THE AVERAGE American reader gets through about 11 books a year. No one wants to waste their precious free time on a dud. So our critics have sorted through some of the best novels published so far this year and selected a few that are truly worth your time (but will not require too much of it: none is longer than 400 pages).
Beartooth. By Callan Wink. Spiegel & Grau; 256 pages; $27. Granta; £14.99
This taut, compelling novel explores the great outdoors—and a realm of moral uncertainty. Thad and Hazen, two brothers, make a living chopping down trees in the backwoods of Montana. One day a forbidding kilt-clad outsider known as “the Scot” approaches them with a lucrative but perilous offer involving an illegal venture in Yellowstone National Park. A ferociously gripping book.
The Boy from the Sea. By Garrett Carr. Knopf; 336 pages; $29. Picador; £16.99
In 1973 a baby is found in a barrel on the beach of an Irish village. A fisherman and his wife adopt the boy, but as he grows up his presence creates divisions in more than one family. Poignant and humane, this work expertly depicts a close-knit community, hardscrabble lives and sibling rivalries.
The Dream Hotel. By Laila Lalami. Pantheon; 336 pages; $29. Bloomsbury; £16.99
Channelling Joseph Heller, Franz Kafka and George Orwell, this novel imagines society transformed by technology and surveillance. Sara finds herself being “retained” in a prison-like setting, after the government analyses her dreams and warns that she could pose a threat to her husband. It has its faults, but this is a riveting tale of the risks of surrendering privacy for convenience.
Flesh. By David Szalay. Scribner; 368 pages; $28.99. Jonathan Cape; £18.99
A man’s life is dramatised in a few crucial stages, from a youthful sexual relationship with an older woman in Hungary to a stint as a multi-millionaire in Britain and then on to uncertainty after a personal tragedy. The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers a narrative rich in insight and pathos.
The South. By Tash Aw. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 288 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; 304 pages; £16.99
The first instalment in a planned quartet, this novel is an intimate and intense study of adolescence. It follows 16-year-old Jay as he and his family swap the city for the south of Malaysia to claim their inheritance, a run-down farm. Jay adapts to rural life and befriends an older and more outgoing teenager, who shows him the bright lights of the local town and awakens his sexual desire.
Theft. By Abdulrazak Gurnah. Riverhead; 304 pages; $30. Bloomsbury; 256 pages; £18.99
Three people from different walks of life come of age in Tanzania. Karim and Fauzia fall in love, but their marriage is no idyll. Badar, an uneducated village boy, grasps his opportunities—first as a house servant and later as a hotel worker—but faces prejudice. The author’s first novel since winning a Nobel prize in 2021 is a tightly focused, beautifully controlled examination of friendship and betrayal.
Twist. By Colum McCann. Random House; 256 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; £18.99
Anthony Fennell, a journalist in search of a story, travels to South Africa to accompany a crew that repairs cables at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He endures seasickness and tension with the ship’s chief of mission, John Conway, a man who has “many missing years”. When Conway later disappears, Fennell endeavours not just to find him but to find out who he really is. An exploration of hidden depths told in shimmering prose.
We Do Not Part. By Han Kang. Hogarth; 272 pages; $28. Hamish Hamilton; 384 pages; £18.99
The winner of the latest Nobel prize chronicles a bloody chapter in South Korean history. A writer travels from Seoul to Jeju island to care for her friend’s pet bird while she is in hospital. After battling a snowstorm, she arrives at her destination, where she learns the horrors of a failed uprising that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. A novel that is both disquieting and entrancing: stark eyewitness accounts of atrocities are juxtaposed with otherworldly imagery. ■
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