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A LONELY MAN

Name: A LONELY MAN
Author: Chris Power
ISBN: 978-0-374-29844-9

by Chris Power ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

An entertaining literary thriller that traces intrigue from the writer’s mind to the latest headlines.

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Will a man’s tales of Russian oligarchs and murders be a blocked writer’s salvation or his doom?

It’s been two years since British writer Power’s well-received fiction debut (Mothers: Stories, 2019), and it’s been four years since the publication of the debut story collection of his lead character, Robert Prowe (hmm). But Robert is blocked now and well past deadline on his contracted first novel while Power, of course, has delivered his. Robert is living in Berlin with his wife and two daughters when he meets fellow Briton Patrick, a ghostwriter. Their acquaintance grows to something like friendship as Patrick reveals his ties to a Russian millionaire who hired him to write about his rags-to-riches life and how he fell afoul of Putin. The oligarch, who gives Patrick computer files damaging to the Russian ruler, dies mysteriously, and Patrick fears he will be targeted next by the Kremlin’s thugs. Robert is skeptical about all this but recognizes good material for the novel he needs to write and so encourages Patrick to keep talking. Then strange things start to happen: A window that’s always locked is found open, a friend commits suicide, and on and on. There are familiar questions raised here about how writers get and use material from real life, but what Power does cleverly is make them part of the story’s rising suspense, stoking the tension and disconnect between Robert and Patrick and even inserting some novel within the novel as the narrative intermittently shifts into Robert’s fictional rendering of Patrick’s adventures with the oligarch. Power’s understated style abets the tension, creating gaps and unanswered questions that pull the reader along, recalling Hermione Lee’s description of Penelope Fitzgerald’s prose as “plain, compact, and subtle,” leaving “much unsaid."

An entertaining literary thriller that traces intrigue from the writer’s mind to the latest headlines.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-29844-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | THRILLER | GENERAL FICTION

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HOME IS WHERE THE BODIES ARE

by Jeneva Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.

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Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.

Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.

Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9798212182843

Page Count: 270

Publisher: Blackstone

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE COME HERE
by Jeneva Rose

- BOOK REVIEW
ONE OF US IS DEAD
by Jeneva Rose

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REAL AMERICANS

by Rachel Khong ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.

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A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.

Khong’s follow-up to her sweet, slim debut—Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)—is again about parents and children but on a more ambitious scale, portraying three generations in what feel like three linked novellas, or somehow also like three connected gardens. The first begins in 1999 New York City, where Lily Chen stands next to a man at an office party who wins a big-screen TV in the raffle. He insists she take it; he is Matthew Maier, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and has all the TVs he needs. On their first date, they go to Paris after dinner, and as this section ends, they’ve had their first child. The second part of the book moves to 2021 on an island off the coast of Washington state. It’s narrated by Lily’s now-15-year-old son, Nick; his father is nowhere in sight, at least for now. The closing section unfolds in 2030 in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s told by Lily’s now elderly mother, May, with an extended flashback to her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and her first years in the U.S. As a budding scientist, May was fascinated by genetics. Of the lotus flowers she studied at university, she observes, “Raindrop-shaped buds held petals that crept closer, each day, to unfurling. As humans we were made of the same stuff, but their nucleotides were coded such that they grew round, green leaves instead of our human organs, our beating hearts.” This concern for how and why we turn out the way we do animates the book on every level, and along with science, social constructs like race and class play major roles. Every character is dear, and every one of them makes big mistakes, causing a ripple effect of anger and estrangement that we watch with dismay, and hope.

Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.