My Year of Reading: Best First Lines of 2016

In 2016, I read somewhere north of 100 books (the final tally is still to come). In those same twelve months, I bought, received in the mail, downloaded onto my Kindle, or was gifted nearly eight times that number of books. They passed through my hands like a slurry caught in never-ending water. With so many new books rushing past my eyes, it takes something bold and unique to catch my attention. Sure, I’m attracted to plot, character and sometimes by the reputation of the author, but it’s the language which really matters to me. A book must work overtime with all its muscle to make me add it to the ever-towering To-Be-Read stack (aka Mt. NeveRest). That’s where the first sentence comes in. The best opening lines are snakes rearing up from the grass, a fire-blaze of sunset, a jack-in-the-box clapping its hands, the tastiest forkful of the best wedding cake ever baked. Surprise me, puzzle me, scare me, warm me with light. Make it impossible for me to resist the second, third and fourth sentences. Open the door so I can step into the book.

Here are my favorite first sentences from books published in 2016, in no particular order. If you’re like me, they’ll make you want to eat the whole cake.

The clowns came to get him when it was time for the hanging.
Champion of the World
by Chad Dundas

This is not my beautiful life.
The Next
by Stephanie Gangi

Getting out of prison is like having a rotten tooth pulled from your mouth: it feels good to have it gone, but it’s hard not to keep touching at that hole.
Every Man a Menace
by Patrick Hoffman

On the day that he would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn alive in the sky above Broadway.
The Last Days of Night
by Graham Moore

The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.
Commonwealth
by Ann Patchett

Once, years ago, I left home looking for a grand adventure and spent five months staring at mud.
On Trails
by Robert Moor

With the tops of the trees around the house lost in fog, Michael and Nancy James prepared for the last party they would ever have, though they didn't know it at the time.
Stranger, Father, Beloved
by Taylor Larsen

I was born blue.
The Opposite of Everyone
by Joshilyn Jackson

When I found my husband at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to resuscitate him before I ever considered disposing of the body.
The Passenger
by Lisa Lutz

Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep.
Blackass
by A. Igoni Barrett

Every night, Frank played harmonica for the cats.
The Flood Girls
by Richard Fifield

You’re not allowed to read this—I’m not even really allowed to write it.
Enchanted Islands
by Allison Amend

The Civil War started in darkness.
City of Sedition
by John Strausbaugh

As True Bliss lay in her bed on the morning of the eve of her one hundredth birthday, the thought that circled her mind, in the applesauce eddy of her mind, the first chunk in the applesauce eddy that her mind could sink its teeth into was please don’t let this day be my last day on earth.
The Remnants
by Robert Hill

It is one of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive days you get in the north of England in February, the space between the land and sky a mere letter box of squeezed light, the sky itself unfathomably banal.
Shylock is My Name
by Howard Jacobson

I first met Marine Corporal Aaron Mankin in Fallujah in early 2005, just before he lost most of his face in the Iraq War.
The Mirror Test
by J. Kael Weston

In early January of 2011, forty-five hundred red-winged blackbirds fell dead from the Arkansas skies.
The Atomic Weight of Love
by Elizabeth J. Church

When I insisted on keeping the baby, Ned threw his hands into the air palms-forward. He looked like a mime climbing a wall—one of the few times I’ve ever seen him look clumsy.
Sweet Lamb of Heaven
by Lydia Millet

See them in their golden hour, a flood of girls high on the ecstasy of the final bell, tumbling onto the city bus, all gawky limbs and Wonderbra’d cleavage, chewed nails picking at eruptive zits, lips nibbling and eyes scrunching in a doomed attempt not to cry.
Girls on Fire
by Robin Wasserman

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.
Why We Came to the City
by Kristopher Jansma

I disappeared from my life in the time it takes to buy a bottle of Yoo-hoo and a package of pork rinds.
The Miracle on Monhegan Island
by Elizabeth Kelly

Only a lunatic would live on the Moon.
The Dark Side
by Anthony O’Neill

On the eve of her thirty-ninth birthday, on the bleakest day of the worst February in memory, Janie made what would turn out to be the pivotal decision of her life: she decided to take a vacation.
The Forgetting Time
by Sharon Guskin

Dear Mrs. Haven—
This morning, at 08:47 EST, I woke up to find myself excused from time.
The Lost Time Accidents
by John Wray

So here I am, upside down in a woman.
Nutshell
by Ian McEwan

This is the story of a ruthless killer, a scofflaw, a keeper of brothels and bordellos, a tax cheat and perpetrator of frauds, a convicted felon, and a mindless, blubbering invalid.
Capone: His Life, Legacy and Legend
by Dierdre Bair

Ted McKay was about to put a bullet through his brain when the doorbell rang. Insistently.
Kill the Next One
by Federico Axat

For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.
Another Brooklyn
by Jacqueline Woodson

The car was a late-model Oldsmobile, the interior dank and musty, and the driver bore the distinctly sweet, rotting smell of overripe bananas.
Angels of Detroit
by Christopher Hebert

Even before the man with rough hands brought the boy to the locked room, even then there was always already the albino ape sitting on the chair beside the nightstand, waiting for the man and the boy to come.
A Tree or a Person or a Wall
by Matt Bell

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.
Zero K
by Don DeLillo

Front Porch Books: June 2016 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources. Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books. In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss. Note: many of these books won’t be released for another 2-6 months; I’m here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books.

A Tree or a Person or a Wall
by Matt Bell
(Soho Press)

Let the bells ring! There’s a new Matt Bell book in town (or will be when the marvelously-titled A Tree or a Person or a Wall is released in September). I look forward to the release of new work by the author of Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods with all the fervor of the devout listening for cathedral bells on a Sunday morning calling them to worship. To stretch this metaphor to its end, let me just say this collection of short fiction is the answer to our prayers.

Jacket Copy:  A Tree or a Person or a Wall gives us Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and acute takes on the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

Opening Lines:  Even before the man with rough hands brought the boy to the locked room, even then there was always already the albino ape sitting on the chair beside the nightstand, waiting for the man and the boy to come.

Compartment No. 6
by Rosa Liksom
(Graywolf Press)

How about some chilly Russian literature for your summer reading? Rosa Liksom’s highly-acclaimed novel looks like it will be just the ticket. From the outside at least, Compartment No. 6 looks like it will marry the snowy vistas of Doctor Zhivago with Chekhovian intimacy on the relationship between two strangers in a train compartment. Liksom’s book, which is making its American debut in a translation by Lola Rogers, was previously published in 2011 in Finland and won the Finlandia Prize.

Jacket Copy:  In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights. There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn’t cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he’s brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where “everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts,” a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring Rosa Liksom’s incantatory Compartment No. 6 to its powerful conclusion.

Opening Lines:  Moscow hunkered down into a dry, frozen March evening, sheltering itself from the touch of an icy sun setting red. The girl boarded the last sleeping car at the tail end of the train, found her cabin—compartment number six—and took a deep breath. There were four bunks, the higher two folded against the wall above. There was a small table between the beds with a white tablecloth and a faded pink paper carnation in a plastic vase. The shelf at the head of the beds was full of large, clumsily tied parcels. She shoved the unprepossessing old suitcase that Zahar had given her into the metal storage space under the hard, narrow bunk and threw her small backpack on the bed. When the station bell rang for the first time she went to stand at the window in the passageway. She breathed in the smell of the train: iron, coal dust, smells left by dozens of cities and thousands of people. Travelers and the people with them pushed past her, lugging bags and packages. She touched the cold window and looked at the platform. This train would take her to villages of exiles, across the open and closed cities of Siberia to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator.
     When the station bell rang the second time she saw a muscular, cauliflower-eared man in a black working-man’s quilted jacket and a white ermine hat and with him a beautiful, dark-haired woman and her teenage son, keeping close to his mother. The woman and the boy said goodbye to the man and walked arm in arm back towards the station. The man stared at the ground, turned his back to the icy wind, pinched a Belamorka, lifted it to his lips and lit it, smoked greedily for a moment, stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and stood there, shivering. When the station bell rang for the third time, he jumped on the train. The girl watched him walk towards the back of the car with swinging steps and hoped he wasn’t coming to her cabin. She hoped in vain.

Blurbworthiness:  “This unlikely couple...accompany one another across the plains as if progressing through a film by Andrei Tarkovsky.”  (Svenska Dagbladet)

The Loved Ones
by Sonya Chung
(Relegation Books)

As a long-time admirer of Sonya Chung’s whip-smart editorial work at The Millions and Bloom, I was happy to see the front-porch arrival of her new novel, The Loved Ones. I have not had the chance to read beyond the first few pages, but I have the sneaking suspicion that The Loved Ones, due to hit bookstores in October, is bookstore-vigil, be-first-in-line, and call-in-sick-to-work worthy. Read on to see why you should put the novel at the top of your must-read list...

Jacket Copy:  In this masterful novel of inheritance and loss, Sonya Chung (Long for This World) proves herself a worthy heir to Marguerite Duras, Hwang Sun-won, and James Salter. Spanning generations and divergent cultures, The Loved Ones maps the intimate politics of unlikely attractions, illicit love, and costly reconciliations. Charles Lee, the young African American patriarch of a biracial family, seeks to remedy his fatherless childhood in Washington, DC, by making an honorable choice when his chance arrives. Years later in the mid-1980s, uneasy and stymied in his marriage to Alice, he finds a connection with Hannah Lee, the teenage Korean American caregiver whose parents’ transgressive flight from tradition and war has left them shrouded in a cloud of secrets and muted passion. A shocking and senseless death will test every familial bond and force all who are touched by the tragedy to reexamine who their loved ones truly are—the very meaning of the words. Haunting, elliptical, and powerful, The Loved Ones deconstructs the world we think we know and shows us the one we inhabit.

Opening Lines:  The boy was six, the girl nine. Their father, Charles Frederick Douglass Lee, was himself one of five children; each had looked after the next while Charles’s mother worked night shifts and his grandmother worked days at the same corner store owned by a cousin. He’d come up fine and didn’t believe in babysitters. It was his wife, Alice, who insisted the girl was not old enough to be left alone with the boy. “What if there’s an emergency,” Alice Lee said to Charles. She often made statements in the form of questions. She said “emergency” in a near whisper.

Blurbworthiness:  “Sonya Chung’s prose is elegant, sparse, and heartbreaking in a way that reminds one of Elena Ferrante or Clarice Lispector. In this novel of two very different but interconnected families both named Lee, she tells the story of love against the twin inheritances of shame and grief. This book is a complication of the immigrant narrative in a way that is long overdue and necessary. A gorgeous and important second novel.”  (Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us)

Half Wild
by Robin MacArthur
(Ecco)

After reading Jodi Paloni’s wonderful They Could Live With Themselves—short stories set in Vermont—I find myself jonesing for more literature about the Green Mountain State. Robin MacArthur’s Half Wild looks All Great. I can’t wait to start exploring the terrain populated by her characters. Reviewers have compared her style to Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—high praise indeed—so that seals the deal for me.

Jacket Copy:  A powerfully authentic new literary voice debuts with stories that carve out a distinctive vision of the wildness and beauty of rural Vermont. Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the hopes, dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul. In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric, rough-living mother. “Maggie in the Trees” explores the aftershocks of a man who surrenders to his passion for a wild, damaged woman—his longtime friend’s partner. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.” In striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters cleaved to the land that has defined them—men and women, young and old, whose lives are inextricably intertwined with one another and tied to the fierce and beautiful natural world that surrounds them.

Opening Lines:  “You want to jump in the creek?” my mother asks. It’s a Tuesday night in late July and we’re on the porch drinking Myers’s rum doused with lemonade. She’s wearing cut-off cargo pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt full of holes; her cracked toenails are the chartreuse of limes.
     “No,” I say, to which she snorts and throws her cigarette butt into the wet grass, where it hisses before losing its flame. Mist rises from the field. Baby grasshoppers pop. Clouds drift.
     I don’t want to go down to the creek with my mom. Nor do I want to be living here at sixteen in this deciduous/coniferous northeastern no-man’s-land of Vicksburg where we were both born, forty square miles of intersecting roads, intersecting streams, failing farms, and rocky ledge.
     Populated by ghosts and animals and lonely women. Frickin' heaven, my mom calls these woods.

Blurbworthiness:  “MacArthur writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods.”  (Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women)

Froelich's Ladder
by Jamie Duclos-Yourdon
(Forest Avenue Press)

I can say, without hesitation, that Froelich’s Ladder is the most unusual book to come across my desk this past month. Too few novels these days involve ladders (not to mention the world’s fourth-tallest ladder!) and there’s certainly a lack of Confederate Army assassins, general store magnates and “unfortunately-named” girls named Lotsee in our contemporary literature. There is, indeed, a lot to see in this novel set in the fog-shrouded Pacific Northwest.

Jacket Copy:  Froelich nurses a decades-old family grudge from his permanent perch atop a giant ladder in this nineteenth century madcap adventure novel. When he disappears suddenly, his nephew embarks on a rain-soaked adventure across the Pacific Northwest landscape to find him, accompanied by an ornery girl with a most unfortunate name. In their encounters with Confederate assassins, European expatriates, and a general store magnate, this fairytale twist on the American dream explores the conflicts between loyalty and ambition and our need for human connection, even at the highest rungs.

Opening Lines:  It was November 1851 when Harald and Froelich arrived in Oregon Country. Disembarking at Fort Astoria, they journeyed inland by foot, hiking over the Cascades in a gale that swept off the ocean like an enormous push broom.

Blurbworthiness:  “From the first page to the last, Froelich’s Ladder brims with color, intrigue, and verve. At once a fantastical, madcap adventure and a poignant meditation on independence and solitude, it’s the kind of book that captivates you quickly and whisks you high into the atmosphere. I was in thrall to the surreal Oregon landscape, populated by tycoons and grifters, cross-dressers and hungry clouds. This debut is clever, irreverent, and ultimately unforgettable.”  (Leslie Parry, author of Church of Marvels)

The Girl in Green
by Derek B. Miller
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Wars are never fully left behind on the battlefield, are they? They’re carried home like burrs in a soldier’s clothing. And they prick and scrape the skin for years and years and years. In Derek B. Miller’s new novel, a soldier and a journalist each witness a terrible attack during Operation Desert Storm and carry those burr-like images with them long after they return home....until another war comes along and they finally have to confront their feelings about what they saw. As an author of a novel about Operation Iraqi Freedom, I get a steady flood of war literature cascading across my desk each month. The Girl in Green has managed to rise above the tide—thanks to the tantalizing story and the promise of the opening lines on the first page—and I’ve put it near the top of my summer-reading pile.

Jacket Copy:  From the author of Norwegian by Night, The Girl in Green is a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before. In 1991, near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a midwestern American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus, or might be a genuine lunatic with a death wish—it’s hard to tell. Desert Storm is over, peace has been declared, but as they argue about whether it makes sense to cross the nearest border in search of an ice cream, they become embroiled in a horrific attack in which a young local girl in a green dress is killed as they are trying to protect her. The two men walk away into their respective lives. But something has cracked for them both. Twenty-two years later, in another place, in another war, they meet again and are offered an unlikely opportunity to redeem themselves when that same girl in green is found alive and in need of salvation. Or is she?

Opening Lines:  Arwood Hobbes was bored. Not regular bored. Not your casual, rainy-day, Cat in the Hat-style bored that arrives with the wet, leaving you with nothing to do. It wasn’t post-fun or pre-excitement bored, either. It was, somehow, different. It felt rare and deliberate, entire and complete, industrial and inescapable. It was the kind of bored that had you backstroking in the green mist of eternity wondering about the big questions without searching for answers. And it wasn’t in short supply, either, because it was being dispensed like candy on Halloween to Arwood and others like him at Checkpoint Zulu at the rim of the Euphrates Valley, in the heart of Iraq, by the world’s largest contractor of boredom: the United States Army.
     How long had he been bored? How long was he destined to be bored? Arwood couldn’t even muster the motivation to care as he melted over his machine gun under the hot, hot sun that was pressing down on the sandy sand around him without a raindrop in sight and no one offering to cheer him up.
     The M60 machine gun was the perfect height for leaning on. It was probably the perfect height for firing, too, but Arwood had no proof of that because he hadn’t fired the gun since qualifying on it, and there was nothing to aim at because everything was far away, apart from a camel; and while he did point the gun at the camel for a while, it ultimately seemed a mean thing to do, so he stopped. That was eons ago. Nothing fun like that had happened since. Even the camel had gone away.

Faithful
by Alice Hoffman
(Simon and Schuster)

I’ll round out this month’s list of Most-Highly-Anticipated Books with the happy news that Alice Hoffman has a new novel on the horizon. Faithful will arrive in bookstores in November. And legions of the faithful shouted, “Amen!”

Jacket Copy:  From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate. Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Opening Lines:  In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 110, on the side of the road that slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are candles set inside paper bags, surrounded by sand, and they burn past midnight. They shouldn’t last for that amount of time, but that’s part of the miracle. On the second anniversary of the accident, a gang of boys creep out their windows and gather at two in the morning to see if Helene’s mother, Diana Boyd, drives along the road replacing each melting pool of wax with a fresh candle. They’re hoping to reveal a con in process and dispel the myth of a miracle, but after keeping watch for a while the boys all flee. In the early morning hours, safe in their beds, they wonder how much of the world can never be understood or explained.

Front Porch Books: July 2015 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.  I should also note that, in nearly every case, I haven't had a chance to read these books.  I'm just as excited as you are to dive into these pages.

The Perfect Son
by Barbara Claypole White
(Lake Union Publishing)

Imperfect families are my bag and Barbara Claypole White seems to have perfectly tapped into that domestic dysfunction in her new novel. The Perfect Son is next up in my ebook reading queue, elbowing aside other books I’d been planning to read. Take that, Donna Tartt and Judy Blume!

Jacket Copy:  From a distance, Felix Fitzwilliam, the son of an old English family, is a good husband and father. But, obsessed with order and routine, he’s a prisoner to perfection. Disengaged from the emotional life of his North Carolina family, Felix has let his wife, Ella, deal with their special-needs son by herself. A talented jewelry designer turned full-time mother, Ella is the family rock…until her heart attack shatters their carefully structured existence. Now Harry, a gifted teen grappling with the chaos of Tourette’s, confronts a world outside his parents’ control, one that tests his desire for independence. As Harry searches for his future, and Ella adapts to the limits of her failing health, Felix struggles with his past and present roles. To prevent the family from being ripped apart, they must each bend with the inevitability of change and reinforce the ties that bind.

Opening Lines:  Passengers in the row behind muttered the Lord’s Prayer. Ella, however, had no plans to make her final peace with God or die in the clouds.

Blurbworthiness:  “With empathy and heartbreaking clarity, Barbara Claypole White explores a family on the precipice of collapse. With the unexamined past coloring their present, a father’s only hope to accept his son’s limitations and be strong for his ailing wife is in finding the resilience to face his own imperfections. The Perfect Son offers insight, compassion and hope.”  (Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage)

Kitchens of the Great Midwest
by J. Ryan Stradal
(Pamela Dorman Books)

I suppose it would be a lazy way out to call J. Ryan Stradal’s debut novel “Garrison Keillor meets Like Water For Chocolate”—lazy because every quirky-literary book set in Minnesota gets the Keillor comparison, and every “foodie” novel is likened to Laura Esquivel’s 1989 bestseller—but I think the Keillor-Esquivel treatment might be rather apt in this case. Kitchens of the Great Midwest looks like great fun, set in a place “where all the cooks are strong, all the stovetops are good-looking, and all the lutefisks are above average.”

Jacket Copy:  When Lars Thorvald’s wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine—and a dashing sommelier—he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He’s determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter—starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredient represents one part of Eva’s journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast that’s a testament to her spirit and resilience. Each chapter in J. Ryan Stradal’s startlingly original debut tells the story of a single dish and character, at once capturing the zeitgeist of the Midwest, the rise of foodie culture, and delving into the ways food creates community and a sense of identity. By turns quirky, hilarious, and vividly sensory, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is an unexpected mother-daughter story about the bittersweet nature of life—its missed opportunities and its joyful surprises. It marks the entry of a brilliant new talent.

Opening Lines:  Lars Thorvald loved two women. That was it, he thought in passing, while he sat on the cold concrete steps of his apartment building. Perhaps he would’ve loved more than two, but it just didn’t seem like things were going to work out like that.

Blurbworthiness:  “Tender, funny, and moving, J. Ryan Stradal’s debut novel made me crave my mother’s magic cookie bars...and every good tomato I’ve ever had the privilege of eating. Kitchens of the Great Midwest manages to be at once sincere yet sharply observed, thoughtful yet swiftly paced, and the lives of its fallible, realistic, and complicated characters mattered to me deeply. It’s a fantastic book.”  (Edan Lepucki, author of California)

Speak
by Louisa Hall
(Ecco)

I’m drawn to novels that push the envelope and this new one from Louisa Hall has all the makings of a damn fine pusher. Fans of Cloud Atlas, take note!

Jacket Copy:  A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence—illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding. In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive. A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend’s mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls. Each of these characters is attempting to communicate across gaps—to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human—shrinking rapidly with today’s technological advances—echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people. Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all five characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.

Blurbworthiness:  “Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn’t remind me of any other book I’ve ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human.”  (Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven)

Excommunicados
by Charles Haverty
(University of Iowa Press)

I can always count on the University of Iowa’s John Simmons Short Fiction Award to consistently deliver some of the best short story collections to my doorstep (see also: Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino, Dancing in the Movies by Robert Boswell, When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds, and Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes by Merrill Feitell, among many others). Charles Haverty’s Excommunicados looks like it will be another winner.  From the first line (see below) to the last (She smiles and speaks one horrible syllable. “Next?”), this is a collection I could fall in love with at the whisper of one horrible syllable.

Jacket Copy:  By turns haunting, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Charles Haverty’s debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. These twelve stories are populated with ex-nuns and Freedom Riders, Chaucer scholars and strippers, out-of-work comedy writers and presidents, navigating their way through bedrooms and emergency rooms, backyard burial parties and airplane crash sites, the Piazza San Marco and the post-apocalyptic suburbs of Boston. A sixteen-year-old boy unearths grisly evidence of his genteel grandfather’s racist past. At his sister’s booze-soaked destination wedding, a recovering alcoholic English professor is finagled into ghostwriting their unreliable father’s nuptial toast. A small town lawyer’s Edenic existence is jeopardized when his wife’s younger brother is arrested for a rash of local burglaries. In the wake of her daughter’s brush with disaster in the Haiti earthquake, a mother finds herself drawn down a dark neighborhood sidewalk toward what might or might not be a dead body. And in the title story—the first of three linked stories—a pious altar boy confronts the twin mysteries of sex and death through the auspices of a classmate’s divorced mother. There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original stories—secrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us.

Opening Lines:  The happiest moment of my father’s life was finding his name on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

Blurbworthiness:  “Charles Haverty drives right into the heart of the storm—storms of doubt, storms of anger, storms of perverse desire, storms of regret. Here are stories that ask enormous questions about faith and doubt, love and death, justice and forgiveness, questions that are always anchored to real human characters in a gorgeously rendered physical reality. I loved the pointillist precision of Haverty’s descriptions: ‘sudsy’ flowers cover caskets, telephone receivers smell like ‘cigarettes and Juicy Fruit,’ pink salt flies through red taillights. You might hear echoes of Jesus’ Son and Flannery O’Connor and Bruce Springsteen and the Book of Ecclesiastes, but these tales belong to Haverty. His scenes are charged with emotion and wonderfully, discomfitingly true to life, whether they unfold inside a Catholic church or a couple’s bedroom. Haverty blurs the sacred and the profane, with plenty of jokes in between. (A father admits to his son at a destination wedding: ‘I know I’m the last resort at this resort.’) Haverty does a beautiful job of revealing how the present moment is always haunted by past and future. In every one of his artful stories, you’ll hear ‘the ghost of another conversation bleeding through the wires.’” (Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia)

The Small Backs of Children
by Lidia Yuknavitch
(Harper)

Sometimes all you need is an impassioned Tweet from a trusted reader.  Lidia Yuknavitch’s new novel was already in my ever-growing To-Be-Read pile (aka Mt. NeverRest), but Michele Filgate’s holy-shit Tweet bumped it up to a spot near the summit. It also doesn’t hurt to have a bold and brilliant cover design to nudge me even closer.

Jacket Copy:  In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds—east and west, real and virtual—collide? A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

Opening Lines:  On a winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. She is six. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in—orphan of war, girl of nothingness.

Blurbworthiness:  “There are a handful of books that have changed the way I move through the world. The Small Backs of Children is one of them. Lidia Yuknavitch writes with sly, subversive, nervy, compassionate madness. She is one of the great American writers.” (Chelsea Cain, author of One Kick)

Honey from the Lion
by Matthew Neill Null
(Lookout Books)

At least on the surface, Matthew Neill Null’s debut novel bears some resemblance to my favorite historical novels: Serena by Ron Rash, The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux and Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent. I’m really looking forward to getting lost inside Null’s pages. Judging by the opening pages, I might get so deep into this book, I should carry a bag of breadcrumbs to mark my path so I can find my way back out.

Jacket Copy:  In this lyrical and suspenseful debut novel, a turn-of-the-century logging company decimates ten thousand acres of virgin forest in the West Virginia Alleghenies and transforms a brotherhood of timber wolves into revolutionaries. After fleeing his childhood farm in the wake of scandal, Cur Greathouse arrives at the Cheat River Paper & Pulp Company’s Blackpine camp, where an unlikely family of sawyers offers him new hope. But the work there is exacting and dangerous with men’s worth measured in ledger columns. Whispers of a union strike pass from bunk to bunk. Against the rasp of the misery whip and the crash of felled hemlock and red spruce, Cur encounters a cast of characters who will challenge his loyalties: a minister grasping after his dwindling congregation, a Syrian peddler who longs to put down his pack and open a store, a slighted Slovenian wife turned activist, and a trio of reckless land barons. Cur must accept or betray the call to lead a rebellion and finally reconcile a forbidden love.

Opening Lines:  Conflict begets commerce, and theirs was the American Civil War.

Blurbworthiness:  “This novel is a master performance. Industry, capital, religion, class, race, and unionization are all rendered through the fully realized loggers, vigilantes, industrialists, and preachers that Matthew Neill Null conjures so utterly and empathetically. You will be awed and emptied by this book, and the truth and humanity within it. Honey from the Lion isn’t just beautiful—it’s important. Read it now.”  (Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek)

Scrapper
by Matt Bell
(Soho Press)

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the decline and fall of Detroit (from autopsies to beautiful terrible ruins), but the one person I really want to hear from is Matt Bell. He follows up his previous novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, with what looks like will be a beautiful autopsy not only of a city but of its citizens as well. Of course, the announcement of a new Matt Bell novel on our shelves is always a great and wonderful thing. As Benjamin Percy notes: “Matt Bell does not write sentences—he writes spells.”

Jacket Copy:  Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again. Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, Its lost houses and its shuttered factories, its boxing gyms and storefront churches, anywhere hope lingers. With precise and powerful prose, it asks: What transgressions would we allow if we believed they would ensure the safety of the people we loved? What do we owe for our crimes, even those committed to protect our charges from harm?

Opening Lines:  See the body of the plant, one hundred years of patriots’ history, fifty years an American wreck. The remainder of a city within the city, a fortress of squared buildings a mile long and five blocks wide.

Blurbworthiness:  “Like the very best novels, Matt Bell’s dark and suspenseful Scrapper works on so many levels that it’s difficult to describe in just a few words, but what I can tell you is that it’s ultimately about love and death, and that people will still be reading it when all of America, not just Detroit, is crumbling under the weight of its mistakes.”  (Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time)

The Sweetheart Deal
by Polly Dugan
(Little, Brown)

My wife and I often talk about who will take our place when one of us dies. After much thought and a couple bottles of wine, we come up with an answer: no one. We agree I’ll spend my widowerhood shuffling, unshaven, down the sidewalks of Butte, Montana in my slippers, mumbling the lyrics to our favorite love songs; while Jean will stare vacantly at a TV screen which plays increasingly inane “reality” shows over the years. Neither of us will be completely happy, but we’ll get by, emotionally limping through the rest of our lives. In her debut novel, Polly Dugan suggests another option for happily-married couples: make your best friend (preferably a bachelor/bachelorette) sign a contract to be the one who’ll step in when you die. I’m sticking with my original slippers/shuffle/mumble plan, but I’m also very interested in reading Dugan’s bittersweet romance to learn how someone else might work out their life-after-death melancholy.

Jacket Copy:  Leo has long joked that, in the event of his death, he wants his best friend Garrett, a lifelong bachelor, to marry his wife, Audrey. One drunken night, he goes so far as to make Garrett promise to do so. Then, twelve years later, Leo, a veteran firefighter, dies in a skiing accident. As Audrey navigates her new role as widow and single parent, Garrett quits his job in Boston and buys a one-way ticket out west. Before long, Audrey's feelings for Garrett become more than platonic, and Garrett finds himself falling for Audrey, her boys, and their life together in Portland. When Audrey finds out about the drunken pact from years ago, though, the harmless promise that brought Garrett into her world becomes the obstacle to his remaining in it.

Opening Lines:  I know Garrett never thought I was serious when I told him, If I die, I need you to marry Audrey. Make my wife your bride—she’s meant to be a bride, not my widow. And I know she didn’t think I was either, but I’d never been more serious about a thing in my life.

Blurbworthiness:  “The Sweetheart Deal hits all of my favorite topics: loss, pain, friendship, betrayal—but ultimately love. It’s the most romantic story I’ve read in years.”  (Elin Hilderbrand, author of Beautiful Day)

All This Life
by Joshua Mohr
(Soft Skull Press)

I love books that take chances—novels reaching out with both hands to grab great heaping armloads of characters, narratives, and ideas. Starting with that key word in the title—“All”—Joshua Mohr’s new novel looks like it will “go big or go home.” Based on its first few pages (especially that terrific verbal rush of the first chapter’s first sentence), I think this one will be a bona fide winner. It’s going straight to the top of Mount NeveRest.

Jacket Copy: Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line. In land-locked Nevada, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he—or his online profiles—claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form. With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.

Opening Lines:  It’s another brittle day, all of them inching over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, their typical trek to cluttered desks, schlepping with their hangovers, their NPR, carpools and podcasts, prescription pills and nicotine patches, their high-def depressions, Lasik so they can see all their designer disaffections, lipstick smeared on bleached teeth, bags under their eyes or Botox time machines, bald spots or slick dye jobs, bellies wedged in pants or carved Pilates bodies, their urges to call in sick, their woulda coulda shouldas.

Blurbworthiness:  “Joshua Mohr is a rabble-rouser whose first four novels have earned him a near cultish following. Now, with All This Life, Mohr wades into the dark territory of cyber voyeurism, internet shaming, tweets, YouTube, and streaming anger. Trouble spreads like wildfire in this compelling novel, and with brutal honesty, and empathy for his diverse cast of characters, Mohr refuses to flinch.” (Tom Barbash, author of Stay Up With Me)