A PASSAGE NORTH by Anuk Arudpragasam

THE BENNET WOMEN

AppiahKubi, Eden Montlake Romance (366 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jul. 20, 2021 978-1-5420-2917-9

Pride & Prejudice goes to college. At the prestigious Longbourn College in Massachusetts, best friends EJ, Jamie, and Tessa are members of Bennet House, the first female residence on campus. For them, being Bennet Women isn’t just about where they live, it’s an ethos adapted from the Bennet House Rules—act with maturity, support your sisters, embrace the adventure of Longbourn. And this year is shaping up to be more adventure-filled than most thanks to fellow student Lee Gregory, son of Hollywood royalty, and the arrival of his arrogant friend Will Pak, a recently disgraced actor. When Jamie finds her match in Lee, EJ agrees to put up with Will’s rudeness and insulting behavior for her sake. As they spend more time together, a tentative friendship begins to grow—along with Will’s attraction to EJ. That is, until Jordan Walker, an old enemy of Will’s, makes EJ’s acquaintance and begins wreaking havoc at Longbourn. Now Will and EJ will both have to put their pride aside to prevent the past from repeating itself. The cast of characters is diverse—EJ is Black, Jamie is a recently out trans woman, Tessa is Filipina, and Will has both Chinese and Korean heritage—and hearing EJ, Jamie, Tessa, and the other women who populate Longbourn discuss ambitious career goals, healthy sex lives, and more with unabashed frankness is refreshing. But this tale has been told (and retold) many times, and the plot doesn’t offer enough in the way of innovation or excitement to feel wholly necessary. The relationship between EJ and Will, this novel’s Elizabeth and Darcy, also lacks the same intense slow-burn spark that has made the original couple a pop-culture mainstay for centuries.

A fine but mostly forgettable addition to the large library of Austen-inspired novels.

A PASSAGE NORTH

Arudpragasam, Anuk Hogarth/Crown (304 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 13, 2021 978-0-593-23070-1

Arudpragasam, whose first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, made a critical splash in 2016, is back with an intelligent, quite often moving novel of meditation and aftermath. The plot of this book, conventionally speaking, would fit on a cocktail napkin: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man who lives in the southern city of Colombo and works for a nongovernmental organization there, receives a phone call; takes a long walk, during which he stops to smoke a few cigarettes; makes the titular train journey into the recently war-ravaged north, during which he recalls a love affair now over; attends a village funeral. That’s it. And yet the novel is charged throughout with tension and excitement. Part of that derives from Arudpragasam’s fierce intelligence and his total commitment to plumbing Krishan’s psyche, to following his thoughts patiently, relentlessly, with exquisite subtlety. Not many writers can successfully invite comparison to W.G. Sebald’s slow, inward, thoughtful—yet somehow pulse-pounding—novels, but Arudpragasam can and does. The rest of the novel’s tension comes from the powerfully evoked historical context. This isn’t just the aftermath of a love now over, or of a young man’s idealistic early 20s, or even of the life of a grandmother’s caretaker now dead in what appears to be an accidental fall down a well (the funeral to which Krishan is headed); beneath them all, agitating the water to which the book returns again and again, is the long, still-rippling wake of Sri Lanka’s bloody three-decade civil war, in which the grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, lost both her sons (and in which Krishan’s father was killed). The result, if such a thing be possible,

is a novel of philosophic suspense, one whose reader shivers in anticipation not of what will happen next but of where the next thought will lead.

A luminously intelligent, psychologically intricate novel— slow in always rewarding ways.

WE WERE NEVER HERE

Bartz, Andrea Ballantine (320 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 13, 2021 978-1-984820-46-4

A backpacking trip gone awry tests the relationship of two best friends. Emily and Kristen, now almost 30, have been close since college, and as neither are close with their families, they’re more like sisters than friends. Now it’s time for their yearly trip to somewhere adventurous and off the beaten path, trips that have become even more important since Kristen moved to Australia for work a few years ago. Last year’s trip was a disaster, though, ending when Kristen killed a man who’d been sexually assaulting Emily; now, on the last night of their trip to Chile, Emily finds Kristen standing over the body of the cute guy she’d brought back to their room, saying he’d been rough with her. Taken aback by the similarities to what had happened the year before, Emily helps her friend cover it up and heads back to Wisconsin, unsure how to deal with her newly reignited trauma. Just when she thinks she’s ready to move on with her new boyfriend and therapist, Kristen appears on her doorstep as if nothing has happened. Bartz’s latest thriller is full of twists and turns as Emily discovers new things about the friend she thought she knew so well. The dread creeps up slowly on both Emily and the reader as more and more comes to light and the truth slowly reveals itself. Up to the unexpected climax and beyond, Bartz’s writing will keep readers on their toes, questioning everything and looking for hidden meanings in every communication between Emily and Kristen. While the last 10 pages or so may not quite live up to those that precede it, the overall plot is exhilarating.