| The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Roundup; Fiction: “The Year of the Runaways” by Sunjeev Sahota; “The Summer Before the War,” by Helen Simonson; Nonfiction: “The Books That Changed My Life” edited by Bethanne Patrick; | | | | | | | | April’s Book Club Selection: “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” | | “Evicted” immerses readers in the lives of families and individuals in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, people trapped in — or thriving off — the private rental market for the poorest, a brutal world where landlords have all the power and tenants feel all the pain, where nearly 1 in 8 renters in the city are compelled to move in a two-year span. We meet Arleen, trying to raise her boys, Jori and Jafaris, while cycling through so many homes and shelters and couches that it’s hard to keep count. Even when she finds a home, keeping it for long seems impossible when the rent consumes 88 percent of her $628 monthly welfare check. | | |
| | Carlos Lozada, Nonfiction book critic • Read the full review » |
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| | | The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Roundup | | Book World contributor Nancy Hightower reviews science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post and pulls out the top books every month. The latest roundup includes Helen Oyeyemi’s collection of short fiction, “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” Ken Liu’s long-anticipated “The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories,” and more. | | Read more » |
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| “The Year of the Runaways” by Sunjeev Sahota | | “The Year of the Runaways” is essentially “The Grapes of Wrath” for the 21st century: the Joads’ ordeal stretched halfway around the planet, from India to England. By following a handful of young men, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean. If you’re willing to have your vague impressions of the dispossessed brought into scarifying focus, read this novel. | | Read the review » |
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| “The Summer Before the War,” by Helen Simonson | | Anglophiles mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” will find solace in Helen Simonson’s “The Summer Before the War,” a novel that begins in pre-World War I England and deftly observes the effect of war on the staid Edwardian sensibilities regarding gender, money and class. | | Read the review » |
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| “The Books That Changed My Life” edited by Bethanne Patrick | | This cunning bit of cocktail-party fodder asks 100 notable persons, from actors to authors, to choose one book that changed their life: an irresistible exercise of the desert-island type. “The Books That Changed My Life,” edited by Bethanne Patrick, is an engaging exemplar of those gifty cheerleading-for-culture tomes that nonreaders buy for people they don’t know very well — brain candy for the harried, the uncommitted and the moderately curious. | | Read the review » |
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| “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” by Rob Spillman | | “All Tomorrow’s Parties” recounts two timelines of intense travel. In his childhood, he bounces between Berlin and the United States, the locales of his divorced parents, while trying to piece together the mysteries of identity — his own and his father’s. In the second, he and his wife, writer Elissa Schappell, tumble through the ruins and artistic potential of post-wall, pre-unification East Berlin. Each story is about the rollercoaster ride of attempting that hardest of artistic challenges: to experience something, to belong somewhere and to bring back an account like a trophy hunter. | | Read the review » |
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