The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (Random House). This novel, the first by an author celebrated for her short fiction, follows a group of teen-agers who are determined to live normal lives amid intrusions of magic. Three classmates wake up to find that they have died; confused and annoyed, they make a deal with two mysterious beings, who allow them to return home in exchange for their participation in a series of trials. A supernatural power struggle ensues, but the book devotes most of its attention to the ordinary world, slowing the action to examine the relationships between its characters, most of whom are queer. Here, a magical quest is less absorbing than the act of texting a crush.
What Kingdom, by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago). In this striking début novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Waheed blasts 50 Cent and loves junk food; Marie lives a few floors above her mother; and the narrator, who remains nameless, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines—“benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles”—and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction, “inaccessible to any other.” Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
Rabbit Heart, by Kristine S. Ervin (Counterpoint). This memoir stretches across a quarter century to chart the investigation into the author’s mother’s murder, which occurred in 1986, after she was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. Ervin, who was eight at the time of the tragedy, follows the case with devastating rigor, shingling its developments with her memories of growing up without a mother. The adult Ervin, knowing that her mother was sexually brutalized, attempts to undo how that knowledge seems to have settled in her body—in the form of muscular dysfunction—but she also accepts the lasting nature of her grief: “Maybe I’ll always be the daughter, retracing her final footsteps to the car, seeing just how close I can get.”
On Giving Up, by Adam Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Like many of Phillips’s previous works, this roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss. Phillips enlivens these explorations with examples from literature and history: Kafka and Shakespeare appear, as does the Crow Nation, whose existence was radically altered by the decimation of the animals on which its people depended. Though occasionally meandering, Phillips’s agile treatment of familiar ideas often yields compelling analyses, as when he argues, in the titular essay, that our cultural prohibition on “giving up” compels us to “think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss.”
