WATER OVER STONES by Bernardo Atxaga; trans. by Margaret Jull Costa & Thomas Bunstead

WATER OVER STONES by Bernardo Atxaga; trans. by Margaret Jull Costa & Thomas Bunstead ............................ 4 THE 6:20 MAN by David Baldacci......................................................7 NATURAL HISTORY by Andrea Barrett ..............................................7 I WALK BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS by T.C. Boyle......................... 9 HAS ANYONE SEEN MY TOES? by Christopher Buckley ................10 IF I SURVIVE YOU by Jonathan Escoffery..........................................18 STORIES FROM THE TENANTS DOWNSTAIRS by Sidik Fofana....18 THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH by George Dawes Green.............22 DIDN’T NOBODY GIVE A SHIT WHAT HAPPENED TO CARLOTTA by James Hannaham............................................................................22 EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard ......................................................24 DARK MUSIC by David Lagercrantz; trans. by Ian Giles................24 THE BOOK OF GOOSE by Yiyun Li...................................................25 CARRIE SOTO IS BACK by Taylor Jenkins Reid............................... 29 THE VILLAGE IDIOT by Steve Stern...................................................30 AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS by Jincy Willett.....................32 MURDER BY THE BOOK Ed. by Martin Edwards............................34 THE ART OF PROPHECY by Wesley Chu...........................................37 HEARTBREAKER by Sarah MacLean...............................................40 THE HOOKUP PLAN by Farrah Rochon.............................................41

THE BOOK OF GOOSE Li, Yiyun Farrar, Straus and Giroux (368 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-374-60634-3

Angoe, Yasmin Thomas & Mercer (364 pp.) $17.99 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-6625-0007-7

A second round of action-packed, high-casualty intrigue for professional assassin Nena Knight. Happy families may be all alike, but the family of Noble Knight, who took Nena in after her birth father was killed, is something else. Noble plays a prominent role in the African Tribal Council; Nena herself, trained as a warrior, heads a Dispatch team of professional assassins targeting anyone who threatens the Council; and Noble’s birth daughter, Elin, is pregnant with the baby of Oliver Douglas, whom Nena killed in Her Name Is Knight (2021). Now new threats seem to have reached a boiling point. Not only has someone been embezzling from the Council; rumors that someone has infiltrated its ranks and passed information to one of its many enemies are confirmed when the planned assassination of Gen. Konate goes south, leaving most of Nena’s Dispatch team dead and Nena herself grieving and struggling to figure out who she can and can’t trust. After a mission from Ghana to Gabon to strengthen a crucial alliance leads to more explosive violence, Nena thinks she’s plumbed the depths of treachery, but she’s only tasted its first fruits. Angoe, who seems to draw inspiration from a combination of Black Panther and Black Widow, keeps the betrayals coming as allies closer and closer to Nena show their true colors through their attempts to bend the Council to their own nefarious ends. Although Nena’s surprised by every single one of these betrayals, savvy readers will wise up sooner than she does.

Atxaga, Bernardo Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa & Thomas Bunstead Graywolf (400 pp.) $18.00 paper | Aug. 16, 2022 978-1-64445-095-6

Deep slices of life from the Basque Country evoke the beauty and banality of the world.

Elías hasn’t spoken since returning from college to the village of Ugarte, spending his time carving a toy boat alongside local twins Luis and Martín. Bakery employees Donato and Eliseo serve in Franco’s army barracks, secretly sheltering a magpie while they await their discharge. A coal mine engineer named Antoine blames Eliseo for his dog’s death and suspects Martín of sabotaging his lab in the name of Maoism.These are just some details of the plot—somehow both expansive and intimate, straightforward and elliptical—described by Atxaga in languid, unadorned prose. Scenes have room to breathe and often conclude without fanfare; conversational dialogue, poetic imagery, and small gestures rather than propulsive conflict advance the story. Particular attention is paid to pedestrian scenic metadata such as the date, time of day, and weather. Atxaga helped translate his book from the original Basque to Spanish, and the crisp Spanish-to-English translation is courtesy of longtime Atxaga collaborators Jull Costa and Bunstead. The language teems with repetition; each character frequently returns to different topics of fixation: Antoine thinks his therapist resembles Raisa Gorbacheva; Luis hears the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in his head. The undramatic innocuousness of the story is eerie, as though anything could happen. So, what is the point? What are these sections—almost interconnected novellas—building toward? As Luis asks himself: “Was there anything significant about that coincidence? Who knows?” Atxaga inspires trust from the reader through his authorial command. There is indeed a method to the madness and an unexpected payoff that meaningfully reframes the entire book.

If there’s one thing sure to enthrall a lot of readers, it’s a book set in the literary world—books about writers, books about editors, books about bookstores, books about Jane Austen characters. Here are some new entries for your book-world shelf. Book Lovers by Emily Henry (Berkley, May 3): In Henry’s first novel for adults, Beach Read (2020), two novelists fall in love, while her second, People We Meet on Vacation (2021), features a travel writer. Her latest moves into the business side of publishing as Nora Stephens, a high-powered literary agent (is there any other kind?) tries to figure out her own happy-ever-after with Charlie Lastra, an editor who rejected her biggest client’s last book. According to our starred review, “Henry creates a warm, sparkling romance brimming with laugh-outloud banter, lovable characters, and tons of sexual tension.”

Jackie & Me by Louis Bayard (Algonquin, June 14): Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did have a link to the literary world as an editor at Doubleday for the last 19 years of her life, but Bayard is writing about an earlier period, when she was a young woman courted by a man with political ambitions and the need for an appropriate wife. The me of the title is Lem Billings, a real friend of the Kennedys who’s turned into a fictional observer of Jack and Jackie’s courtship. “The result is a meditation on the definitions, possibilities, and failures of friendship,” according to our starred review. “Romance with bite: the perfect escapism for today’s anxious times.”

Joan by Katherine J. Chen (Random House, July 5): Chen’s first novel, Mary B. (2018), reimagined Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the plain middle sister. Now Chen has approached a figure who’s more literary symbol than person: Joan of Arc. “Making her real requires imagination and empathy, and Chen brings both to the task of putting solid flesh on the charred bones of a legendary figure,” says our starred review. “The Joan we meet here is not a saint. She’s a savant, and her genius is for violence.…An elegant and engaging work of historical fiction.”

Voices in the Dead House by Norman Lock (Bellevue Literary Press, July 5): Every year since 2014, Lock has published a book in the series he calls the American Novels, delving into 19th-century U.S. history through the lives of real and imagined literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Huckleberry Finn (who’s projected forward to 2077). This latest installment focuses on Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott as they’re both working with wounded Civil War soldiers. “Through the writers’ proximity to the effects of war, Lock depicts both as grappling with their feelings on racial equality and the legacy of slavery in the United States,” according to our starred review. “A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.”

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens (Scribner, July 19): Stevens’ previous two books have combined literary analysis with memoir: First she traveled to the Falkland Islands on a fellowship and wrote Bleaker House (2017), about how the novel she was working on was turning out to be terrible, and then she wrote The Victorian and the Romantic (2018), which combined a study of Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell with a look at her own life and the parallels between them. Now she’s written a novel, and it’s also based on the life of a writer—this time, George Sand. The narrator is a ghost, a girl who’s been 14 years old for almost four centuries and who falls in love with Sand as the French writer is staying on Mallorca with her family. “An entrancing and singular exploration of a fascinating historical footnote and a queer life after death,” according to our starred review.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.