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THE VERSIONS OF US

Fans of the novel One Day and the movie Sliding Doors will want to pick up this debut.

The multiverse migrates out of science fiction for a fling with romance.

Eva Edelstein, biking to class in 1958 at Cambridge, runs over a rusty nail. A tall, blue-eyed student, Jim Taylor, offers to fix her tire. In version one, she accepts his help and eventually marries him. In version two, she is muddled and marries a less-likely beau. In version three, Eva marries the same lesser bloke but makes a course correction midbook. In bite-sized alternating chapters, Eva’s and Jim’s lives spin along, apart and intersecting, together and fraying, over the next 56 years. Newcomer Barnett labels each chapter installment as version one, two, or three. This triple-braided structure builds poignancy, as the same 30th birthday party or funeral, populated by the same characters, unspools into different outcomes. So Eva is “plumping cushions” while Jim’s lover Helena is “cleaning, tidying” in parallel but different stories as Jim paints a triptych he calls The Versions of Us. Children arrive, toddle, grow into sullen adolescence, and launch families of their own. Careers founder or flourish; infidelities are pursued. Pot is inhaled throughout the 1960s; tobacco is smoked to the end. In every era, cats are petted under their chins, and vats of alcohol swilled. Secondary characters—Eva’s best friend, Penelope; Jim’s art dealer, Stephen—are barely inhabited devices. Barnett, a British journalist writing her first novel about British journalist Eva trying to write her first novel, has a weakness for clichés and clunkers, such as “Do you see how beautiful we are?” Beauty is not enough, of course. Those readers particularly fond of the one-true-love trope will overlook what cloys. Others will long for the superior sentences and searing London Blitz scenes in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, a much better multiverse novel. Still, this debut work, like three snowballs running downhill, gathers the old-fashioned Newtonian momentum of a good yarn. We see the consequences of small choices echoing through the years.

Fans of the novel One Day and the movie Sliding Doors will want to pick up this debut.

Pub Date: May 3, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-544-63424-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016

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IT ENDS WITH US

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly.  One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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