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Best new paperbacks:
The BookPage monthly feature for reading groups
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Month paperback releases offer good choices for reading groups
REVIEWS BY JULIE HALE
Grushin, who was born in Moscow, makes an impressive debut with this compelling tale of life in modern-day Russia. Anatoly Sukhanov is a talented avant-garde painter with a growing reputation when he marries Nina Malinin, the daughter of one of Russia's most famous artists. After their marriage, Sukhanov gives up his work and turns his hand to art criticism. Relinquishing his love of the avant-garde and taking on the editorship of Art of the World, an important cultural review, he turns his back on the creative life to enjoy newfound wealth and national recognition. This betrayal of beliefs catches up with Sukhanov a decade later, in 1985, when he is no longer writing, and Gorbachev's presence on the political scene is altering the course of daily life in Moscow. Matters come to a head when a man purporting to be Sukhanov's cousin drops in for an extended visit, and he starts to have dreams about his past life as a painter. Sukhanov also discovers that Nina has made her own difficult choices concerning love and work. Sukhanov's revelations about himself and his family come at a critical time in Russian history, when politics and society are changing at a rapid rate. Grushin handles these topics deftly, creating a wise yet humorous narrative that has been compared to the work of Nikolai Gogol and Vladimir Nabokov. A reading group guide is available at www.penguin.com.
By Olga Grushin Penguin $14, 368 pages ISBN 9780143038405
Johns' appealing and well-crafted debut novel is set during World War II. Walt Dunmore, a Canadian gunner, is flying a mission when his plane is hit over Newfoundland. Only Walt and his crewmate Alistair Clark survive when the plane crashes, but Alistair eventually succumbs to his injuries. Meanwhile, Walt's wife, Dottie, tries to cope with the difficulties of life during wartime. She's lonely for her husband, worried about the future and drawn to a local farmhand. When Walt comes home from the war, he tells Alistair's wife about the crash, and the experience binds the two families together. Along with Alistair's widow and her baby girl, Walt and his family move from rural Canada to Chicago in hopes of finding a better life. As the years pass, Walt's son falls in love with Alistair's daughter. The two of them come of age in an unsettled era marked by a different kind of war—the conflict in Vietnam—and both must make their own choices about relationships, politics and the future. As the characters mature, they're faced with secrets from the past that alter their perceptions of the world forever. Marked by well-paced action and complex characters, Johns' novel has all the ingredients of great literary fiction. A reading group guide is available online at www.bloomsburyusa.com.
By Rebecca Johns Bloomsbury $14.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781582345727
When Henry Every dies at the age of 15, he leaves a diary that spans five years, with entries composed on graph paper (2,600 pages, to be exact). This idiosyncratic record of his daily existence gives Henry's mother and father, Hannah and Harlan Every, new insight into the strange interior life of their son, who, like most teens, distanced himself from his parents. The pages of Henry's journal provide the basis of this ingenious debut novel from Shapiro, who has produced a quirky and innovative narrative about families, love and the difficulties of adolescence. The details concerning Henry's death—which was caused by drowning—are unclear, so his peculiar diary helps alleviate his parents' pain. Both Hannah and Harlan study the journal, which is filled with records of Henry's dreams, scraps of overheard conversations, and his amusing observations on life, hoping to find in it the son they never really bonded with in life. As Henry's hidden life unfolds, his parents make the painful discovery that they may have unwittingly been complicit in his unexpected death. Shapiro has a wonderful gift for detail, and his account of how one family copes with death is rendered in remarkable prose. A reading group guide is available online at www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
By Dana Adam Shapiro Mariner $12.95, 224 pages ISBN 9780618773404
Has your club recently read an excellent book that sparked good group discussion? If so, BookPage would like to hear about it. Contact us at reading@bookpage.com with a description of the book and the reasons for your recommendation. We'll pass the top choices along to our readers.
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