The Ray Carney saga is Colson Whitehead’s first series, and just like his readers, he feels passionately about the man at its center: a respectable, upwardly mobile furniture salesman by day, and fence of stolen goods by night. “I love him too. He’s been a great source of pleasure and inspiration,” says the author. But that affection doesn’t stop Whitehead from mercilessly putting Ray through the wringer.
Picking up four years after the close of Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto heightens the dangers and stakes for the prosperous Harlem merchant and former hustler, and Ray soon gets sucked back into life on the seamier side. After all, as Whitehead writes, “crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.”
In truth, the author may love Ray now, but the character was born out of a kind of hate—the distaste Whitehead felt for a ubiquitous trope in heist movies. “The character of the fence is always a travesty,” he says. “The team does all the work, and half the crew’s dead—they’re crawling or bloody, the cops are after them. And then some random guy you haven’t even seen before in the whole movie is like ‘10 cents on the dollar.’”
“I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?”
Whitehead was incensed by the patterns he observed on-screen, but that ire gave way to curiosity: “I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?” And from this interrogation came the driving force of the Ray Carney trilogy: “the psychology of the fence. . . . Having a front business and having your illegal stuff in the back provided the divided nature of Ray Carney.”
Although Whitehead kept his cards close to the vest, he knew almost from the start that he had a series on his hands. While the initial instinct was “to do a heist book and just have fun with that genre,” once started, the ideas kept flowing. There was just too much material, and he was having too much fun to stop at one book. “I was halfway through [Harlem Shuffle], and I was coming up with more capers that obviously would not fit,” he says.
Doing the math, he figured: six adventures, two books. But also, “if you do two, might as well do three. You know, I’m definitely a rule-of-three guy.” Still, he proceeded cautiously in terms of commitment. He didn’t want to be held to a third book, just in case he got bored—but that never happened. Now he’s deep in the writing of Ray’s third and presumably final set of adventures.
Along with the series being a trilogy, each individual book has a three-act structure. Harlem Shuffle tells of three separate misadventures for Ray at three pivotal moments during the 1960s, and this structure continues in Crook Manifesto, which evokes the ’70s down to the sight, feel and smell of a crumbling New York City. In the first book, Ray is in his 30s; second book, 40s; third book, 50s. Ray’s experiences with aging and all its attendant challenges are essential to the series, and it also means that initially, “his kids are babies; in the second book, they’re teenagers of varying degrees of annoyingness; and in the third book, they’ll be in college and out of the house.”
Three decades is, as Whitehead says, “a long stretch of time.” But in addition to the capers and misadventures that flow from the heist narrative, he found something compelling about the mystery surrounding the fence, and with great finesse he explores the dichotomy between Ray’s straight-and-narrow life and “the call of the street.” We witness Ray’s wrestling with his criminal nature—“bending toward it, embracing it, rejecting it,” Whitehead says—and by shifting our focus to this internal tug of war, we are invited to think beyond the usual markers of time and success.
In the four-year interregnum between Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Ray has kept his nose clean, built a prosperous business and bought both a commercial building for his store and a home for his family, moving uptown to the much storied if fraying Strivers’ Row. It’s a laudable, remarkable rise for the son of a failed career criminal, and yet it’s not enough.
In 1971, the year Crook Manifesto kicks off, Ray’s sabbatical from crime ends abruptly in an almost ironic way, considering the innocence of the inciting incident in comparison to the refuse he must wade through after. Ray calls on an old contact to get tickets to a sold-out (and history-making) Jackson 5 concert for his 15-year-old daughter—although as Whitehead points out, this fatherly duty is a cover to give in to an itch that’s been nagging at him for years.
The world around Ray is also evolving. In Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead allowed the pull of crucial—though not necessarily widely remembered—events in New York City history to guide him in shaping Ray’s story. In pursuit of key moments to “exploit,” he arrived upon the anti-police Harlem riots in 1943 and 1964. Whitehead decided that Invisible Man had portrayed the former in such an iconic, indelible manner that “I’ll let Ralph [Ellison] keep the 1940s one. I haven’t read a lot of stuff about the 1960s one. So it was open territory.”
The tension between the public and the police escalates to a palpable and deadly fever pitch in Crook Manifesto. The New York Police Department wages war against Black power activists, and a police corruption scandal widens, putting cops in the hot seat. And yet, in a way that matches the dualism of the novel’s leading man, Ray’s story also shows how normal life goes on alongside such events.
In keeping with that, the movie- and music-obsessed author takes the opportunity to throw his love of pop culture history into the mix, something that gives him great pleasure. “I was very taken with that idea that I could get my pop culture fixation and bring Ray along,” he says. So in addition to the Jackson 5 concert, which provides a soundtrack and momentum for Crook Manifesto’s first movement, the second section weaves in the rise of Blaxploitation cinema. It’s a heady and riveting mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead’s stature could so seamlessly blend.
Photo of Colson Whitehead by Chris Close.
As the Ray Carney series steps into the 1970s, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead continues to explore history through propulsive heist narratives that go far beyond crimes and cover-ups.
The Secret Hours is a slow burning, artfully told and explosive excavation of the messy era of post-Cold War espionage.
In the modern-day British countryside, a spry sexagenarian with combat skills goes on the run after thwarting an attempted abduction from his home in sleepy north Devon. The attack feels unreal and disorienting after years of quiet living undercover as a retired academic, a life of “long walks, cooking slow meals, losing himself in Dickens”—not taking down potential assassins.
About one day earlier in London, two MI5 civil servants are wrestling with a career-killing task: investigating whether the U.K.’s elite intelligence service has overreached and abused its authority in covert operations. But much like being exiled to Slough House, the purgatory for spies at the center of Herron’s award-winning series (and its acclaimed Apple TV+ adaptation, “Slow Horses”), to which The Secret Hours is a prequel, the so-called Monochrome inquiry is a dead end. A “screw-up start to finish is one of the kinder assessments.” Leading the halfhearted charge is Griselda Fleet, a middle-aged Black woman worn down by decades of marginalization. Her second-in-command is the frustrated, formerly high-flying Malcolm Kyle, who blames Griselda for what the commission has become.
It’s been two years of wading through pointless and irrelevant testimonies from low-level employees, and they’re nearing the end of their remit with nothing to show for it. A bombshell of a case file has mysteriously landed in their laps but, confoundingly, they’re told to shut it down. Instead, Griselda and Malcolm call the central party to testify.
That witness, code named Alison North, starts slow but then blows the doors off the sleepy inquiry, adding a crucial third track to an already complex plot. Like Dan Fesperman’s excellent Winter Work, North’s story within a story takes place in volatile, quasi-unified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the treacherous “Spook Zoo” that is early 1990s Berlin. As the past reshapes our perspective on the present, Herron plays with narrative form. Rather than separating timelines by chapter, the conversation and comments of 21st-century inquisitors Malcolm and Griselda intermingle with and interrupt the witness’ riveting retelling. North slowly unearths the truth behind a classified op gone tragically wrong, recasting three decades of U.K. intelligence history and its present-day players in a radical new light. Equally pithy and dark, Herron is as masterful in depicting the day-to-day drudgery of the spy-versus-spy game as he is its most incendiary events, all leading up to a spectacular climax. With shifting covers and code names in play, it’s fascinating to decipher how the operatives Slough House fans already know figure into this post-Cold War spy history, and it’s delightful to watch the pieces slowly click into place.
Sly and suspenseful, The Secret Hours is both a marvelous standalone novel and a stunning companion to Herron’s Slough House series.
Sly and suspenseful, The Secret Hours is both a marvelous standalone novel and a stunning companion to Mick Herron’s Slough House series.
Mick Herron, author of the phenomenally successful Slough House espionage novels, has been hailed as the best spy novelist of his generation. His bestselling, award-winning series following MI5 agents who have fallen from grace expanded its fan base recently with “Slow Horses,” the 2022 Apple TV+ adaptation starring Academy and BAFTA award-winners Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. Now, Herron will delight fans both old and new with his prequel to the series, The Secret Hours. Set in the post-Cold War era, Herron’s pithy and tense latest slowly reveals the cover-up of a classified op gone wrong, casting three decades of U.K. intelligence history in a radical new light.
How will the experience of reading The Secret Hours differ for new readers versus established fans of the series? It’s impossible to quantify the experience of new readers, but I hope they’ll find The Secret Hours a story that’s complete in itself, and not feel excluded from any larger framework. Regular readers will notice familiar elements, though; for example, the Regent’s Park setup, which—as in the Slough House novels—is the center of the U.K. intelligence service. And there are a few Easter eggs along the way . . .
Does The Secret Hours have its own distinctive tone? I hope so. Though set much in the same world as the Slough House novels, it features different characters and required a different narrative voice at times. It opens, for example, with a lengthy chase sequence, which is a bit more frantic than my usual openings. I wanted to drag the reader along—make them feel they’d been hijacked, almost.
“Genre writing is often dismissed as sub-literary, but only by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
What’s your typical practice in regard to research and verisimilitude for the series, and did you have to do anything different when taking on the Cold War era? I’m not a great fan of research, for the most part, and only resort to it when absolutely necessary. When writing the Slough House books, I’m usually writing about London in the present day, so I can achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude simply through observation. But part of The Secret Hours is set in post-reunification Berlin—the years immediately after the Cold War ended—and this required a little more work. I focused on finding out what the city would have looked and smelled like. Who would have been most visible on its streets. What people did for entertainment. That sort of thing.
You’ve been hailed as the John le Carré of your generation. How did you feel when you first heard that comparison, and did it affect how you wrote? Any comparison to le Carré is both hugely flattering and somewhat misapplied. Le Carré was unique—there’ll never be another. His work defined the Cold War era. My work will never match up to that. If the comparison has brought new readers to my books, it’s done me a favor, but I’ve never tried to live up to it in the sense of trying to write more like him. That would be doomed to failure.
What first piqued your interest in the world of espionage? Were you an avid spy novel fan as a young reader? I read le Carré, of course, and also Deighton, and also—in many ways, more importantly—about a million other thrillers I no longer remember, of hugely varying quality. Quantity matters more at that stage. Reading everything you can get your hands on helps you develop your own intuition about storytelling: what works, what doesn’t, what’s new, what’s been done a hundred times. The spy novel, though, wasn’t a particular interest; just one among many. I liked most stories—I was a total addict. Still am.
Unlike the high-flying protagonists of many other espionage series, the inhabitants of Slough House are all outcasts in some way. What made you want to center spooks in professional purgatory? It’s largely because I wanted to write about failure, which I find intrinsically more interesting than success. More relatable, too. Few of us know what it’s like to be a hero, or, say, freefall from a helicopter. But we’ve all had squabbles in the workplace.
Having studied English literature at Oxford, you have a deep and varied literary background. Who do you think of as important authorial influences? Do they cross genre boundaries? There are dozens, hundreds, of writers I admire, but it’s not easy to say who I’m influenced by. They’re not necessarily overlapping categories anyway: There’s no living thriller writer I admire more than Martin Cruz Smith, but I don’t try to write like him and have never noticed myself doing so. A writer’s voice generally develops piecemeal, and by the time it’s formed, there’s no telling where its origins lie.
Thinking about it, I’ve probably been consciously influenced more by poets than by thriller writers. Not so much individual writers (though a keen-eyed reader might spot borrowed images, or even whole lines, from various poets on pages I’ve written) as the control that poetry requires: the weighing of individual words, the balancing of sentences with each other. All the things that go towards making writing seem natural. Genre writing is often dismissed as sub-literary, but only by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
The Slough House series was recently translated to the screen via the spectacular “Slow Horses” TV show. What was your role in that development process and how did the team for “Slow Horses” come together? Thank you for that “spectacular”! I have a consultant’s role on the show and spend time in the writers room, taking part in the discussions around adapting the plots and storylines so that they meet the demands of the new medium. The team itself was put together by the people, now my friends, who first approached me about the show: Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta and Gail Mutrux. I’m in their debt.
Were there ground rules or nonnegotiable elements that you had in mind or stipulated in the deal for “Slow Horses”? I’m pretty sure they’re not allowed to kill or maim any of the characters without my express permission.
What are you reading now? Like many people, I did a lot of re-reading—comfort reading—during the pandemic, and for me, the habit has endured. One of my go-to writers is Robert Goddard, many of whose works I’ve re-devoured these last few years. He’s a fabulous storyteller, consistently surprising without ever resorting to cheap trickery. His latest is out soon, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m currently re-reading Out of the Sun.
Photo of Mick Herron by Jo Howard.
In The Secret Hours, the author reveals the secret backstory of Slough House, his series following MI5 agents who have fallen from grace.
Hugo Contreras is a babaláwo (a practitioner of the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria) who is drowning in debt, both spiritual and material. Though he’s attached to the premier Cuban botanica in Miami, Hugo has no real faith and no belief in himself. Guilt-ridden dreams of exposure as a fraud haunt his nights, and collection calls hound him by day.
But Hugo’s gifts are real: He can see secrets and sometimes the future. So when his archnemesis Alexi Ramirez—the attorney turned debt collector who has tormented Hugo night and day throughout his wife’s sickness and after her death—finds his new home plagued by malevolent spirits, he turns to Hugo for help. The deal Alexi offers is almost irresistible: Get rid of the spirits in his suburban mansion, and he’ll wipe out everything Hugo owes. No more stalking from debt collectors; no more scraping by after exorbitant monthly payments that never make a dent in the principal. Though Hugo is loath to accept a deal with a man he considers the devil himself, his boss Lourdes convinces him to take what looks like a win-win opportunity to absolve him and Alexi both.
Of course, nothing is ever so simple. Even after accepting Alexi’s offer, Hugo dreams of exacting some petty humiliation while completing the task. Grappling with long-buried ghosts that have nothing to do with Alexi’s extortionate loans and reeling with guilt about his beloved wife Meli’s last days, Hugo is frequently overcome with anger. Author Raul Palma excels at reflecting Hugo’s excruciating emotional states through flashbacks to Meli’s illness and moments of body horror. In one instance, when Hugo feels vulnerable, “it remind[s] him of the way his indebtedness would seize his wrist and turn over his forearm, exposing the network of veins and capillaries.”
A Haunting In Hialeah Gardens ingeniously uses metaphor and horror to explore the many dimensions of debt, including those that have precious little to do with money. “All devils dabbled in the business of debt,” Palma writes. In this brilliantly constructed nightmare that contains a surprising amount of humor, sometimes the lienholder is a bottom-feeding lawyer; at other times it’s a mountain-dwelling spirit who steals children’s souls. Palma’s spectacularly chilling and original debut novel is as fresh and inventive as the devil is inescapable.
In Raul Palma’s brilliantly constructed nightmare, the prose is as consistently fresh and inventive as the devil is inescapable.
The prodigiously gifted Alexis Hall spins pathos, sex and humor into frothy yet sensitive paeans to love. His ambitious new novel, Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble, demonstrates the magnitude of his talents.
The second Winner Bakes All romance after 2021’s Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Paris is a bittersweet play on the opposites-attract trope. The titular character, a baker with devastating anxiety and self-doubt in spite of his beauty, talent and privilege, falls for Tariq Hassan, a charismatic young Muslim with ambition and confidence to spare. Paris and Tariq meet as competitors on “Bake Expectations,” a famous television cooking competition show. (If you’re thinking “The Great British Baking Show,” you’re on the right track.)
Paris’ roommate, Morag, ropes him into joining the show, hoping that becoming a contestant would break Paris out of an unhealthy pattern of isolation and doubt. Though some good does come of the experience, it turns out you can’t shock the mental illness out of someone. The reality of what Paris is going through—the result of nature (brain chemistry) complicated by nurture (or lack thereof, i.e., years of parental abandonment)—is too messy and complex.
Hall portrays Paris’ omnipresent anxiety disorder and how it affects his relationships with intensity and an impressive attention to cognitive and emotional detail. This may make some readers uncomfortable, as peeking inside Paris’ thoughts can be pretty harrowing. But many people who have experienced this type of mental health challenge, as well as some who haven’t, will find his story deeply relatable.
Paris may crumble under the pressure of appearing on “Bake Expectations,” but he also finds a real romantic connection with a man who’s delightfully different from himself. Tariq revels in his queerness, style and religion, and he inhabits the spotlight with a confidence that sometimes borders on cockiness. Paris and Tariq’s differences add an interesting texture to their interactions, and it is meaningful to see someone go through what Paris does and be loved throughout. Hall refreshingly balances sensitivity and matter-of-factness about Paris’ challenges and how they impact his relationship with Tariq, while also exploring where Tariq needs to grow.
Hall’s sprightly irony and clever humor significantly lighten the angst. At one moment, Tariq gets impatient with Paris, as people are wont to do with him as he works his way up to an apology. “Look . . . we’ve been here before,” Tariq says. “I know how long your apologies take. I’ve got a religious obligation. I’ll come find you later.”
A dish that’s both sweet and savory, Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble is poignant and witty in equal proportion.
A dish that’s both sweet and savory, Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble is poignant and witty in equal proportion.
In The Gentleman’s Book of Vices, Jess Everlee’s soul-stirring debut, a fan obsessed with an illicit book finds true love with his favorite author.
Handsome Charlie Price is a respectable accountant by day and a “finely dressed and finely drunk” rake by night. When his exploits land him under a mountain of crushing debt, he makes a deal with his parents: If they pay what he owes, he’ll do whatever they ask.
Since that compromise, almost nothing in Charlie’s life has been of his choosing, not his comfortable London town house, not the servants who spy on him, not his bank job and not even his sweet fiancée, Alma. Until his wedding, Charlie’s committed to taking pleasure in two things: cultivating his collection of erotica and spending his free time with his gaggle of devoted friends at his hedonistic gentleman’s club, The Curious Fox.
The circumspect and cautious Miles Montague also leads two lives, albeit much more quietly than Charlie. Heartbroken and shaken by an experience that Everlee keeps mysterious at first, Miles runs a respectable bookshop but writes England’s most infamous erotica in his off hours under the nom de plume of Reginald Cox.
Cox happens to be Charlie’s favorite author, so when Charlie learns Cox is an unassuming bookseller, he visits the shop to ask him to autograph his most infamous novel (and Charlie’s most treasured possession): Immorality Plays. In 1883 London, being exposed as the author of an explicit text would mean legal and life-threatening danger, so of course, Miles assumes anyone asking for him by his pen name must be a blackmailer. It’s the queer Victorian version of a meet-disaster turned meet-cute. Miles and Charlie’s attraction is electric. Even though both know their relationship has a firm expiration date, love blooms in the blissful interregnum between their meeting and Charlie’s impending wedding.
Fans of KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian and Alexis Hall will find much to enjoy here. There are shades of Charles’ Unfit to Print (pornographer/bookseller lead) and A Seditious Affair (the well-wrought BDSM and the tightknit circle of friends centered on a private gentleman’s club) as well as Hall’s Something Fabulous (the slapstick humor, mistaken identities and genderplay). While the characters are a bit slow to develop and the plot isn’t as distinctive or refined as the best works in the subgenre, Charlie and Miles’ chemistry is sweet, and Everlee’s writing reaches its peak in their love scenes, which soar with emotional intensity. With its potent blend of queer eroticism, found family and unabashed swoon, this romance is a resonant winner.
An erotica devotee and an infamous author form an electric connection in Jess Everlee’s emotionally resonant queer Victorian romance.
In Lynn Steger Strong’s taut domestic drama, Flight, Christmas is a time of tension and healing for three adult siblings in the wake of their mother’s death.
Helen was a formidable figure by all accounts. Equal parts homemaker, matriarch and intellectual, she stood out in her Florida town and provided the charismatic fulcrum around which her family’s life pivoted. Even after her children had long left the family home behind, she wielded a strong influence.
For their first holiday after her death, Helen’s fractious family has gathered at the large house in upstate New York that middle child Henry shares with his wife, Alice. The whole group is flailing, because Helen died suddenly—without a will—and now they’re fighting over their mother’s Florida home.
But money and property are only the start of their issues. No one is at ease in Helen’s absence; everyone is worried and hiding some perceived shortcoming. The youngest sibling, Kate, a stay-at-home mom of three, chose a similar path to Helen’s but entirely lacks her conviction. The jury is still out on Kate’s husband, Josh, who spends the holiday dedicated to the seemingly Sisyphean task of building an igloo for the kids to play in. With money trouble looming, Kate’s focus is firmly trained on the big favor she wants to ask of her brothers.
Eldest brother Martin is a professor worried about job stability in the wake of some unbecoming and potentially ruinous behavior. His wife, Tess, is a well-paid and perennially anxious lawyer, who is neither confident with her kids nor comfortable when they’re out of her sight.
Henry is a dedicated artist who does interesting work to document climate change, which no one else inside (or perhaps even outside of) the family understands or values. Alice is a beautiful biracial social worker from a well-to-do family who is grieving her maternal prospects after multiple miscarriages. She dreads being left alone with any of her in-laws.
As a reader, it’s easy to relate to Alice’s trepidation. Though every sibling and spouse in Flight is nuanced and multidimensional, Helen’s clan can be overwhelming. Fortunately, a significant side plot involving one of Alice’s more troubled clients provides a key rallying point for the family as well as some much-needed breathing room. But of course, the myriad fissures, fractures and worries are what make this family drama feel utterly real.
The myriad fissures, fractures and worries of one family at Christmastime make this drama feel utterly real.
When you’re a spy, regime change is tricky. Even positive shifts can make for treacherous times. Two novels uncover the messy, uncertain lives of intelligence operatives in times of tectonic political change: Allison Montclair’s The Unkept Woman explores English life after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War, while Dan Fesperman’s Winter Work illuminates the turmoil surrounding German reunification as the Cold War was coming to a shaky close.
The Unkept Woman
A lighter riff on the espionage novel, Montclair’s The Unkept Woman is the fourth in a series about two women—Gwendolyn Bainbridge, an upper-class widow, and Iris Sparks, a former British spy—who run the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a matchmaking service launched in the wake of WWII.
Witty and suspenseful, the novel brims with Noël Coward-esque banter. The primary mystery is how Helen Joblanska, an aspiring Right Sort client, ended up dead in Iris’ apartment. And why was a woman tailing Iris in the days before the murder? The events may or may not have something to do with the sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance of Andrew Sutton, Iris’ married former lover and fellow spy, who had recently turned up on her doorstep looking for a place to hide out.
As the prime suspect in Helen’s murder, Iris is determined to find the truth, but she’s facing strong tail winds. The local authorities are openly hostile due to their resentment of her involvement in previous cases, and Gwen is unable to help Iris as her own freedom and future are hanging in the balance. She has been trying to recover custody of her son and her inheritance, but having once been labeled a “lunatic” and committed to an asylum by her family, it’s an uphill battle.
Montclair paints a compelling portrait of two intelligent, formidable women working against systems and circumstances that put them at a distinct disadvantage. They’ve grown used to having careers and being in charge of their own fates, often in the absence of men. But both Iris and Gwen are considered disreputable, and the social change they represent is seen by some to be a monstrous encroachment on the normal social order. As unruly women in an uncertain time, Iris and Gwen are as intriguing as the mystery they’re investigating.
★ Winter Work
Like The Unkept Woman, Dan Fesperman’s Winter Work savvily leverages the inherent messiness of the life of a spy. When Lothar Fischer, a colonel in the now-defunct East German foreign intelligence service (more commonly known as the Stasi), is found dead in the woods near his dacha, his right-hand man, Emil Grimm, is determined to find out what really happened. Some suspect suicide, as many other senior Stasi officials have made that choice in the face of potential prosecution now that the Berlin Wall has fallen, but Emil thinks that’s nonsense. To complicate matters, the surrounding neighborhood is thick with former spies, and there’s soon a scuffle over jurisdiction.
As a sympathetic Stasi officer, Emil provides a fascinating perspective for Western readers. In addition to the troubles of being an aging Cold Warrior, Emil also worries about his wife, who is seriously ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. With the Stasi dismantled amid the general upheaval, Emil’s income and health care are uncertain, which makes his situation particularly precarious.
As Emil scrambles to make sense of what happened to Lothar while trying to secure his future, Fesperman effectively balances building the mystery with illustrating the broader historical context and personal stakes. The social dynamics in the story are handled brilliantly, with the lines between personal and political motivations appropriately nuanced throughout. There are a multitude of competing interests in Berlin, chiefly Russians trying to shut down the flow of information and Americans offering top dollar to informants. For Emil, who has long since lost his belief in the East German system and grown wary of surveillance in his own life, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is a shaky figure who can’t be relied upon to help displaced men like him in this new world order. With the Russian leader “too preoccupied with making the Americans fall in love with his new Perestroika,” some of Emil’s fellow officials are looking for hope in other figures. In a chillingly prophetic note, one of them is Vladimir Putin: “The KGB station chief in Dresden, that Putin fellow, is as outraged as we are,” they remark. The heavy toll of authoritarianism looms over the entire proceeding, making for a complex tale that will have readers rooting for a Stasi agent.
Regime change, murder—and matchmaking? In two thrilling novels, spies both former and current contend with a host of challenges.
Few words related to identity convey a more precise meaning than the ones Bolu Babalola uses to describe her identity: “I’m a Nigerian child, eldest daughter.” If you’re familiar with immigrant parents, you know the drill: Education is the key to securing your future, with a reliable profession (doctor, lawyer, engineer) followed by a judicious marriage by a certain age.
But Babalola, author of Honey and Spice, one of the year’s most ambitious rom-coms, didn’t stick to that script. Born in South London to two striving professionals, one a lawyer and the other a teacher, her artistic journey began at age 10. She gained attention for her writing from teachers, and the fact that she could do something she loved, then get praised for it in school and by her family, planted a seed. Like a sunflower bending toward the light, she leaned in. By 14, she was writing and sharing rom-coms with friends. So publishing her outstanding romance debut at 31 has been a long time coming.
Voice-driven and striking, Honey and Spice is Beyoncé meets Jane Austen on a British university campus. As unlikely as that blend sounds, Babalola nails it. The book’s narrator is budding media maven Kikiola “Kiki” Banjo, the host of a student radio show that dispenses pop culture commentary, offers advice about university life and dissects the Black British cliques of Whitewell University. When handsome and far-too-charming transfer student Malakai Korede enters the scene, he changes the social equilibrium. Kiki instantly identifies the new big man on campus as someone her fellow classmates should steer clear of.
“Because I’m a romantic, I actually don’t want romance for the sake of romance. It has to be real.”
But as Kiki gets to know him, she realizes that, despite his slick reputation, Malakai is actually beautifully and wonderfully squishy—the perfect sparring partner for the prickly yet sweet Kiki. As Kiki notices when she digs into his social media and finds a doting post about his niece, Malakai has “a softness to him. . . . There was no way he could fake the adoration with which he looked at that angel.”
Babalola also adores him. Malakai is “a kind of distortion of what we think masculinity and Black masculinity should be,” she says, speaking by video call. Malakai’s openheartedness reflects an essential part of Babalola’s upbringing, in which her father played the role of loving cheerleader. Her parents not only nurtured her independent thinking and creativity, but also shaped Babalola’s romantic sensibility: She was raised by a couple who share the exact kind of partnership and abiding love she writes about so devotedly.
Their relationship inspired Babalola’s first book, the story collection Love in Color, a kaleidoscopic reimagining of romantic myths from around the world. Though the book’s premise was dreamed up by Babalola’s publisher, it was her vision that made it a breakout hit. Love in Color became a mission statement, a calling card that introduced Babalola’s voice to the broader public. It provided an opportunity to place Black women and women of color from around the world at the center of her beloved genre. With Love in Color, and now with Honey and Spice, Babalola wants to “decolonize the concept of romance . . . because we usually see white women as the romantic heroines, [both the ones] desiring and the ones who deserve to be desired.”
With her debut romance novel, Babalola wanted to “pay homage not only to my parents’ love story but also to them as parents because their love embodies so much of my confidence.” Perhaps because she’s a woman (and Black and Nigerian), she gets asked about that aspect of her personality a lot. “Everyone wonders why I’m so confident and why I’m so sure of myself, and I’m 100% sure it’s because my parents had that confidence in me,” she says. “There wasn’t really any space for me not to believe in myself, because that was unacceptable to them.” That’s not the story one usually hears about Nigerian parents, and Babalola’s work provides a realistic, progressive portrayal of Black British life. Honey and Spice is grounded in Whitewell’s complex and tight (if imperfect) Black community, where love and joy and feminist sensibilities intertwine and vibrate off the page.
Babalola’s own academic life is another key influence in Honey and Spice. In graduate school, her focus on American politics and history through popular culture culminated in a thesis on Beyoncé’s audiovisual masterpiece Lemonade, female blues singers and Black women redefining identity through art. That blend of cultural savvy, empowerment and identity exploration pervades Babalola’s writing. What’s more, Kiki’s politics, media and culture major mirrors a concentration the author once designed for herself, and the fictional advisor who pairs Kiki with Malakai for a semester-long project is modeled on Babalola’s own grad school mentor.
Like her creator, Kiki is a bold, confident woman who already knows she’s loved and won’t settle for anything less with a man, no matter how charming. “I have such a soft spot for Kiki. I relate to her. . . . And I think a lot of Black girls relate to her,” Babalola says. “They think they need to be tough, but they’re really just sweethearts deep down.”
Honey and Spice is the book of Babalola’s heart, a novel she’s been developing and refining for years. As in Austen, the romance is paramount, but the ensemble cast and the broader world in which the relationship grows are half the fun, allowing Babalola to lay bare the intricacies of cliques, class and color. She weaves together humor and cutting social observations with precise, innovative language. Some of this language, such as mandemologist, Kiki’s joking term for her expertise in male behavior, Babalola invented and some of it, such as wasteman, the pejorative term Kiki initially uses to label Malakai, is Black British vernacular. Babalola says the latter term can describe “a loser, like in the generic sense of the word. But it can also just be somebody who just messes you around.” In contrast with the traditional romance rake, who is often an attractive figure who can be redeemed, wasteman serves as a hard line in the sand. As Babalola puts it, “Signifying that it’s unacceptable [to behave like a wasteman] shows that we’re defining our parameters of relationships and romantic relationships.”
This term and what it says about knowing your worth is emblematic of the author’s outlook on life, gender equality and love. Babalola is single, and over 130,000 followers on Twitter savor both her insight and her celebration of sexy, empowered womanhood. She’s a romantic visionary who hasn’t yet experienced her one grand romance, but she has seen it modeled and knows what she wants. Being willing to be single until she gets the love story she’s looking for is a conscious choice. “I am a romantic,” Babalola says. “And because I’m a romantic, I actually don’t want romance for the sake of romance. It has to be real. I don’t prioritize being partnered above all else, because I really, really respect romance and love.” The women she creates mirror the ethos she embodies. Babalola champions a romanticism rooted in trust, independence and bravery—both in Honey and Spice and as the star of her own story.
Photo of Bolu Babalola credit Caleb Azumah Nelson.
The author's debut romance, Honey and Spice, celebrates the love she wants to see in the world.
In Julie Mayhew’s Greek island-set thriller, Little Nothings, little cuts do lasting damage and friendships are as intense and heartbreaking as romantic relationships.
Thanks to her friendless childhood and dysfunctional family, Liv Travers never felt like she belonged. Even getting married to her husband, Pete, and giving birth to a daughter, Ivy, didn’t fundamentally change how she felt. But bonding with Beth and Binnie at a singalong music class for mothers and babies radically shifted her perspective.
So when an interloper comes along and rocks their happy triad, it’s intolerable. The new girl, Ange, is shinier and bossier than Liv’s other friends. Soon she has them all in her thrall, and the vibe shifts from supportive and homey to acquisitive and competitive, like a suburban London version of “Keeping Up with the Kardishians.” Regular group outings now take place at fashionable restaurants with bills totalling hundreds of pounds a pop. Every part of the group’s lifestyle gets an upgrade, and everyone is expected to conform. It’s hard to keep up financially, and even worse, Ange seems to want to run Liv off. Liv is excluded from group events with flimsy excuses, and no one else notices the manipulation. All the “little nothings,” the cuts and insults delivered so casually, add up, and the hostilities increase during an expensive group vacation to the Greek island Corfu. How far will Liv go to protect her found family, and what will she risk?
Rather than follow a chronological timeline, Mayhew uses flashbacks to reveal what pushed Liv and her friends to the brink. It’s an effective, psychologically driven structure, with each flashback being triggered thematically by an event in the present. As the full picture emerges, it’s easy to wonder if any friendship is worth all that drama, especially as neither Beth nor Binnie really seems to have Liv’s back. But to Liv, these women aren’t just friends, they’re soulmates; Mayhew even likens the intimacy of these female friendships to marriage. In a way that’s reminiscent of both Nikki May’s thriller Wahala and the novels of Patricia Highsmith, the intense relationships are vital to the women’s sense of their own identities. Vowing to not be that lonely girl again, Liv in particular hangs on with the fervor of a person in a rocky marriage warding off divorce.
Anchored by a deliciously layered and desperately unreliable narrator, Little Nothings enriches the familiar setup of an intruder shaking up a happy idyll with a compelling, creative structure and distinctive voice. It’s obvious that what Liv needs are better friends and a truckload of therapy, but singular obsessions make for seductive and fun reading, even if the depth of Liv’s interiority makes the other characters look thin and shabby by comparison. A good choice for fans of relationship-driven stories with a sinister edge, Little Nothings hits the same sweet spot as the works of Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty.
With her Greek-island set thriller, Little Nothings, Julie Mayhew hits the same seductive sweet spot as writers like Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty.
In Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s seventh novel, Our Gen, four well-off 60-something characters bond in an exclusive and privileged environment.
Located just outside Philadelphia, the Gen (short for “sexagenarian”) is a leafy suburban community named for the sexy seniors who live there. In addition to its luxury concierge services, spa amenities and high-tech smart homes, the Gen is a uniquely intense social environment in which residents experience a kind of renewal and second wind. It’s also a place of transition that inspires contemplation, and sometimes those reflections are painful.
The events of the novel pivot around Cynthia, a new resident grieving the loss of the cherished West Philadelphia mansion and the life her attentive (and pushy) son is convinced no longer suits her. A wealthy Black Ivy League graduate and divorc’e, Cynthia bonds quickly, yet not without reservation, with an existing clique that includes the “tall and golden” Tish, an attention-grabbing, light-skinned African American socialite; Bloc, the only Black man at the Gen and a retired NASA scientist with three ex-wives; and the mysterious Lavia, a retired financier, who may or may not be South Asian. Cynthia and Bloc share an instant attraction that threatens the group’s equilibrium. There’s also a wrongful arrest of a beloved community employee, but that ends up being a small part of why Cynthia’s first few months at the Gen are a time of great change for the clique.
In the novel’s present, life revolves around dinners and cocktail receptions. Cynthia, Tish, Bloc and Lavia fill their time with political debate and conjecture about other residents’ political leanings, as well as recreational drinking and smoking that greases the wheels of interpersonal disclosures and sex. There’s a college-campus feel to the intensity of their sharing. However, the majority of the novel’s drama is interior, occurring in contemplative flashbacks as the foursome reckons with the worst parts of their personal histories.
McKinney-Whetstone presents these revelations in a striking and compelling style, frequently dipping into metaphor to describe the characters’ interiority through comparisons to their environment. The soapy melodrama and artistic presentation of the flashbacks are a powerful blend, if at times a little uneven in their effect.
Complex characters and relationships are the heart of the novel, and overall, the combination works well. The premise is creative, focusing on a group of people who aren’t often at the center of stories filled with love, sex and laughter. Our Gen is warm and smart, accessible yet meaningful, a beach read with strong writing and emotional heft.
Focusing on a group of people who aren’t often at the center of stories filled with love, sex and laughter, Our Gen is warm and smart, accessible yet meaningful, a beach read with strong writing and emotional heft.
The Emma Project concludes Sonali Dev’s series of contemporary Jane Austen retellings with a gender-flipped version of Emma. In it, Vansh Raje is the jet-setting youngest child of the illustrious Raje family, a famously wealthy and tightknit clan descended from Indian royalty and based in California. Dev’s Mr. Knightley equivalent is formidable entrepreneur Knightlina “Naina” Kohli, a decade-older family friend who’s been a beloved mentor to Vansh for most of his life.
Naina is the mature grump to Vansh’s playful sunshine. As an Indian American woman who’s fought for the well-being of countless others and gone to extremes to secure her own independence (she once faked a long-term relationship to appease her difficult parents), she’s grown to resent the Rajes’ seemingly easy paths through life. Tensions ratchet up between Naina and Vansh when they compete for funding from the same donor, funding Naina desperately needs for her microfinance foundation. Going head-to-head ignites a heady combination of long-standing trust blended with newfound lust.
While Dev expertly grafts the age gap, charming meddler and grumpy-sunshine tropes from Emma onto her sprawling contemporary update, there is a sharp difference in tone. Emma is a true precursor to the modern romantic comedy, but The Emma Project, like most of Dev’s work, is an emotionally heavy story. Naina is not just stern; she’s been hurt by her severe and volatile father, who has wreaked havoc on his family over the years. Dev’s darker take on the character gets especially tricky in Naina’s attitude toward Vansh, which can seem excessively harsh given his sincerity.
Handsome and relentlessly gregarious, Vansh dealt with dyslexia and the sting of comparison to his academically adept older siblings growing up. He’s keenly aware of his own privilege; he “wasn’t hypocritical enough to see his life as anything but charmed.” He also understands that his most obvious assets, apart from his family, are his looks (“Vogue had declared him the most gorgeous of his siblings”) and his easy way with people, and he’s more than made peace with that. Determined to stand out in his own right, Vansh has worked hard to build a substantial philanthropic network by leveraging his strengths. He has earned the implicit trust of his friends and that social capital has meaningful rewards.
Dev endows Vansh with wonderful depth, making him a more substantive Emma, while giving Emma’s petty jealousy to Naina, who is a more severe Knightley. This makes the gender flip of The Emma Project interesting, but it’s dissatisfying to see the female character, especially a female version of a character as beloved as Knightley, get the short end of the stick.
Despite these somewhat disappointing adaptation choices, Vansh and Naina’s story is compelling in its complexity. These are multilayered characters, and the drama is well earned. Plus, The Emma Project‘s many callbacks and cameos from previous books in the series firmly tie the novel into the larger series. It’s intriguing to contemplate how gender impacts this classic age-gap romance, especially when complicated by a contemporary setting and family dynamics.
Sonali Dev's contemporary, gender-flipped Emma is a sprawling and emotional grumpy-sunshine romance.
In Sister Mother Warrior, her second historical novel following the success of Island Queen, Vanessa Riley brings the Haitian revolution to life through the perspectives of two real-life women: one a soldier, the other the future empress of a fledgling nation.
Gaou Adbaraya Toya’s fighting spirit is forged in fire. She is 12 when her peaceful home in West Africa is destroyed by Dahomey warriors. A week earlier, the elders had conferred on Toya the “sanctified” status of being a grown woman, but the catastrophic loss of her village is the true turning point of her childhood, as she gains a terrible understanding: “The rumors must be true. The Dahomey sold their vanquished enemies to the white devils.”
In the midst of all this chaos, Toya decides she will become a fighter. The likelihood of being sold into slavery motivates her to join the Dahomey people and serve the conquering ruler, King Tegbesu, as a member of a select group of female soldiers. But in a horrible twist of irony, Toya’s path leads her into enslavement in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. She eventually becomes a renowned healer with an unofficial protected status throughout the colony, a warrior who fights in the rebellion and the adoptive mother of a boy who will become one of the rebellion’s most vaunted leaders (and ultimately Haiti’s emperor), Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
The second revolutionary, Marie-Claire Bonheur (later Dessalines), lives a relatively privileged life in Saint-Domingue. She and her family occupy a specific place in the colony’s stratified society. Her father is a respected free Black man who works as a fisherman; her mother is an “affranchi,” or free person of color; and her grandfather is a “Grand Blanc,” or white elite plantation owner. Darker skinned than her mother and sister, 13-year-old Marie-Claire sacrifices her precarious status—and entwines her fate with Toya’s—when, rather than solidify her family’s standing by marrying a white man, she falls in love with an enslaved boy: Jean-Jacques Dessaline. Their enduring and imperfect love is a key throughline of the narrative, bringing softness and dimension to the story.
To her credit, Riley never shies away from gray areas when depicting these incredible public figures and events. Her heroes are fallible. Toya pledges (and maintains) her undying loyalty to a king who sold her brethren into slavery; she believes that it was his divine right to do so, even after she recognizes slavery for the “slow death” that it is. Jean-Jacques grows up to become a great man, but he’s also unpitying and vengeful as a leader, and in his personal life he’s unfaithful, repeatedly breaking Marie-Claire’s heart.
The complexity of Sister Mother Warrior suits this complicated, difficult history, and Riley is successful in portraying the roles of African people within a unique and racialized system they didn’t foresee without diminishing the reality of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Europeans. Fair warning, though: The story’s complexity is at times compounded by uneven writing, which can be dense and expository, choppy and impressionistic. Riley uses first-person perspectives to place readers in the heads of her lead characters, immersing us in their thoughts and feelings. It’s effective and engrossing, especially when there’s chaos roiling outside and within, but both the subject matter and Riley’s writing style make for challenging reading. At its most opaque, the narrative mirrors the unruliness of turbulent events.
Still, Sister Mother Warrior is captivating. I sank into this one, and it motivated me to learn more about a subject I have long avoided as a Black person descended from slavery in the former West Indies. I recommend others take the same leap.
The complexity of Sister Mother Warrior suits the complicated, difficult history of the Haitian revolution, which Vanessa Riley brings to life through the stories of a soldier and a future empress.
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