cover image
LATEST ISSUE OF
Kirkus Reviews
Check out our interview with Rick Yancey, author of the wildly entertaining YA thriller The 5th Wave.
Kirkus Star
THE KIRKUS STAR
Awarded to Books of Exceptional Merit

BROWSE BOOK REVIEWS



New and Notable Fiction for June

Cover art for PARTITIONS
FICTION
Released: June 21, 2011
Kirkus Star PARTITIONS
by Amit Majmudar
"Written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight--a rueful masterpiece."
In his magnificent first novel, poet Majmudar (O°, O°, 2009) embodies the terrible days following the partition of India and Pakistan in the stories of four refugees from sectarian violence. Read full book review >
Cover art for AMERICAN MASCULINE
FICTION
Released: June 21, 2011
Kirkus Star AMERICAN MASCULINE
by Shann Ray
"Think Hemingway or Jim Harrison, and know that Ray's collection is the deserving winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize."
Ray's stories resonate hard and clear, very much word images reflecting the Montana setting of the collection. Read full book review >
Cover art for THE ABSENT SEA
FICTION
Released: June 17, 2011
Kirkus Star THE ABSENT SEA
by Carlos Franz, translated by Leland H. Chambers
"Dark, brilliant and disturbing. Let's hope this first U.S. publication for Chilean novelist Franz will be followed by many more."
What happened in a provincial town during the early days of the Pinochet regime. Read full book review >
Cover art for JAMRACH'S MENAGERIE
FICTION
Released: June 14, 2011
Kirkus Star JAMRACH'S MENAGERIE
by Carol Birch
"Jaffy's experience could well move the reader as profoundly as it changed the narrator."
A magical, literary novel puts a surreal spin on a coming-of-age seafaring saga. Read full book review >
Cover art for THE ASTRAL
FICTION
Released: June 14, 2011
Kirkus Star THE ASTRAL
by Kate Christensen
"A masterpiece of comedy and angst. Think Gulley Jimson of Joyce Cary's The Horses Mouth transported from 1930s London to present-day Brooklyn."
Christensen (Trouble, 2009, etc.) knows her way around aging characters. Having won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her lively septuagenarians in The Great Man (2007), she now creates a charmingly ribald bohemian poet flailing about in late middle age. Read full book review >
Cover art for THE SECRET HISTORY OF COSTAGUANA
FICTION
Released: June 9, 2011
Kirkus Star THE SECRET HISTORY OF COSTAGUANA
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
"To read this novel is to enter a Borgesian rabbit hole--it's a fiction that purports to tell the truth obscured by another fiction--yet its strangeness helps make it both brave and engaging."
An ambitious picaresque tale about civil war, love, propaganda and the Panama Canal, delivered with verve and wit. Read full book review >