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Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is something rare: a jewel-like, introspective novel in which not all that much happens, yet worlds are revealed. Set in a sparsely populated abbey in rural Australia, the story unfolds through the diary-like ruminations of an unnamed woman who has come seeking spiritual retreat from personal turmoil. After separating from her husband, who has gone to England, this self-described atheist was drawn to the circumscribed religious life of a small community of nuns near the provincial town where she was a girl. This sudden proximity to her childhood feeds her deepest thoughts, reviving specific memories and recasting truths about her loving, nonconforming parents, who shaped her worldview and whose deaths left a hole in her heart. 

The first driving episode of this gentle novel is a plague of mice that infests the abbey. Depicted in all their relentless, squirming vehemence, the vermin are the consequence of a regional drought that brings home the inescapable environmental threat hovering over the wider world (the novel is also set during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, although Wood is careful not to make that the focal point of the story). The second event that rattles the otherwise isolated community is the discovery of the remains of a nun who disappeared in Thailand decades ago. The planned repatriation and burial of Sister Jenny’s bones triggers a third incident: the arrival of Helen Parry, a globe-trotting, celebrity activist nun whose presence is taxing for all, but most particularly upsetting for the narrator. As the second half of the novel plays out, the reason for this nettlesome friction, and the emotional hold Helen has over the narrator, deepens our understanding of her need for redemption.

Grief and forgiveness are undeniably the central tent poles propping up the novel, but Wood takes things further and deeper—wrestling with timeless human questions of faith (even among the faithless), mortality and kindness, parsing them with bare-bones clarity. With its absorbing and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential and living a life of intention.

With its absorbing and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential and living a life of intention.
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Girl gets hired for her dream job only to discover her boss is a nightmare—and unfairly hot. Sound familiar? But what if I told you that the dream job was working for a video game company, and that both the girl and the superhot boss in question are queer people of color? Non-white, non-straight, non-cisgendered protagonists are still the exception rather than the rule, both in romances and in the gaming industry, which is exactly why Tara Tai’s Single Player is a breath of fresh air. Because everyone deserves the chance to have a goofy, tumultuous, accident-prone rom-com of their very own.

It starts with Cat Li, who gave up a profitable but soul-sucking career and her family’s approval to chase her dream of working in the gaming industry. She’s beyond thrilled when she’s hired to write romance arcs for a hot new game overseen by her idol, Andi Zhang, a wunderkind writer and creative director who uses both she and they pronouns. But when Cat and Andi actually meet, sparks fly in the worst possible way. Their interactions are full of misunderstandings, insecurities and a surprising mutual ex-girlfriend, and some readers may become frustrated by their inability to communicate. But then Cat and Andi finally, truly start to connect.

While Single Player waves its nerd flag proudly—there were probably about a million references that sailed directly over my head—there’s a lot here for even the least gamer-savvy reader to enjoy. Cat and Andi face hurdles aplenty to reach success, both romantically and otherwise, but that just means that by the time they reach the end of their gameplay, they’ve more than earned their happy ending.

Single Player, Tara Tai’s extremely nerdy romance set at a video game company, is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

A refreshing take on the increasingly popular cookbook-memoir subgenre, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen: Half Recipes, Half Stories, All Latin American by Kiera Wright-Ruiz is a soul-searching journey that uses food as a navigating force. The daughter of an Ecuadorian man and Korean woman, Wright-Ruiz has dealt with the anxiety-provoking question “What are you?” her entire life. She notes that her food life isn’t the type you typically read about in cookbooks, where the author is taught recipes handed down through generations. Wright-Ruiz learned to cook from her parents, grandparents, foster parents and the bubbling cultures around her, and that’s how she has found her identity too. “This cookbook is a celebration of Latin American dishes and how the journey to embrace a culture isn’t always linear,” she writes. 

The result is a cookbook of (mostly) Latin American dishes emphasizing the Mexican-, Cuban- and Ecuadorian-inspired recipes from those who raised and influenced her, such as menestra de lentejas (a deliciously flavorful lentil stew from Ecuador), ropa vieja (slowly stewed shredded beef and bell peppers from Cuba) and champurrado (a chocolaty corn-based Mexican drink). She includes recipes that are funny and personal, such as “3 Salsas You Must Know How to Make Before You Die” and “My Perfect Cuban Breakfast.” An intro to each recipe explains and clarifies the ingredients, cultural context and impact of that particular dish on Wright-Ruiz’s life. All are interspersed with witty stories and personal reflections, like her love letter to plantains and the culinary prowess of her “Aunt TT the Kitchen God.” An informative ingredient section lists interesting facts about Latin American foods used in her recipes, such as hominy (soaked corn kernels processed through nixtamalization, which was invented by Indigenous Mesoamericans), naranjilla (a small orange fruit that was enjoyed by the Incas) and Tajin (a Mexican seasoning that’s “a little salty, a little citrusy, and a little smoky”). 

My (Half) Latinx Kitchen is richly imagined with fun, full-color illustrations by Zyan Méndez: Smiling plantains are suspended in outer space, and an amused woman with big hoop earrings lounges on an avocado slice in a pool of a stew. Coupled with enticing, full-bleed photos of the dishes and highly stylized spreads of ingredients, Wright-Ruiz’s cookbook is a pleasure to page through. 

Kiera Wright-Ruiz explores a host of Latin American cultures in her richly imagined cookbook-memoir, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen.
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On Memorial Day weekend in 2019, Geraldine Brooks received a life-changing phone call from a brusque hospital resident. Her husband of more than three decades, the writer Tony Horwitz, had died suddenly while on his book tour. In Memorial Days, Brooks describes the confusing and difficult weeks that followed: the rush from her home on Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C., the sleepless first night, her reaction to his public obituaries and the headlong rush into the endless details that suddenly needed her attention. She intersperses these vivid renderings of grief’s early days with the story of her subsequent retreat three years later to Flinders Island, a remote island near Tasmania (Brooks was born in Australia) where she sequestered herself to finally, at last, grieve.

Brooks, who is the author of 10 books, including 2005’s Pulitzer Prize-winning March, paraphrases the writer Jennifer Senior, whose essay “On Grief” compares survivors of loss to passengers on an airplane that crashes on a mountaintop. The passengers emerge injured and each must travel down the mountain alone. This is the story of Brooks’ own journey down. With her in this dramatic and solitary landscape are Tony’s journals and books in which he’d written marginal notes, including Joan Didion’s acclaimed memoir about grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, which Tony, who was a judge on the National Book Award committee that year, found “name dropping” and “padded.” (Nonetheless, the book won the honor.) Brooks, reading his comments in her own moment of grief, wishes he’d given Joan Didion a break. “She worked in the movies; her friends happened to be famous. She can’t help that.” There is both humor and sorrow in these pages, and Tony emerges as an interesting and complicated figure, someone who loved life and was deeply driven. Brooks worries that his commitment to his final book, Spying on the South, accelerated his demise.

Tony has no grave. Instead, following his wishes, his ashes were tucked inside a baseball mitt and buried in the field where he played weekly ballgames. Memorial Days, a title which at once pays homage to the date of Tony’s death and the duration and purpose of Brooks’ solitary retreat, is another place of grief and memory. In its spare and direct pages, Brooks honors the writer, father and husband that she loves, and she offers her own story as a companion for others who are walking grief’s lonely path.

 

Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days is a momentous, resonant companion for others who are walking grief’s lonely path.
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There are so many plot twists in Hannah Echlin’s Clever Little Thing that it’s impossible for a synopsis to truly do the story justice—this book will genuinely keep readers guessing, wondering what is a mother’s intuition and what could be perinatal psychosis.

Charlotte knows that her 8-year-old daughter Stella isn’t like other children. Stella can’t stand certain sounds, has sensory issues with tight-fitting or scratchy clothes, and goes into an apocalyptic tantrum Charlotte calls “freak-out mode” when she’s overstimulated. But Stella is also reading vastly above her grade level, and is curious about the world in a way that makes her precocious and unique.

But after Stella’s babysitter, Blanka, quits her job with a vague text message, things begin to change. Charlotte notices her daughter accepts change more readily and even begins to change physically, gaining weight rapidly. Alarmingly, Stella also seems to be regressing in her reading skills and her once avid curiosity is gone.

Teachers, counselors and even Charlotte’s husband, Pete, assure her that Stella is merely changing as she grows, and that she should be happy her daughter is turning into a more typical child. Charlotte isn’t so sure: To her, Stella is an entirely different child, almost like a changeling. As Stella continues to evolve, Charlotte begins to feel like she’s the only one who can see the truth about her daughter. However, she’s also in the midst of a high-risk pregnancy, a situation that others seem to think may be the true source of her anxiety.

The book is entirely narrated from Charlotte’s point of view, and her rising sense of panic and the “wrongness” about her daughter is acutely palpable. Still, Echlin keeps the reader removed enough that they’ll begin to wonder if the pressures of motherhood to a challenging child (Pete is a rather absent father) and a difficult pregnancy are clouding Charlotte’s judgment.

Clever Little Thing is an impressively twisty thriller, but it’s also a testament to a mother’s intuition and her love for her child exactly as she is, not as society wants her to be. Sometimes spooky, sometimes rage-inducing, Clever Little Thing concludes with a truly unexpected, impossible to predict ending.

Clever Little Thing is an impressively twisty thriller, but it’s also a testament to a mother’s intuition and love for her child.

You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip isn’t a volume of titillating tales. Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of novel God Spare the Girls (2021) interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture, and reflects on its role in her own life.

Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of the novel God Spare the Girls interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture and reflects on its role in her own life.

McKinney traces her gossip origin story back to her childhood in the evangelical Christian faith, which considers gossip “unequivocally, absolutely an affront against God, closer to murder or adultery than dancing.” Now, having left the church, she asserts, “It is certainly true that gossip is not helpful if your goal is to maintain the status quo and keep the peace, but those are two things Jesus Himself was very uninterested in doing.” Especially, she realized, when “the codifying of gossip as a sin could be used as a shield for misbehaving men in power to subjugate women in their congregations.”

The theme of gossip as liberation echoes throughout You Didn’t Hear This From Me, as does its ability to inform and, often, prevent harm, create community and help us better understand ourselves. McKinney adeptly leads readers through in-depth consideration of everything from the epic of Gilgamesh to Gossip Girl, saucy Doja Cat lyrics and Françoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso, analyzing gossip-adjacent phenomena like urban legends, conspiracy theories and whisper networks along the way.

McKinney’s fans are sure to be just as obsessed with You Didn’t Hear This From Me as they are with the “Normal Gossip” podcast she created and hosted for three years, wherein she and guests reveled in anonymous listener-submitted juicy stories. (Launched in 2022, the pod has 10 million listens and counting; in December 2024, McKinney handed the reins to a new host.) Her voice is smart and funny, and her arguments for considering gossip valuable and meaningful are compelling and clearly heartfelt. There’s no longer any shame in her game, either; she is “professionally nosy,” and beckons readers to join her in viewing gossip with a more appreciative eye—perhaps luxuriating in “the joy of snooping” while they’re at it.

The host of the “Normal Gossip” podcast, Kelsey McKinney, investigates gossip with an appreciative eye in her winning ode to snooping, You Didn’t Hear This From Me.
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Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.

Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.

It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.

We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued. 

For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.

In Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, narrator Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a friend and artistic collaborator before Inseon asks her to travel to her remote house on snowbound Jeju Island to save the life of her bird.

When Sigrid, a 20-year-old working at an unsatisfying job, is left in a coma following a suicide attempt, her older sister, Margit, finds Sigrid’s drafts of a suicide note, along with Sigrid’s emotionally fraught request that Margit write the final version. As Margit takes on this task, she delves into Sigrid’s journals and belongings, both to accurately capture her sister’s voice and to uncover the reasons behind her actions. What Margit discovers leads to a profound reckoning with their shared past and a renewal of the bond forged during their tumultuous childhood.

Emily Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is a poignant, layered exploration of how lack of belonging can erode the human spirit and drive one to the brink of despair. Through the perspective of each sister, Austin examines how they have diverged from their shared troubled upbringing, responding to their lives in vastly different ways. Sigrid struggles as a high school dropout stuck in a stifling small town, and dreams of the carefree existence of a fat rat eating hot dogs at a fair. Her pain is amplified by the loss of her best friend, Greta. Meanwhile, Margit has achieved her goal of leaving town to attend college, but she hasn’t escaped without some emotional scars of her own. 

While both Sigrid and Margit are deeply sympathetic characters, their narratives occasionally falter under the weight of too much repetition and overly didactic moments that make the novel’s themes feel oversimplified. However, Austin successfully delivers some dramatic revelations that illuminate the complexity of the characters and add tension to the plot. The depiction of Sigrid’s growing inability to cope with the small-town environment, and with the things she finds out about Greta’s past, effectively conveys her increasing sense of alienation.

We Could Be Rats is a heartfelt and stirring read for those interested in fiction that tackles themes of mental health, family relationships and reconnection.

Emily Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is a heartfelt and stirring read for those interested in fiction that tackles themes of mental health, family relationships and reconnection.
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Amanda Peters’ bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023), which received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is a story of significant tragedy, about Indigenous family separation in Nova Scotia. Similar abuses appear throughout Peters’ book of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which opens with a dedication “to all those who have shared their stories and planted the seed of imagination.” 

The 17 stories that follow are, for the most part, seeds. Many were practice exercises while Peters was working toward The Berry Pickers, and she had no intention of collecting them into a book. Because of their origins, some are little more than fables to be told around a fire, with guidance passed down from matriarchs, and simple axioms like town is a bad place, forest is good. Other stories explore plot elements, like how to deliver a shock of horror: a water cannon used by American government forces to assault the bodies of Standing Rock protesters; a girl’s tongue pierced with a steel pin at a Christian residential school; women jumping to their deaths or being murdered in the woods.

All of Peters’ first-person narrators speak similarly, as if each voice—no matter the age, era or gender—were the same storyteller. But despite this, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world. Read individually, a few stories stand on their own. “The Virgin and the Bear” is a stunning piece about a woman learning her grandmother’s tragic history while placing it within the context of other genocides. The titular story is tender, lyrical and lovely, with forest scenes so lush that you can feel the earth underfoot, and the sharp pain of memory as an older man recalls his late sister. And the Dakota Access Pipeline story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” is the freshest premise in the collection, following a young woman who heals her grief through resistance.

When it comes to contemporary Native fiction, the majority of readers—and likewise, the publishing industry—still focus on stories that whittle down the history and present life of American Indigenous people to colonization and trauma. As Terria Smith, editor of Heyday’s News From Native California, wrote in Publishers Weekly in 2023, “There is a real possibility that a lot of our own literature is unwittingly perpetuating the narrative that tribal people are tragic, but there is much more to us than this.” Peters’ best stories probe the possibility of venturing beyond those tropes.

In these 17 stories from Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world.
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Lately, a good deal of attention has been given to women who are in what’s called the “sandwich generation.” These are women who’ve taken on, or been given, the responsibility of caring for their elders even as they still have children to raise. In the case of Lila Kennedy, the protagonist of Jojo Moyes’ We All Live Here, this sandwich is a muffuletta. Everything is in it.

Lila, the British, 40ish writer of a bestselling self-help book, can’t be said to have a bad life, but when we meet her she’s having a series of bad days. Her stepfather, the overly fastidious but devoted Bill, has pretty much moved into her home. Her ex-husband, Dan, has moved out and is now shacking up with his girlfriend, Marja. Lila discovers by accident that Marja is pregnant, even though Dan said he didn’t want any more kids—at least not with Lila. The kids, by the way, are stroppy 16-year-old Celie and confident 8-year-old Violet. Truant, the dog, bites people. Lila has the feels for Jensen, Bill’s gardener. On top of all this, Lila is imposed on by Gene, her dad, a bombastic has-been American actor who abandoned her and her lovely, bubbly mother when Lila was a child. Her mother who died, hit by a bus. 

Moyes, the author of Me Before You, Someone Else’s Shoes and Paris for One, deeply understands the tribulations of women like Lila, who have a roof over their head, a garden out back that needs renovating and a bit of money even though their exes aren’t paying their fair share of child support. It’s easy to dismiss these women as privileged and clueless about what real hard times look like, but Moyes knows we all live in an entropic universe and things fall apart even in the cushiest life. It’s not a coincidence that nearly everyone in the family ends up at Violet’s school to watch a rather alternative production of Peter Pan. Growing up is not for the faint of heart, says this wise, funny and compassionate book.

Jojo Moyes, the author of We All Live Here, deeply understands the tribulations of women like Lila Kennedy, who have taken on the responsibility of caring for their elders even as they still have children to raise.
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Hope and laughter animate Betty Shamieh’s debut, Too Soon, which revolves around three generations impacted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a subject so weighty, the novel feels surprisingly effervescent thanks to the witty and resolute women who make up the three main characters—Zoya, Naya and the central protagonist, Arabella.

Stretching from 1948 to 2012, the story takes us from Jaffa to New York. We follow Zoya, a mother of nine, who is forced to abandon her seaside villa to start again as a refugee in Michigan; Naya, Zoya’s youngest daughter, who grows up in the changing Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s; and Arabella, Naya’s outspoken daughter, a Yale graduate who, at 35, has achieved a version of the American dream as a theater director in New York City. These three women, each shaped by their times, have more in common than they would like to admit.

Too Soon begins in New York in 2012 with Arabella, who has just been invited by the Royal Court Theatre of England to direct Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Arabella is lukewarm about the opportunity, but she decides to go for it after her grandmother Zoya sets her up with a boy named Aziz, who is volunteering as a medic on the Gaza border.

In her great-grandfather’s one-room house in Ramallah, Arabella confronts her family’s history and her place in it, while dating Aziz and directing her radical gender-swapped production of Hamlet. Dispersed among Arabella’s angsty chapters are chapters telling Zoya’s and Naya’s stories, recounting their memories of girlhood, lost love, marriage and motherhood. Together, they spin a resonating tale of hope’s potential to survive through terrible atrocity.

Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, and is a founder of The Semitic Root, an Arab and Jewish American theater collective. In her first novel, she has crafted a page-turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.

In her first novel, playwright Betty Shamieh has crafted a page turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
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A considerable wave of hype has grown around Victorian Psycho. Well before it hit bookstore shelves, Virginia Feito’s follow-up to her hit debut (Mrs. March) was set to be adapted into a Hollywood film starring Thomasin McKenzie and Margaret Qualley, cementing it as a horror story we’ll be discussing for quite some time.

And, happily, there’s good reason to keep talking about Victorian Psycho, well beyond a movie deal. Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Feito’s novel is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities, and one of 2025’s must-read genre releases.

The “psycho” of the title is Winnifred Notty, a young woman who’s taken a post as a governess in a stuffy, shadowy old manor house in Yorkshire, a setting full of all the requisite repression and strange fascinations of the Victorian era. As Winnifred narrates the story with a mixture of black-hearted wit and misanthropic glee, we learn that she has plenty of strange fascinations of her own, many of them springing from an unhappy childhood that taught her to survive and to make her own rules. Now, with Christmas fast approaching, Winnifred’s way of life is about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting Pounds family, and no one is safe.

Fittingly, Winnifred’s voice is the star of this particular show. Feito draws on her novel’s namesake, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, when it comes to portraying Winnifred’s inner turmoil, and blends that with the polished Victorian intricacy of writers like Henry James and Charles Dickens. We learn about the jealousy and rage inherent in Mrs. Pounds; the lecherous curiosity of Mr. Pounds; Winnifred’s young charges, Andrew and Drusilla, who are tiny monstrosities in their own right; and, of course, the darker side of the servants stationed throughout the labyrinthine home. Through Winnifred’s eyes, we see all of these elements quickly stacking together, a delicate house of cards primed not merely to tumble, but to burst into flame.

At just 200 pages, Victorian Psycho is lean, lithe and clear in its purpose and its violent delights. It’s a book you can easily finish in a single sitting, yet Feito’s prose is so dense with meaning and subtlety that you may just pick it right back up again. The novel whistles along at a breakneck pace but also immerses you deeply in everything, from the tapestries adorning the house’s walls to the joys of Victorian mummy unwrappings. You won’t want to leave Winnifred’s dark world.

Perfect for fans of CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw alike, Victorian Psycho is one of those books you won’t just read. You’ll get lost in it, and you’ll be delighted by what you find in its sardonic embrace.

Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Victorian Psycho is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities.

No matter how much chaos they wreak or how catastrophic the destruction they leave in their wake, dogs can wriggle their way out of a scolding simply by casting an innocent glance or woeful expression at their owners. The truth, as Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) reveals in his playful and poignant memoir, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth), is that owners love their canine companions no matter how incorrigible they are.

With affection and some exasperation, Zusak recalls the highlights and lowlights of life with Reuben, Archer and Frosty—the three boisterous rescue dogs who, one by one, swagger into his family’s life. The bulk of the book chronicles the misadventures of Reuben and Archer, “essentially a two-dog mafia” who terrorize the dog park with a playfulness under which lurks the animal instinct to kill. In the most harrowing moment, Reuben knocks Zusak down, breaking his knee. Reuben and Archer corner a possum in a local park and kill it; they kill the family cat; they bite the piano teacher. At the same time, the dogs are often perfect companions: They lavish affection on the Zusak children, Kitty and Noah, and slow their pace when the children are walking them. The family is overcome with misery and pain when the two dogs fall ill and die—Reuben in 2019, Archer in 2021. “There are terrible and poetic things in our lives,” writes Zusak, “and so often they’re one and the same.” Following the “dogless drought of 2021,” the family adopts another rescue dog, Frosty. Though sometimes “ADHD on legs,” Frosty slept at Zusak’s feet as he wrote this book.

Despite the many challenges Zusak and his family faced with their burdensome beasts, Zusak tenderly recalls that “on account of our many animals, we’ve lived a beautiful, brutal, awful, hilarious, escapadical life.” Telling these stories gives Zusak reason to meditate on his own nature. He reflects that Reuben and Archer, especially, “were dogs who somehow made me. . . . They were a mirror, I suspect, to my own hidden turmoils—my wilderness within.”

Though it sometimes overreaches for humor, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) will be enjoyed by readers of the best dog tales, such as The Art of Racing in the Rain, for its ability to evoke both the aggravation and deep love that dogs foster in those who build their lives around these creatures.

 

In Markus Zusak’s playful, poignant memoir, the Book Thief author recounts the misadventures of his canine companions.

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