But this new book is a collection of essays where Robinson explores the modern political climate and the mysteries of faith, including, “theological, political, and contemporary themes.” Given that the essays come from Robinson’s incisive mind, I think there will be more than enough to keep both camps happy. (Claire)

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by TAYARI JONES: In our greatest tragedies, there is the feeling of no escape—and when the storytelling is just right, we feel consumed by the heartbreak. In Jones’s powerful new novel, Celestial and Roy are a married couple with optimism for their future. Early in the book, Jones offers a revelation about Roy’s family, but that secret is nothing compared to what happens next: Roy is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and sentenced to over a decade in prison. An American Marriagearrives in the pained, authentic voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre—Celestial’s longtime friend who moves into the space left by Roy’s absence. Life, and love, must go on. When the couple writes “I am innocent” to each other in consecutive letters, we weep for their world—but Jones makes sure that we can’t look away. (Nick R.)

THE STRANGE BIRD by JEFF VANDER MEER: Nothing is what it seems in VanderMeer’s fiction: bears fly, lab-generated protoplasm shapeshifts, and magic undoes science. In this expansion of his acclaimed novel Borne, which largely focused on terrestrial creatures scavenging a post-collapse wasteland, VanderMeer turns his attention upward. Up in the sky, things look a bit different. (Nick M.)

HOUSE OF IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTIES by JOSEPH CASSARA: First made famous in the documentary Paris Is Burning, New York City’s House of Xtravaganza is now getting a literary treatment in Cassara’s debut novel—one that’s already drawing comparisons to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The story follows teenage Angel, a young drag queen just coming into her own, as she falls in love, founds her own house and becomes the center of a vibrant—and troubled—community. Critics call it “fierce, tender, and heartbreaking.” (Kaulie)

FRESHWATER by AKWAEKE EMEZI: A surreal, metaphysical debut novel dealing with myth, mental health, and fractured selves centering around Ada, a woman from southern Nigeria “born with one foot on the other side.” She attends college in the U.S., where several internal voices emerge to pull her this way and that. Library Journal calls this “a gorgeous, unsettling look into the human psyche.” (Lydia)

RED CLOCKS by LENI ZUMAS: The latest novel from the author of The Listeners follows five women of different station in a small town in Oregon in a U.S. where abortion and IVF have been banned and embryos have been endowed with all the rights of people. A glimpse at the world some of our current lawmakers would like to usher in, one that Maggie Nelson calls “mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring–not to mention a way forward for fiction now.” (Lydia)

HEART BERRIES by TERESE MAILHOT: In her debut memoir, Mailhot—raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in southwestern Canada, presently a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue—grapples with a dual diagnosis of PTSD and Bipolar II disorder, and with the complicated legacy of a dysfunctional family. Sherman Alexie has hailed this book as “an epic take—an Iliad for the indigenous.” (Emily)

ASYMMETRY by LISA HALLIDAY: 2017 Whiting Award winner Halliday has written a novel interweaving the lives of a young American editor and a Kurdistan-bound Iraqi-American man stuck in an immigration holding room in Heathrow airport. Louise Erdrich calls this “a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy.” (Lydia)

BACK TALK by DANIELLE LAZARIN: long live the short story, as long as writers like Lazarin are here to keep the form fresh. The collection begins with “Appetite,” narrated by nearly 16-year-old Claudia, whose mother died of lung cancer. She might seem all grown up, but “I am still afraid of pain—for myself, for all of us.” Lazarin brings us back to a time when story collections were adventures in radical empathy: discrete panels of pained lives, of which we are offered chiseled glimpses. Even in swift tales like “Window Guards,” Lazarin has a finely-tuned sense of pacing and presence: “The first time Owen shows me the photograph of the ghost dog, I don’t believe it.” Short stories are like sideways glances or overheard whispers that become more, and Lazarin makes us believe there’s worth in stories that we can steal moments to experience. (Nick R.)

THE CHÂTEAU by PAUL GOLDBERG: In Goldberg’s debut novel, The Yid, the irrepressible members of a Yiddish acting troupe stage manages a plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin in hopes of averting a deadly Jewish pogrom. In his second novel, the stakes are somewhat lower: a heated election for control of a Florida condo board. Kirkus writes that Goldberg’s latest “confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction’s liveliest new voices, walking in the shoes of such deadpan provocateurs as Mordecai Richler and Stanley Elkin.” (Matt)

THIS LINES BECOMES A RIVER by FRANCISCO CANTÚ: A memoir by a Whiting Award-winner who served as a U.S. border patrol agent. Descended from Mexican immigrants, Cantú spends four years in the border patrol before leaving for civilian life. His book documents his work at the border, and his subsequent quest to discover what happened to a vanished immigrant friend. (Lydia)

CALL ME ZEBRA by AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI: If the driving force of Van der Vliet Oloomi’s first novel, Fra Keeler, was “pushing narrative to its limits” through unbuilding and decomposition, her second novel, Call Me Zebra, promises to do the same through a madcap and darkly humorous journey of retracing the past to build anew. Bibi Abbas Abbas Hossein is last in a line of autodidacts, anarchists, and atheists, whose family left Iran by way of Spain when she was a child. The book follows Bibi in present day as she returns to Barcelona from the U.S., renames herself Zebra and falls in love. Van der Vliet Oloomi pays homage to a quixotic mix of influences—including Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kathy Acker—in Call Me Zebra, which Kirkus calls “a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it.” (Anne)

SOME HELL by PATRICK NATHAN: A man commits suicide, leaving his wife, daughter, and two sons reckoning with their loss. Focused on the twinned narratives of Colin, a middle schooler coming to terms with his sexuality, as well as Diane, his mother who’s trying to mend her fractured family, Nathan’s debut novel explores the various ways we cope with maturity, parenting, and heartbreak. (Nick M.)

THE WEDDING DATE by JASMINE GUILLORY: If 2017 was any indication, events in 2018 will try the soul. Some readers like to find escape from uncertain times with dour dystopian prognostications or strained family stories (and there are plenty). But what about something fun? Something with sex (and maybe, eventually, love). Something Roxane Gay called a “charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel….One of the best books I’ve read in a while.” Something so fun and sexy it earned its author a two-book deal (look out for the next book, The Proposal, this fall). Wouldn’t it feel good to feel good again? (Lydia)

Las novedades literarias para el 2018

Agencia EFE, publicado en El Comercio (Perú): 29.12.2017

Las últimas creaciones de John Le Carré, Orhan Pamuk, Éric Vuillard, Margaret Atwood, Muñoz Molina y Juan José Millás destacan en las novedades editoriales del primer trimestre de 2018, que verá la publicación de 18 cuentos inéditos de Francis Scott Fitzgerald y en el que Tom Hanks debuta como escritor.

En "El legado de los espías" (Planeta), John le Carré retoma la trama de "El espía que surgió del frío" y "El topo", ahora con los espías Leamas, Prideaux, George Smiley o Peter Guillam investigados por una generación sin memoria de la Guerra Fría ni paciencia.

En este trimestre también se publicará "La mujer del pelo rojo" (Literatura Random House), del Nobel turco Orhan Pamuk, una historia de amor y parricidio; así como "El orden del día" (Tusquets), de Éric Vuillard, que narra el apoyo que en febrero de 1933 los dueños de Opel, Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben, Bayer, Telefunken, Agfa o Varta dieron en una reunión secreta a Hitler a cambio de estabilidad.

Destacan asimismo "La semilla de la bruja" (Lumen), relectura de "La tempestad" shakespeariana de Margaret Atwood; "Entre ellos", de Richard Ford; "Riquete el del copete", de Amélie Nothomb (ambas en Anagrama); "La investigación", de Philippe Claudel, y "Los celosos" (ambas en Salamandra), de Sándor Márai.

En las letras españolas aparecerán, entre otros, "Un andar solitario entre la gente" (Seix), de Antonio Muñoz Molina; "Que nadie duerma" (Alfaguara), de Juan José Millás; "Las afueras" (Anagrama), de Luis Goytisolo o "Fractura" (Alfaguara), del hispano-argentino Andrés Neuman.

De Latinoamérica llegan "Moronga", de Horacio Castellanos Moya; "Mediocristán es un país tranquilo", de Luis Noriega, y "El galán imperfecto", de Rafael Gumucio, las tres en LRH; así como "La sombra del agua" (Umbriel), de Guillermo del Toro y Daniel Kraus.

El "best seller" estará representado por libros como "Bajo cielos lejanos" (B), de Sarah Lark; "Pizzería Vesubio" (Espasa), de Walter Riso; y "La marca del inquisidor" (Duomo), de Marcello Simoni.

La cosecha negra traerá a Ian Rankin con "Mejor el diablo" (RBA); Mary Higgins Clark con "Negro como el mar" (Plaza & Janés); Anne Perry y su "Traición en Lancaster Gate" (B); Andrea Camilleri con "La pirámide de fango" (Salamandra); Donna Leon con "La tentación del perdón" (Seix); John Connolly con "Tiempos oscuros" (Tusquets); o Camilla Läckberg y "La Bruja" (Maeva).

Otras novedades 'negras' serán "Anatomía de un escándalo" (Roca), de Sarah Vaughan; "De noche" (Salamandra), de Bernard Minier; "Cuando sale la reclusa" (Siruela), de Fred Vargas; "En la tormenta" (Principal) de Flynn Berry, o "Absolutamente Heather" (Seix).

La novela negra en español estará representada por el argentino Jorge Fernández Díaz con "La herida" (Destino); el cubano Leonardo Padura con "La transparencia del tiempo" o el español de origen cubano José Carlos Somoza con "El origen del mal" (B).

Respecto al cuento, serán novedad "Moriría por ti" (Anagrama), de Francis Scott Fitzgerald, con 18 relatos inéditos, textos presentados a revistas durante la década de 1930 y que nunca se imprimieron, o guiones y argumentos cinematográficos jamás filmados; así como el debut literario del actor Tom Hanks con "Tipos singulares" (Roca).

Alba inaugurará una nueva colección de poesía, dirigida por Gonzalo Torné, con un volumen de "Poesía completa" de Emily Brontë y una antología de poetas españolas; y también en poesía se publicará en este primer trimestre una antología de Sylvia Plath (Navona).

New books being published in January 2018

Book previews from www.themillions.com

THE PERFECT NANNY by LEILA SLIMANI (translated by Sam Taylor): In her Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Slimani gets the bad news out of the way early—on the first page to be exact: “The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a gray bag, which they zipped up.” Translated from the French by Sam Taylor as The Perfect Nanny—the original title was Chanson Douce, or Lullaby—this taut story about an upper-class couple and the woman they hire to watch their child tells of good help gone bad. (Matt)

HALSEY STREET by NAIMA COSTER: Coster’s debut novel is set in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn. When Penelope Grand leaves a failed art career in Pittsburgh and comes home to Brooklyn to look after her father, she finds her old neighborhood changed beyond recognition. The narrative shifts between Penelope and her mother, Mirella, who abandoned the family to move to the Dominican Republic and longs for reconciliation. A meditation on family, love, gentrification, and home. (Emily)

FIRE SERMON by JAMIE QUATRO: Five years after her story collection, I Want to Show You More, drew raves from The New Yorker’s James Wood and Dwight Garner at The New York Times, Quatro delivers her debut novel, which follows a married woman’s struggle to reconcile a passionate affair with her fierce attachment to her husband and two children. “It’s among the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about longing—for beauty, for sex, for God, for a coherent life,” says Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You. (Michael)

THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN by DENIS JOHNSON: Johnson’s writing has always had an antiphonal quality to it—the call and response of a man and his conscience, perhaps. In these stories, a dependably motley crew of Johnson protagonists find themselves forced to take stock as mortality comes calling. The writing has a more plangent tone than Angels and Jesus’ Son, yet is every bit as edgy. Never afraid to look into the abyss, and never cute about it, Johnson will be missed. Gratefully, sentences like the following, his sentences, will never go away: “How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation?” R.I.P. (Il’ja)

A GIRL IN EXILE by ISMAIL KADARE (translated by John Hodgson): Kadare structures the novel like a psychological detective yarn, but one with some serious existential heft. The story is set physically in Communist Albania in the darkest hours of totalitarian rule, but the action takes place entirely in the head and life of a typically awful Kadare protagonist—Rudian Stefa, a writer. When a young woman from a remote province ends up dead with a provocatively signed copy of Stefa’s latest book in her possession, it’s time for State Security to get involved. A strong study of the ease and banality of human duplicity. (Il’ja)

FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD by AHMED SAADAWI (translated by Jonathan Wright): The long-awaited English translation of the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 gives American readers the opportunity to read Saadawi’s haunting, bleak, and darkly comic take on Iraqi life in 2008. Or, as Saadawi himself put it in interview for Arab Lit, he set out to write “the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone.” (Check out Saadawi’s Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.)

THIS WILL BE MY UNDOING by MORGAN JERKINS: Wünderkind Jerkins has a background in 19th-century Russian lit and postwar Japanese lit, speaks six languages, works/has worked as editor and assistant literary agent; she writes across many genres—reportage, personal essays, fiction, profiles, interviews, literary criticism, and sports and pop culture pieces; and now we’ll be seeing her first book, an essay collection. From the publisher: “This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans.” The collected essays will cover topics ranging from “Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t ‘see color’; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of ‘the fast-tailed girl’ and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the ‘Black Girl Magic’ movement.” (Sonya)

MOUTHS DON’T SPEAK by KATIA D. ULYSSE: In Drifting, Ulysse’s 2014 story collection, Haitian immigrants struggle through New York City after the 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of their county. In her debut novel, Ulysse revisits that disaster with a clearer and sharper focus. Jacqueline Florestant is mourning her parents, presumed dead after the earthquake, while her ex-Marine husband cares for their young daughter. But the expected losses aren’t the most serious, and a trip to freshly-wounded Haiti exposes the way tragedy follows class lines as well as family ones. (Kaulie)

THE SKY IS YOURS by CHANDLER KLANG SMITH: Smith’s The Sky Is Yours, is a blockbuster of major label debuts. The dystopic inventiveness of this genre hybrid sci-fi thriller/coming of age tale/adventure novel has garnered comparisons to Gary Shteyngart, David Mitchell and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. And did I mention? It has dragons, too, circling the crumbling Empire Island, and with them a fire problem (of course), and features a reality TV star from a show called Late Capitalism’s Royalty. Victor LaValle calls The Sky Is Yours “a raucous, inventive gem of a debut.” Don’t just take our word for it, listen to an audio excerpt. (Anne)

EVERYTHING HERE IS BEAUTIFUL by MIRA T. LEE: Spanning cultures and continents, Lee’s assured debut novel tells the story of two sisters who are bound together and driven apart by the inescapable bonds of family. Miranda is the sensible one, thrust into the role of protector of Lucia, seven years younger, head-strong, and headed for trouble. Their mother emigrated from China to the U.S. after the death of their father, and as the novel unfurls in clear, accessible prose, we follow the sisters on journeys that cover thousands of miles and take us into the deepest recesses of the human heart. Despite its sunny title, this novel never flinches from big and dark issues, including interracial love, mental illness and its treatment, and the dislocations of immigrant life. (Bill)

THE INFINITE FUTURE by TIM WIRKUS: I read this brilliant puzzle-of-a-book last March and I still think about it regularly! The Infinite Future follows a struggling writer, a librarian, and a Mormon historian excommunicated from the church on their search for a reclusive Brazilian science fiction writer. In a starred review, Book Page compares Wirkus to Jonathan Lethem and Ron Currie Jr., and says the book “announces Wirkus as one of the most exciting novelists of his generation.” I agree. (Edan)

THE JOB OF THE WASP by COLIN WINNETTE: With Winnette’s fourth novel he proves he’s adept at re-appropriating genre conventions in intriguing ways. His previous book, Haint’s Stay, is a Western tale jimmyrigged for its own purposes and is at turns both surreal and humorous. Winnette’s latest, The Job of the Wasp, takes on the Gothic ghost novel and is set in the potentially creepiest of places—an isolated boarding school for orphaned boys, in the vein of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Old Child, or even Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. “Witty and grisly” according to Kelly Link, strange and creepy, Job of the Wasp reveals Winnette’s “natural talent” says Patrick deWitt. (Anne)

BRASS by XHENET ALIU: In what Publishers Weekly calls a “striking first novel,” a daughter searches for answers about the relationship between her parents, a diner waitress from Waterbury, Conn. and a line cook who emigrated from Albania. Aliu writes a story of love, family, and the search for an origin story, set against the decaying backdrop of a post-industrial town. In a starred review, Kirkus writes “Aliu’s riveting, sensitive work shines with warmth, clarity, and a generosity of spirit.” (Lydia)

THE IMMORTALISTS by CHLOE BENJAMIN: Four adolescent sibling in 1960s New York City sneak out to see a psychic, who tells each of them the exact date they will die. They take this information with a grain of salt, and keep it from each other, but Benjamin’s novel follows them through the succeeding decades, as their lives alternately intertwine and drift apart, examining how the possible knowledge of their impending death affects how they live. I’m going to break my no-novels-about-New-Yorkers rule for this one. (Janet)

KING ZENO by NATHANIEL RICH: This historical thriller features an ax-wielding psychopath wreaking havoc in the city of Sazeracs. It’s been eight years since Rich moved to New Orleans, and in that time, he’s been a keen observer, filing pieces on the city’s storied history and changing identity for various publications, not least of all The New York Review of Books. He’s certainly paid his dues, which is vitally important since the Big Easy is an historically difficult city for outsiders to nail without resorting to distracting tokenism (a pelican ate my beignet in the Ninth Ward). Fortunately, Rich is better than that. (Nick M.)

THE MONK OF MOKHA by DAVE EGGERS: Eggers returns to his person-centered reportage with an account of a Yemeni-American man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali’s efforts to revive the Yemeni tradition of coffee production just when war is brewing. A starred Kirkus review calls Eggers’s latest “a most improbable and uplifting success story.” (Lydia)

IN EVERY MOMENT WE ARE STILL ALIVE by TOM MALMQUIST (translated by Henning Koch): A hit novel by a Swedish poet brought to English-reading audiences by Melville House. This autobiographical novel tells the story of a poet whose girlfriend leaves the world just as their daughter is coming into it–succumbing suddenly to undiagnosed leukemia at 33 weeks. A work of autofiction about grief and survival that Publisher’s Weekly calls a “beautiful, raw meditation on earth-shattering personal loss.” (Lydia)

PECULIAR GROUND by LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT: The award-winning British historian (The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War) makes her fiction debut. Narrated by multiple characters, the historical novel spans three centuries and explores the very timely theme of immigration. Walls are erected and cause unforeseen consequences for both the present and futurey. In its starred review, Kirkus said the novel was “stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose.” (Carolyn)

NEON IN DAYLIGHT by HERMIONE HOBY: A novel about art, loneliness, sex, and restless city life set against the backdrop of Hurricane Sandy-era New York, Neon in Daylight follows a young, adrift English catsitter as she explores the galleries of New York and develops an infatuation with a successful writer and his daughter, a barista and sex-worker. The great Ann Patchett called Hoby “a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty.” (Lydia)

THIS COULD HURT by JILLIAN MEDOFF: Medoff works a double shift: when she isn’t writing novels, she’s working as a management consultant, which means, as her official bio explains, “that she uses phrases like ‘driving behavior’ and ‘increasing ROI’ without irony.” In her fourth novel, she turns her attention to a milieu she knows very well, the strange and singular world of corporate America: five colleagues in a corporate HR department struggle to find their footing amidst the upheaval and uncertainty of the 2008-2009 economic collapse. (Emily)

THE AFTERLIVES by THOMAS PIERCE: Pierce’s first novel is a fascinating and beautifully rendered meditation on ghosts, technology, marriage, and the afterlife. In a near-future world where holograms are beginning to proliferate in every aspect of daily life, a man dies—for a few minutes, from a heart attack, before he’s revived—returns with no memory of his time away, and becomes obsessed with mortality and the afterlife. In a world increasingly populated by holograms, what does it mean to “see a ghost?” What if there’s no afterlife? On the other hand, what if there is an afterlife, and what if the afterlife has an afterlife? (Emily)

GRIST MILL ROAD by CHRISTOPHER J. YATES: The follow-up novel by the author of Black Chalk, an NPR Best of the Year selection. Yates’s latest “Rashomon-style” literary thriller follows a group of friends up the Hudson, where they are involved in a terrible crime. “I Know What You Did Last Summer”-style, they reconvene years later, with dire consequences. The novel receives the coveted Tana Frenchendorsement: she calls it “darkly, intricately layered, full of pitfalls and switchbacks, smart and funny and moving and merciless.” (Lydia)

Literary Hub's Ultimate Best Books of 2017 List, by Emily Temple

It’s the end of the year, and everybody has an opinion. And of course, where there’s an opinion, there’s a listicle. The river of Best of 2017 lists can be exhausting this time of year, so as a public service, and because my math skills are always in need of a little exercise, I’ve created a streamlined master list of the books that the most people loved this year. Of course, I couldn’t include everything (like NPR’s enormous list of favorites). But I looked at the end-of-year roundups from 35 outlets and tracked a total of 520 discrete books in order to figure out the most critically popular books of the year. Does that mean they are the Best? You’ll have to decide for yourself, by reading them.

It’s interesting to compare this list of the “best” books to the most recommended books of fall (though it’s not a perfect match-up, of course, because many of these books came out in other seasons)—for instance, everyone was pretty sure they were going to like Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, and then they did! Success. Other books fell a little in the relative rankings. But all in all, it’s pretty satisfying to see how much people loved and recommended books by women and people of color this year.

For the record, the best-of lists consulted for this master list are from the following outlets: GQ, The New York Times, Vogue, Vulture, USA Today, Luna Luna, Publisher’s Weekly (Top 10), The Washington Post, The Chicago Review of Books (Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction), The New York Public Library, The LA Times (Fiction and Nonfiction), Financial Times (Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Nonfiction), Popsugar, Newsday, Library Journal, Elle, Amazon, Book Riot, EW, Cosmopolitan, The Economist, The Stranger, The Wall Street Journal, Bookpage, Shelf Awareness, NYLON (Fiction and Nonfiction), Entropy (Fiction and Nonfiction), Buzzfeed (Fiction), HuffPost (Fiction), Paste (Nonfiction and Novels), Esquire, The Boston Globe, TIME (Novels and Nonfiction), The Chicago Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail. NB: wherever publications had multiple lists, I went with the shorter one—so, for instance, I counted the NYT “Best Books” list but not their “Notable Books” list. This choice was made for my sanity.

(Some of these lists, I should say, bizarrely included books published in 2016—I caught what I could, but all mistakes in that area are the responsibility of the outlet in question.)

And now, without further ado…

The Best Books of 2017, per the power of the list:

On 22 lists
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

On 19 lists
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

On 14 lists
Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann

On 13 lists
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng

On 12 lists
Hunger, Roxane Gay
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

On 9 lists
We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang

On 8 lists
You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie

On 7 lists
The Power, Naomi Alderman
Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan
The Future is History, Masha Gessen
The Leavers, Lisa Ko
White Tears, Hari Kunzru
The Answers, Catherine Lacey
The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy
Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie
Borne, Jeff VanderMeer

On 6 lists
Stay With Me, Ayobami Adebayo
The Idiot, Elif Batuman
What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons
What Happened, Hillary Clinton
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby
The Changeling, Victor LaValle

On 5 lists
American War, Omar El Akkad
All Grown Up, Jami Attenberg
Grant, Ron Chernow
Sunshine State, Sarah Gerard
Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khong
The Burning Girl, Claire Messud
Made for Love, Alissa Nutting
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy B. Tyson
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

On 4 lists
What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui
Marlena, Julie Buntin
Ill Will, Dan Chaon
The Dark Dark: Stories, Samantha Hunt
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul
Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
New People, Danzy Senna
Bunk, Kevin Young

On 3 lists
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
So Much Blue, Percival Everett
Electric Arches, Eve L. Ewing
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris
World Without Mind, Franklin Foer
Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash
American Fire, Monica Hesse
The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mrs. Fletcher, Tom Perrotta
After the Eclipse, Sarah Perry
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney
The Golden House, Salman Rushdie
Autumn, Ali Smith
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch

On 2 lists
Salt Houses, Hala Alyan
Large Animals, Jess Arndt
The Golden Legend, Nadeem Aslam
The Destroyers, Christopher Bollen
The Heart’s Invisible Furies, John Boyne
The Vanity Fair Diaries, Tina Brown
Nomadland, Jessica Bruder
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose
Blind Spot, Teju Cole
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Patty Yumi Cottrell
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge
Ali, Jonathan Eig
Homo Deus, Yuval Harari
Compass, Mathias Enard, trans. Charlotte Mandell
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez, trans. Megan McDowell
Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck
Abandon Me, Melissa Febos
Locking Up Our Own, James Forman Jr.
This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel
Difficult Women, Roxane Gay
Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla
Janesville, Amy Goldstein
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova
Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan
Notes on a Foreign Country, Suzy Hansen
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, ed. Darryl Pinckney
The Grip of It, Jac Jemc
A Separation, Katie Kitamura
Autumn, Karl Ove Knausgaard
After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus
Since We Fell, Dennis Lehane
Bluebird, Bluebird, Attica Locke
Who Thought This Was a Good Idea, Alyssa Mastromonaco
Afterglow, Eileen Myles
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker
Calder, Jed Perl
The Lost City of the Monkey God, Douglas Preston
Ghost of the Innocent Man, Benjamin Rachlin
Imagine Wanting Only This, Kristen Radtke
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin, trans. Megan McDowell
Theft By Finding, David Sedaris
Improvement, Joan Silber
The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit
Anthony Powell, Hilary Spurling
My Heart Hemmed In, Marie NDiaye, trans. Jordan Stump
My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent
Frontier, Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant
Wait Till You See Me Dance, Deb Olin Unferth
Why Poetry, Matthew Zapruder

LIBROS RECOMENDADOS por Antonio Muñoz Molina: mis 12 libros imprescindibles

El escritor Antonio Muñoz Molina elige sus doce libros imprescindibles, entre los que se encuentran clásicos como Don Quijote y Moby Dick hasta obras más contemporáneas como Noches insomnes, de Elizabeth Hardwick. El autor de Plenilunio y Todo lo que era sólido, entre otros libros, comenta para Librotea estas doce obras*.

- Don Quijote de la Mancha, de Miguel de Cervantes: “Dos novelas muy distintas entre sí, escritas con más de 10 años de distancia, y las dos cómicas y experimentales, la primera atropellada, la segunda mucho más construida, las dos inagotables.”

- En busca del tiempo perdido, de Marcel Proust: “Junto a Don Quijote, creo que es la obra que he leído más veces, y que espero seguir leyendo unas cuantas más a lo largo de mi vida. Tiene algo que me gusta en todas las grandes novelas, su desorden enciclopédico: desde el amor y los celos a la ciencia y la música, no hay asunto del que no trate este libro en sus siete volúmenes.”

- Al faro, de Virginia Woolf: “Esta es una de las novelas mejor construidas y mejor escritas que existen. Su manejo del tiempo es de una sutileza insuperable. Su sección central sucede durante varios años en una casa en la que no hay nadie. Un prodigio.”

- Moby Dick, de Herman Melville: “Esta novela es una bomba que le estalló a su autor en el segundo o en el tercer capítulo. Empieza como una historia de aventuras en el mar y se convierte en una fantasmagoría. Tiene algo de locura bíblica que se aprecia mejor leyéndola en voz alta.”

- Demasiada felicidad, de Alice Munro: “El título de este libro de relatos es el del último de ellos, una novela corta más bien, en la que Munro consigue un prodigio: comprimir un novelón ruso en cincuenta páginas. Un viaje en tren a finales del siglo XIX que se convierte en el viaje de la vida a la muerte.”

- Fortunata y Jacinta, de Benito Pérez Galdós: “La otra novela suprema en español, además de Don Quijote; las vidas privadas y las relaciones de clase y de dominación sexual entremezcladas con el devenir de la historia política. Como en Don Quijote, hay humor y hay amargura.”

- Los papeles privados del Club Pickwick, de Charles Dickens: “La risa cervantina trasladada a Inglaterra. El despliegue glorioso, a los veintitantos años, del talento de Dickens. Una fiesta.”

- Noches insomnes, de Elizabeth Hardwick: “Es una novela y es una confesión y una divagación bellísima sobre los recuerdos y la vocación por la literatura, un juego de fragmentos, de flashes.”

- Lo que me queda por vivir, de Elvira Lindo: “Una novela escrita a tumba abierta sobre el aprendizaje de vivir en una intemperie sentimental absoluta, sobre la maternidad y la orfandad y la búsqueda del lugar que a uno le corresponde en el mundo.”

- La montaña mágica, de Thomas Mann: “La lectura de la novela acaba equivaliendo a los años de aprendizaje y retiro de los que trata. Sumergirse en ella y pasar al menos un mes dentro es como retirarse a un sanatorio en los Alpes a aprender sobre la vida, el deseo, la enfermedad, la muerte.”

- La educación sentimental, de Gustave Flaubert: “Una novela que discurre plana como un río, contando el tránsito de una vida de la ilusión al desengaño y de un país de la esperanza revolucionaria a la resignación y el tedio. Una de las novelas más agudas políticamente que conozco. Habla de un personaje tan corrupto que estaría dispuesto a pagar por venderse.”

- La vida breve, de Juan Carlos Onetti: “Un hombre cualquiera, en Buenos Aires, una noche, descubre las posibilidades alucinantes de su imaginación, que son las de la capacidad de fabular a partir de la experiencia inmediata. Es una novela que sucede como en un sueño.”

Publicado en Librotea

*Nota de LIBROTEA: Para la elección del título hemos considerado las dos partes de Don Quijote de La Mancha como un sólo libro, así como las 7 de En busca del tiempo perdido.

Feria Internacional del Libro de Lima 2017: libros más vendidos

Esta edición tuvo una participación récord de más de 500,000 personas que visitaron la feria. La FIL 2017 vendió más del 23% del total del año anterior, unos 18 millones de soles en libros.

Germán Coronado, representante de la Cámara Peruana del Libro, dio a conocer los títulos preferidos por los asistentes en las diferentes categorías.

Los libros más vendidos fueron:

Ficción/Novela
1. Dejarás la tierra, de Renato Cisneros.
2. La segunda amante del rey, de Alonso Cueto.
3. Más allá del invierno, de Isabel Allende.
4. Lobos solitarios, de Fernando Ampuero.
5. Escrito en el agua, de Paula Hawkins.

Crónica/Periodismo
1. No soy tu cholo, de Marco Avilés.
2. Pedro, de Mávila Huertas.
3. Mar de Copas, de Fortunata Barrios.
4. El caso García, de Pedro Cateriano.

Ensayo/Académico
1. La república imaginada, de Rolando Rojas.
2. Mecanismos de la posverdad, de Jackeline Fowks.
3. El juego de las apariencias. La alquimia de los mestizajes y las jerarquías sociales en la Lima del Siglo XIX, de Jesús Cosamalón Aguilar.

Poesía
1. Prueba de galera, de Rosella di Paolo.
2. Bodegón, de Enrique Verástegui.
3. El sol lila, de Luis Hernández.

Testimonio
1. Pablo Escobar In fraganti, Juan Pablo Escobar.
2. Volver a correr, de Carlos Serván.
3. Memorias de un soldado desconocido, 2da edición, de Lurgio Gavilán.
4. La madera del alma, de Gianmarco Zignago.

Infantil
1. Cuentos de buenas noches para niñas rebeldes, Elena Favilli y Francesca Cavallo.
2. Chimoc y Cabrita conocen los deportes, Hermanos Paz.

Autoayuda
1. Comer para vivir, Sara Abu-Sabbah.
2. Cómo aprendí a quererme, Emilia Drago.

Feria del Libro de Madrid 2017: Los 10 libros más buscados

1- "Patria", Fernando Aramburu (Tusquets).

El escritor de San Sebastián es uno de los grandes protagonistas de la Feria del Libro 2017 gracias a su novela "Patria", que ya ha conseguido vender 300.000 ejemplares y que le ha valido para recibir el premio de la Crítica 2016. Aramburu ha comenzado la Feria del Libro de Madrid con buen pie y ya ha dedicado su título a cientos de personas.

Resumen (La casa del libro): "El día en que ETA anuncia el abandono de las armas, Bittori se dirige al cementerio para contarle a la tumba de su marido el Txato, asesinado por los terroristas, que ha decidido volver a la casa donde vivieron. ¿Podrá convivir con quienes la acosaron antes y después del atentado que trastocó su vida y la de su familia? ¿Podrá saber quién fue el encapuchado que un día lluvioso mató a su marido, cuando volvía de su empresa de transportes? Por más que llegue a escondidas, la presencia de Bittori alterará la falsa tranquilidad del pueblo, sobre todo de su vecina Miren, amiga íntima en otro tiempo, y madre de Joxe Mari, un terrorista encarcelado y sospechoso de los peores temores de Bittori. ¿Qué pasó entre esas dos mujeres? ¿Qué ha envenenado la vida de sus hijos y sus maridos tan unidos en el pasado? Con sus desgarros disimulados y sus convicciones inquebrantables, con sus heridas y sus valentías, la historia incandescente de sus vidas antes y después del cráter que fue la muerte del Txato, nos habla de la imposibilidad de olvidar y de la necesidad de perdón en una comunidad rota por el fanatismo político".

2- "Todo esto te daré", Dolores Redondo (Planeta).

La escritora de San Sebastián también está llamada a ser una de las grandes triunfadoras de la Feria del Libro con su obra "Todo esto te daré", obra que le valió para ganar el Premio Planeta 2016.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "Una muerte inesperada. Un oscuro secreto familiar. La búsqueda de la verdad en el corazón de una tierra legendaria. En el escenario majestuoso de la Ribeira Sacra, Álvaro sufre un accidente que acabara con su vida. Cuando Manuel, su marido, llega a Galicia para reconocer el cadáver, descubre que la investigación sobre el caso se ha cerrado con demasiada rapidez. El rechazo de su poderosa familia política, los Muñiz de Dávila, le impulsa a huir pero le retiene el alegato contra la impunidad que Nogueira, un guardia civil jubilado, esgrime contra la familia de Álvaro, nobles mecidos en sus privilegios, y la sospecha de que esa no es la primera muerte de su entorno que se ha enmascarado como accidental. Lucas, un sacerdote amigo de la infancia de Álvaro, se une a Manuel y a Nogueira en la reconstrucción de la vida secreta de quien creían conocer bien. La inesperada amistad de estos tres hombres sin ninguna afinidad aparente ayuda a Manuel a navegar entre el amor por quien fue su marido y el tormento de haber vivido de espaldas a la realidad, blindado tras la quimera de su mundo de escritor. Empezara así la búsqueda de la verdad, en un lugar de fuertes creencias y arraigadas costumbres en el que la lógica nunca termina de atar todos los cabos".

3- "No soy un monstruo", Carme Chaparro (Espasa).

La periodista salmantina fue galardonada con el Premio Primavera de la Novela 2017 gracias a esta novela, su primera obra literaria.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "En solo treinta segundos tu vida puede convertirse en una pesadilla. Si hay algo peor que una pesadilla es que esa pesadilla se repita. Y entre nuestros peores sueños, los de todos, pocos producen más angustia que un niño desaparezca sin dejar rastro. Eso es precisamente lo que ocurre al principio de esta novela: en un centro comercial, en medio del bullicio de una tarde de compras, un depredador acecha, eligiendo la presa que está a punto de arrebatar. Esas pocas líneas, esos minutos de espera, serán los últimos instantes de paz para los protagonistas de una historia a la que los calificativos comunes, "trepidante", "imposible de soltar", "sorprendente", le quedan cortos, muy cortos. Porque lo que hace Carme Chaparro en No soy un monstruo, su primera novela, es llevar al límite a sus personajes y a sus lectores. Y ni ellos ni nosotros saldremos indemnes de esta prueba. Compruébenlo".

4- "Como fuego en el hielo", Luz Gabás (Planeta).

"Como fuego en el hielo" es la última novela de Luz Gabás, la novelista, filóloga y política de Monzón (Huesca) autora del éxito "Palmeras en la nieve", la primera novela que publicó en 2012 y que fue adaptada al cine con la colaboración de Mario Casas y Adriana Ugarte.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "El fatídico día en el que Attua tuvo que ocupar el lugar de su padre supo que su prometedor futuro se había truncado. Ahora debía regentar las termas que habían sido el sustento de su familia, en una tierra fronteriza a la que él nunca hubiera elegido regresar. Junto al suyo, también se frustro el deseo de Cristela, quien anhelaba una vida a su lado y, además, alejarse de su insoportable rutina en un entorno hostil. Un nuevo revés del destino pondrá a prueba el irrefrenable amor entre ellos; y así, entre malentendidos y obligaciones, decisiones y obsesiones, traiciones y lealtades, Luz Gabas teje una bella historia de amor, honor y superación. Los convulsos años de mediados del siglo XIX, entre guerras carlistas y revoluciones; la construcción de un sueño en las indomables montañas que separan Francia y España; y una historia de amor que traspasa todas las barreras".

5- "Lo que te diré cuando te vuelva a ver", Albert Espinosa (Grijalbo).

"Lo que te diré cuando te vuelva a ver" es la quinta novela del polifacético barcelonés Albert Espinosa.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "La nueva novela de Albert Espinosa, "Lo que te diré cuando te vuelva a ver", vuelve a introducirte en su particular mundo a través de un relato único, cargado de emoción y vida. No te dejará indiferente y te ayudará a combatir el miedo a tener miedos. "La verdadera felicidad consiste en dormir sin miedo y despertar sin angustia". Albert Espinosa presenta una narración en la que un padre y un hijo emprenden juntos una búsqueda desesperada y valiente. Una novela atrevida, que te atrapará y emocionará por su originalidad".

6- "El silencio de la ciudad blanca", Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (Planeta).

La escritora y diplomada en Óptica y Optometría irrumpió en el mundo literario en el año 2012 después de más de una década trabajando en el sector óptico y en la Universidad de Alicante. "El silencio de la ciudad blanca" es la primera parte de la trilogía de la Ciudad Blanca que ha conseguido vender más de 100.000 ejemplares.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "Una ciudad aterrorizada por el regreso de unos asesinatos rituales. Un experto en perfiles criminales que esconde una tragedia. Un thriller hipnótico cuyas claves descansan en unos misteriosos restos arqueológicos". Tasio Ortiz de Zárate, el brillante arqueólogo condenado por los extraños asesinatos que aterrorizaron la tranquila ciudad de Vitoria hace dos décadas, está a punto de salir de prisión en su primer permiso cuando los crímenes se reanudan de nuevo: en la emblemática Catedral Vieja de Vitoria, una pareja de veinte años aparece desnuda y muerta por picaduras de abeja en la garganta. Poco después, otra pareja de veinticinco años es asesinada en la Casa del Cordón, un conocido edificio medieval. El joven inspector Unai López de Ayala, alias Kraken, experto en perfiles criminales, está obsesionado con prevenir los crímenes antes de que ocurran, una tragedia personal aún fresca no le permite encarar el caso como uno más. Sus métodos poco ortodoxos enervan a su jefa, Alba, la subcomisaria con la que mantiene una ambigua relación marcada por los crímenes. El tiempo corre en su contra y la amenaza acecha en cualquier rincón de la ciudad. ¿Quién será el siguiente? Una novela negra absorbente que se mueve entre la mitología y las leyendas de Álava, la arqueología, los secretos de familia y la psicología criminal".

7- "Los ritos del agua", Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (Planeta).

Eva García Sáenz de Urturi publicó la segunda parte de la Trilogía de la Ciudad Blanca, "Los ritos del agua", el pasado 4 de abril.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "Ana Belén Liaño, la primera novia de Kraken, aparece asesinada. La mujer estaba embarazada y fue ejecutada según un ritual de hace 2600 años: quemada, colgada y sumergida en un caldero de la Edad del Bronce.1992. Unai y sus tres mejores amigos trabajan en la reconstrucción de un poblado cántabro. Allí conocen a una enigmática dibujante de cómics, a la que los cuatro consideran su primer amor.2016. Kraken debe detener a un asesino que imita los Ritos del Agua en lugares sagrados del País Vasco y Cantabria cuyas víctimas son personas que esperan un hijo. La subcomisaria Díaz de Salvatierra está embarazada, pero sobre la paternidad se cierne una duda de terribles consecuencias. Si Kraken es el padre, se convertirá en uno más de la lista de amenazados por los Ritos del Agua".

8- "El laberinto de los espíritus", Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Planeta).

El escritor barcelonés Carlos Ruiz Zafón concluye con "El laberinto de los espíritus" la saga del "Cementerio de los libros olvidados", un best-seller mundial que ha sido adaptado a 36 idiomas y ha vendido más de diez millones de ejemplares. "La sombra del viento" (2001) es la primera entrega y le siguieron "El juego del ángel" (2008) y "El prisionero del cielo" (2011). "El laberinto de los espíritus" es su cuarto y último libro y fue publicado el año pasado.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): "En la Barcelona de finales de los años 50, Daniel Sempere ya no es aquel niño que descubrió un libro que habría de cambiarle la vida entre los pasadizos del Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados. El misterio de la muerte de su madre Isabella ha abierto un abismo en su alma del que su esposa Bea y su fiel amigo Fermín intentan salvarle. Justo cuando Daniel cree que está a un paso de resolver el enigma, una conjura mucho más profunda y oscura de lo que nunca podría haber imaginado despliega su red desde las entrañas del Régimen. Es entonces cuando aparece Alicia Gris, un alma nacida de las sombras de la guerra, para conducirlos al corazón de las tinieblas y desvelar la historia secreta de la familia aunque a un terrible precio".

9- "La magia de ser Sofía", Elisabet Benavent (Suma de Letras).

"La magia de ser Sofía" es la primera parte de una bilogía escrita por Elisabet Benavent, Licenciada en Comunicación Audiovisual y nacida en Gandía en 1984 que ya ha publicado varias novelas muy exitosas.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): " Sofía tiene tres amores: su gata Holly, los libros y El café de Alejandría. Sofía trabaja allí como camarera y es feliz. No tiene pareja y tampoco la busca, aunque desearía encontrar la magia. Sofía experimenta un chispazo cuando él cruza por primera vez la puerta. Él aparece por casualidad guiado por el aroma de las partículas de café......o tal vez por el destino. Él se llama Héctor y está a punto de descubrir dónde reside la magia"

10- "Sabores de siempre", Karlos Arguiñano (Planeta).

"Sabores de siempre" es el último libro gastronómico del famoso cocinero guipuzcoano Karlos Arguiñano y fue publicado el año pasado.

Resumen (La Casa del Libro): " Sabores de siempre pretende ser un recetario de la memoria, un recorrido por los recuerdos y la nostalgia de los lectores. Y es que todos somos capaces de transportarnos en el tiempo gracias al aroma de aquel plato tan especial que preparaban nuestras abuelas cuando íbamos a visitarlas al pueblo. Evocar ese instante asociado a la felicidad más plena: ese es el poder de la gastronomía. Un viaje a nuestra infancia, pero también homenaje a la tradición gastronómica de nuestra tierra, transmitida con suma sabiduría de generación en generación hasta llegar a nuestros días. Un canto a la cocina popular, a veces humilde, otras festiva, sustentada siempre por la riqueza y la estacionalidad de los productos de cada denominación geográfica, lo que ha derivado también en decenas de recetas similares y a la vez diferentes, condicionadas por los productos de cada territorio. En definitiva, un alegato a favor de nuestras raíces y nuestros orígenes".

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2017

The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

Autumn, by Ali Smith (Fiction)

The extraordinary friendship of an elderly songwriter and the precocious child of his single-parent neighbor is at the heart of this novel that darts back and forth through the decades, from the 1960s to the era of Brexit. The first in a projected four-volume series, it’s a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be.
Pantheon Books. $24.95.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid (Fiction)

A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence. Hamid has written a novel that fuses the real with the surreal — perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet.
Riverhead Books. $26

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee (Fiction)

Lee’s stunning novel, her second, chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Exploring central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging, the book announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen.
Grand Central Publishing. $27.

The Power, by Naomi Alderman (Fiction)

Alderman imagines our present moment — our history, our wars, our politics — complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss. Provocatively, Alderman suggests that history’s horrors are inescapable — that there will always be abuses of power, that the arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice so much as inscribe a circle away from it. “Transfers of power, of course, are rarely smooth,” one character observes.
Little, Brown & Company. $26.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (Fiction)

In her follow-up to “Salvage the Bones,” Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like “rural poor,” “drug-dependent,” “products of the criminal justice system.” Instead Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination.
Scribner. $26.

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us, by Richard O. Prum (Nonfiction)

If a science book can be subversive and feminist and change the way we look at our own bodies — but also be mostly about birds — this is it. Prum, an ornithologist, mounts a defense of Darwin’s second, largely overlooked theory of sexual selection. Darwin believed that, in addition to evolving to adapt to the environment, some other force must be at work shaping the species: the aesthetic mating choices made largely by the females. Prum wants subjectivity and the desire for beauty to be part of our understanding of how evolution works. It’s a passionate plea that begins with birds and ends with humans and will help you finally understand, among other things, how in the world we have an animal like the peacock.
Doubleday. $30.

Grant, by Ron Chernow (Nonfiction)

Even those who think they are familiar with Ulysses S. Grant’s career will learn something from Chernow’s fascinating and comprehensive biography, especially about Grant’s often overlooked achievements as president. What is more, at a time of economic inequality reflecting the 19th century’s Gilded Age and a renewed threat from white-supremacy groups, Chernow reminds us that Grant’s courageous example is more valuable than ever, and in this sense, “Grant” is as much a mirror on our own time as a history lesson.
Penguin Press. $40.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. (Nonfiction)

A former public defender in Washington, Forman has written a masterly account of how a generation of black officials, beginning in the 1970s, wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation’s capital. What started out as an effort to assert the value of black lives turned into an embrace of tough-on-crime policies — with devastating consequences for the very communities those officials had promised to represent. Forman argues that dismantling the American system of mass incarceration will require a new understanding of justice, one that emphasizes accountability instead of vengeance.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser (Nonfiction)

Fraser’s biography of the author of “Little House on the Prairie” and other beloved books about her childhood during the era of westward migration captures the details of a life — and an improbable, iconic literary career — that has been expertly veiled by fiction. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, this book refreshes and revitalizes our understanding of Western American history, giving space to the stories of Native Americans displaced from the tribal lands by white settlers like the Ingalls family as well as to the travails of homesteaders, farmers and everyone else who rushed to the West to extract its often elusive riches. Ending with a savvy analysis of the 20th-century turn toward right-wing politics taken by Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Fraser offers a remarkably wide-angle view of how national myths are shaped.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.
$35.

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (Nonfiction)

In this affectionate and very funny memoir, Lockwood weaves the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with her own coming-of-age, and the crisis that later led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. She also brings to bear her gifts as a poet, mixing the sacred and profane in a voice that’s wonderfully grounded and authentic. This book proves Lockwood to be a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.
Riverhead Books. $27

The Guardian: Best fiction of 2017

One of the joys of the novel is its endless capacity for reinvention, and 2017 saw fiction writers trying out fresh approaches and new forms. The Man Booker winner was a debut novel from an author with 20 years of short stories under his belt: George Saunders’s magisterial Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury), in which the death and afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son is told through snippets of civil war memoir and a cacophony of squabbling ghosts, was a fantastically inventive exploration of loss, mourning and the power of empathy. There was an injection of the fantastic, too, in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Hamish Hamilton), which added the device of magical portals opening up across the globe to its spare, devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual’s place in the world.

Jon McGregor has always written about communities; in the acclaimed Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), he deepened his pursuit of a collective voice, encompassing the natural world as well as the human in a cyclical tale of the years going by in an ordinary English village wounded by a girl’s disappearance. Each of Nicola Barker’s books is a world unto itself; with H(a)ppy (William Heinemann), winner of the Goldsmiths prize, she pushed the novel towards objet d’art, using colour and madcap typography to conjure a visionary dystopia of surveillance and control in which creativity and individuality refuse to be constrained.

There were notable returns and some new directions from fiction’s biggest names: Colm Tóibín replayed Greek myth in House of Names (Viking); John Banville channelled Henry James in the Portrait of a Lady sequel Mrs Osmond (Viking); Salman Rushdie went back to realism in The Golden House (Jonathan Cape); and Alan Hollinghurst layered historical snapshots of gay life in The Sparsholt Affair (Picador), a beautifully written chronicle of art and love in a changing Britain.

Jennifer Egan followed up her zippy Pulitzer winner A Visit from the Goon Squad with a more conventional novel of American dreams, Manhattan Beach (Corsair); while Arundhati Roy’s second novel appeared a mere two decades after her first: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton) was a sprawling, kaleidoscopic fable about love and resistance in modern India. Roddy Doyle excelled himself with Smile (Jonathan Cape), a typically bittersweet novella about a middle-aged man’s memories of his schooldays which pulls the rug shockingly from under the reader’s feet. And in June we said goodbye to the prodigiously talented Helen Dunmore, who died shortly after the publication of her haunting last novel, Birdcage Walk (Windmill), set in an 18th-century Bristol where revolution is in the air.

Of the many classical reboots, the most interesting was Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury Circus), which contrasts the role of the modern state with timeless bonds of love and loyalty by replaying the Antigone myth through the story of two sisters and their jihadi brother. Hogarth Press’s project to novelise Shakespeare continued, with master stylist Edward St Aubyn recasting King Lear as the downfall of a media mogul in Dunbar. Debut novelist Preti Taneja set her fierce, freewheeling version, We That Are Young (Galley Beggar), in contemporary India, with fascinating results.

The trend for autofiction continued, with two scorching novels powered by personal history: Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Atlantic) brutally exposed the violence of an abusive marriage within the constraints of Indian society; and The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, translated by Michael Lucey (Harvill Secker), is a savage account of growing up poor, gay and victimised in rural France. Meanwhile, the intimate horrors of a toxic marriage – and toxic parents – were skewered in Gwendoline Riley’s pin-sharp First Love (Granta).

Two slim, terrifying volumes lingered in the mind: Fever Dream by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Oneworld), was a gloriously creepy fable taking in bodyswapping, maternal dread and the dangers of GM crops. In Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (Portobello), a traumatised young girl’s arrival in an orphanage is the trigger for an explosion of love, hate and repressed desire. Both are quickly read, never forgotten. Another gem in translation was Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo), which in the vein of WG Sebald knits together snippets of fiction, narrative and reflection to meditate on human anatomy and the meaning of travel: this is a delicate, ingenious book that is constantly making new connections.

If you’re after the juicier pleasures of a realist pageturner, pick up Amanda Craig’s canny portrait of the bitter divisions in a marriage and the UK: The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown) sees a privileged couple who feel too poor for London move to rural Dorset. There they discover how the other 90% live in an elegantly written expose of all the things the elite would rather not consider about poverty, inequality, food production and class, with a nailbiting mystery thrown in.

Debuts to celebrate included Yaa Gyasi’s ambitious, multi-generational saga of the effects of the slave trade, Homegoing (Penguin); Gabriel Tallent’s intense tale of abuse and self-determination in backwoods California, My Absolute Darling (4th Estate); and Sally Rooney’s witty anatomisation of modern attitudes in post-crash Dublin, Conversations With Friends (Faber). Former US soldier Brian Van Reet’s Spoils (Jonathan Cape) was a brilliantly written account of kidnap and conquest in the early stages of the Iraq war; for the Iraqi perspective, turn to Muhsin al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens, translated by Luke Leafgren (Maclehose), which follows a group of friends growing up under Saddam Hussein.

The year’s short stories tended to the dark and the disturbing: standout collections included Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero (Faber), elegant tales of sex, motherhood and transformation, and June Caldwell’s Room Little Darker (New Island), a supercharged gothic debut from an Irish writer to watch. Another debut, Eley Williams’s Attrib. And Other Stories (Influx), cornered the market in cerebral playfulness.

Finally, two novels that make fitting reading for the season. Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape), about an elderly married couple on a mini-break in Amsterdam, may put you off the festive sherry: its portrayal of the tightening vice of alcohol addiction is unparalleled. But its profound exploration of love, companionship, faith, work and our search for meaning in life made it a tender masterpiece, and one of the year’s essential reads.

Ali Smith’s Winter (Hamish Hamilton) is the second in her seasonal quartet, following the Booker-shortlisted Autumn, and once again tackles the biggest subjects with the lightest touch. A capacious, generous shapeshifter of a novel taking in Greenham Common and Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and global migration, it juxtaposes art with nature and protest with apathy, finding surprising alliances in a family riven by feuds. It’s a book with Christmas at its heart, in all its familiarity and estrangement: about time, and out of time, like the festival itself.