Fiction:
Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper
This novel is a homesick song of its own, written about a town on the coast in Canada on the verge of slipping away. Finn, a young boy who lives there with his sister and parents, until his sister runs away and his parents take turns leaving to work at the logging camps, will do anything he can to save his town, and his family. Finn’s parents, Martha and Aidan, have a beautiful love story of their own—met and fell in love, he a singing fisherman, she a mender of fishing nets, lured to the water by the sound of his voice.
It's a lovely story of a family, coming together, falling apart, and coming together again, laden with sweet sentimentality, populated with indelible characters you will love, and written in dreamy prose. I love it so much I just want to squeeze it. *squeezes book* *book squeezes back* *shoot is this book alive*
Florida by Lauren Groff
Such a stellar collection of stories, all centered around Florida—the place, the idea, the VIBE. Groff’s writing is just so freaking perfect, and a few of these stories left me absolutely motionless. (I think my favorite is “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” which is one of those incredible short stories that spans decades and yet is only 29 pages—a year is a paragraph and you feel that somehow you learned every pertinent detail you needed to know through her spare sentences and the ending is absolutely perfect.)
If you enjoy being totally stunned by magical writing, this is the book for you. (And when you’re done, read
Fates and Furies and
Arcadia and by all means read her New York Times “By the Book” interview in which she NAILS THE DAMN PATRIARCY.) She’s an absolute treasure. She’s our Alice Munro y’all.
Severance by Ling Ma
What would you do if you were the only person left in New York City? Why would you stay? That's what the group of survivors, headed for "the Facility," where they can shelter together and begin to rebuild after a catastrophic pandemic, are wondering about Candace Chen when they find her passed out in a Yellow Cab on a deserted highway in Pennsylvania. The story circles back to the beginning of the outbreak of Shen Fever, to Candace's experiences in China, and how she found herself alone on the 34th floor of an office building in Times Square, ransacking her coworkers' desks for face cream and Ramen.
It's funny, thoughtful, crazy suspenseful, and so well written. I couldn’t stop thinking about. Still haven’t. I loved it.
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
This is suuuuuuuch a beautiful book. Makkai captures the AIDS epidemic in Chicago just the way a good ally should—with compassion, outrage, honesty, and huge amounts of research and acknowledgements. It feels close to her heart. She has also written just a dynamite story of friendship, love, innocence, and betrayal among a group of friends at the center of the crisis. It’s also a story of art and the long shadow of memory. Oh and then there’s a whole other storyline too, about motherhood and forgiveness and not being able to forgive, and PARIS. It’s all weaved together seamlessly and beautifully, with lovely writing and indelible characters.
It’s a full story with a big cast of characters, one to curl up with. It’s heartbreaking, yet also joyful. I loved it.
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
You know that thing where it feels like a writer is trying to impress you with their word choice? I’m not just talking straight up thesaurus abuse, which is bad enough, but that thing some writers do where they just try to twirl together interesting sounding verbs and phrases and similes until the sentence doesn’t even hold water anymore? WELL R.O. Kwon is so dang good at writing that I marveled at her gorgeous word choices and sentences (linden trees in a cemetery “raised their limbs in hallelujah”) yet I didn’t lose the thread of the story in the marveling. You could underline every sentence in this book. It’s just perfect.
And that says nothing about the story, which is also a wonder! Religion, both losing it and finding it, love, the losing and finding, the shackles of family and the freedom of being on your own. It’s about faith and fear and passion. It’s everything.
Washington Black by Esi Eduygan
This is an incredible novel. It does SO much. Reading it, you will be entertained and delighted, have your heart broken, be pissed off and shamed anew at the damage we did to Black people through slavery, educated, and utterly swept away by the narration.
Our narrator, Washington Black, “Wash,” is born into slavery on a plantation in Barbados. He’s protected by Kit, a hard woman who has a soft spot for him. She promises that when they die, they’ll be returned to the homeland, Africa. But before that can happen, Wash is chosen as the manservant to Titch, the younger brother of their cruel master. Though Titch benefits from the slave system, he doesn’t agree with it. When Wash is about to be implicated in a crime, Titch takes him and they escape in his flying machine, the balloon they have been working on for months. Their journey takes them around the world, working on scientific discoveries and running from the slave catchers. It’s an adventure story, a coming of age novel, a slave narrative, all in one. The writing is excellent and the story will take you on a journey you won’t soon forget.
She Would be King by Wayetu Moore
This truly important novel tells the story of the making of the nation of Liberia, not from the point of view of American politicians but from the unique perspectives of a Vai witch who cannot die, a freed slave with incredible strength, and a young Jamaican man with the power to become invisible, who use their gifts to save their people. It is poetic and gorgeously written, crazy powerful, and a stark reminder of the injustice of slavery and the will to survive. The only challenge I found was wanting to read it both quickly, because of how compelling it was, and slowly, to savor the prose.
Comparisons can be made to Homegoing, for its epic sweep of history that spans the US and countries in Africa, and The Underground Railroad, for the its touch of magic realism, but She Would Be King is truly a singular work of brilliance.
Scribe by Alyson Hagy
This truly peculiar (in the best possible sense!) novel of a woman living in a... pre-industrial post-apocalyptic future? ...an alternative history past?...who knows? whose mysterious skill is writing letters for people, letters that somehow say the unsayable, is holed up alone in a farmhouse when a stranger appears. Her life, as they say, will never be the same. Can she trust this man? Does he deserve her help? Dare she let him in?
This novel is fascinating, unsettling, and mysterious, with one of the best endings I've read in ages.
Books published before 2018 that are staff picks at Water Street..though many also happen to be national/regional bestsellers. The bookseller(s) who recommend(s) it is in parentheses after the title.
