The Luminaries: Fiction Many of this summer’s and fall’s most anticipated fiction titles are reviewed in this issue. The galleys of some, however, weren’t available by press time; here are a few we’re eagerly awaiting: Dave Eggers’ Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? opens with two men, a kidnapper and the NASA astronaut he’s chained to a post, and is written entirely in dialogue. …Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is much shorter than 1Q84, his last blockbuster hit; and who else could get away with calling his main character “colorless” and still sell more than 1 million copies in a week in Japan? …Hilary Mantel has taken a break from her fictional life of Thomas Cromwell—to the dismay of her many fans—for a book of short stories with another controversial political figure in the title: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories. …Ian McEwan’s The Children Act explores a hot-button issue: parents who refuse medical treatment for their children because of their religious beliefs. …David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks returns to the peripatetic structure of his earlier novels; it follows a woman from 1984 to 2044 in locations ranging from Ireland to Baghdad, Switzerland and New York. …Lauren Beukes had a hit last summer with her timetraveling serial-killer novel, The Shining Girls; her new book, Broken Monsters, is about a series of freakish crimes set among the abandoned warehouses of Detroit. …Brian Morton’s fans have been waiting eight years for a new book; he returns on Sept. 23 with Florence Gordon, about a 75-year-old feminist icon and “complete pain in the neck” who’s cantankerously trying to write her memoirs and avoid dealing with her son and his family. —Laurie Muchnick
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makes the pragmatic choice and convinces Hunsdon the baby is his; he arranges her marriage to a complaisant courtier. Will’s anguish turns to hatred when he walks in on the heavily pregnant Aemilia being raped by the dissolute Henry Wriothesley and takes Wriothesley’s word that it’s consensual. Of course he would believe another man, bitterly concludes Aemilia, who throughout the narrative engages readers’ sympathy with her outrage over the way women are kept down and denied a voice. Ten years later, when desperation to cure her plague-stricken son drives Aemilia to practice black magic, it’s utterly appropriate that she summons the demon Lilith, biblical Adam’s rebellious first wife. (The rather lurid supernatural elements are acceptable in the context of the Elizabethan worldview O’Reilly ably recaptures.) In return for her help, Lilith commands Aemilia to write The Tragedie of Ladie Macbeth, a savage affirmation of women’s power that—you guessed it—Aemilia offers to Shakespeare’s partner Richard Burbage, who promptly turns it over to Will to be remade as Macbeth. It’s an insult even worse than the vindictive portrait of her in his sonnets, but Aemilia and Will still love each other, painfully and without hope. O’Reilly brings her star-crossed lovers together and drives them apart through plot twists that are, for once, credible outgrowths of the characters’ personalities and beliefs, finally giving them a tender, heartbreaking parting. First-rate historical fiction: marvelously atmospheric and emotionally engaging. (This review was first published in the 4/15/14 issue of Kirkus. BEA booth: 1738/9; ALA booth: 528. )
ALPHABET
Page, Kathy Biblioasis (304 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 14, 2014 978-1-927428-93-1 A moving novel about knowledge, self-awareness and the power of words, set in the purgatory of prison. This young man’s life demands our attention and refuses to let go. Simon Austen is serving life imprisonment for the murder of his girlfriend in a fit of uncontrollable rage. It’s Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s England, but he is lost in time, attending sessions with institutional psychiatrists who might be able to help him gain parole. He learns to read with the aid of a prison volunteer and writes letters for his fellow inmates to lawyers, mothers and lovers, considering it his job. He also writes his version of his life story, tattooing his body with the words others have called him in spite and hate: “ARROGANT,” “WEIRDO,” “BASTARD,” “COLD,” “MURDERER.” Then “COURAGEOUS,” inspired by Bernadette “Bernie” Nightingale, a counselor he fantasizes about and works with to enter an experimental program that may move his parole forward. Page writes fiercely, drawing a fine portrait of a man who lives daily, routinely, fragilely in an environment that can erupt in violence at any time. It does, in a powerful scene where Simon is gangbeaten, has bleach poured down his throat, and is sent to a
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