11 books to turn to after the ‘Severance’ season 2 finale
Nicole Cuffy’s ambitious second novel, O Sinners!, opens with New York journalist Faruq Zaidi on assignment to embed with “the nameless,” a spiritual group with their headquarters in Northern California. Led by Odo, a charismatic Black Vietnam War vet, the nameless’ residential compound in the midst of the forest is part experiment in utopian communal living, part inflexible sect. Its members follow a creed that encourages them to view death as a natural part of life and to live without the “distortion” which they believe warps and disfigures the world’s beauty. At first, their so-called Forbidden City is appealing—gorgeous surroundings, attractive people and a rich cultural life. Faruq retains his skepticism, however, and on his daily runs through the forest and in his interactions with Odo and second-in-command Minh-An, something continues to bother him. He becomes more suspicious when it appears that someone is going through his things. And how does Odo know so much about Faruq’s family? But Faruq’s experience with the faithful of the Forbidden City also makes him question his own lack of faith and drives home the way conflicts with his strict Muslim father were exacerbated by his mother’s death and the aftermath of 9/11. The nameless offer a rosy worldview and a tempting way of life. But is it the one for Faruq?
Cuffy includes chapters chronicling Odo’s tour of duty in Vietnam, an experience that encompasses moments of extreme danger as well a deep camaraderie with fellow combatants. She also interleaves the transcript of a documentary about the nameless’s face-off with an evangelical church at the group’s original home in rural Texas. Though neither of these narratives provides irrefutable answers to Faruq’s questions, they give important context to the group’s origins.
Dances, Cuffy’s first novel, explored the physical and psychological toll felt by a Black ballerina in a classical company. Cuffy brings that same clear-eyed honesty and fearlessness to O Sinners!, but on a whole new level, exploring the ways rage and racism can shape a life, and how doubt can lead us to new paths of belief.
- by Amanda Diehl
There’s never a bad time for a book by Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour.” Her third novel, Back After This, is a comforting pick-me-up, perfect as either a bright spot in the dregs of winter or a tender beach read to flip open between bouts of sunbathing.
When audio producer Cecily Foster’s boss asks her to co-host a dating podcast about her own love life, she doesn’t feel like she’s in a position to say no, given his thinly veiled references to layoffs if their company doesn’t produce a new hit. Cecily begrudgingly agrees, but with two demands of her own: She wants her work bestie to keep her job and serve as producer, and she wants a chance to script a pilot episode of her dream project. As Cecily begins the litany of dates her dating coach co-host has arranged—very few of which lead to anything interesting, let alone a coveted second date—she keeps running into Will, a cute waiter who owns a rambunctious Great Dane. It seems that the universe keeps throwing them together and Cecily’s interactions with Will are inconveniently sparking something within her.
Linda Holmes on how to have a work-life balance—when your job is also your life.
Holmes is a master at writing warm, relatable and realistic characters. Cecily’s success at and passion for audio production has unfortunately prevented her from chasing her dreams of hosting or enjoying any upward career growth. Will is a waiter and photographer, but worries that one of those things may be eclipsing the other. Over the course of the novel, Cecily examines how much her identity and occupation are linked and tries to figure out how to untangle them. As much as she loves what she does, she knows her work will never love her back. Even the characters who function as obstacles to Cecily and her romantic and professional pursuits (her boss, her co-host and even her ex-boyfriend) are complex. There’s no devious mustache-twirling here, just regular people also trying to make the best decisions for their livelihoods.
The slow-burn romance between Will and Cecil is cozy, sweet and wholesome. They’re just two genuinely good people blessed by serendipity, with the added chaos of a Great Dane. Much like the climax of a Nora Ephron film, happy sighs will abound when Back After This reaches its finale.
Sculpting a novel that conveys vastness through inner lives alone is a tremendous challenge. Making that same novel a page-turning mystery that’s simultaneously moving and often nail-biting is another challenge altogether. With The Strange Case of Jane O., Karen Thompson Walker rises to meet both of these challenges head-on, and succeeds.
The title character is—externally at least—an unremarkable woman, a single mother who works at the New York Public Library. Alarmed by potential hallucinations, blackouts and a feeling of lingering sadness and dread, she seeks the help of a psychiatrist, who takes an interest not just in Jane’s case, but in the way the woman sees the world. Told through a combination of the psychiatrist’s reflections on his sessions with Jane, and Jane’s own diary entries addressed to her infant son, The Strange Case of Jane O. seeks to excavate a particular human mind in such a way that the minds of everyone around her, and the very nature of their reality, might turn on what becomes of this fascinating protagonist.
Though this engrossing book often moves with a thriller’s pace, there is little sensationalism in Walker’s writing. She approaches Jane’s story through spare, deliberate prose, keeping each chapter lean and, when narrating from the psychiatrist’s point of view, sometimes clinical. But it’s not cold prose. In fact, as the psychiatrist discovers the nature of Jane’s unique memory, her hallucinations and the source of her dread, the precision of Walker’s word choice becomes key to deciphering the mystery. This is not a book that holds the reader’s hand through every revelation, but one that asks something of us, wanting us to decipher along with its characters a mystery that is bigger than psychiatry, bigger than crime, bigger than a single strange incident.
Slowly, elegantly and with tremendous grace, Walker starts to draw parallels between therapist and patient, between mother and father, between woman and child, and The Strange Case of Jane O. becomes an emotional journey into the heart of what drives us, what breaks us and what keeps us walking the line of mundane daily life.
Every daughter contains a part of her mother. An imprint buries deep down, binding the two together, indelible. For Margot, the young protagonist of Lucy Rose’s dreamlike, visceral horror novel The Lamb, the connection with Mama is bloodsoaked, painful and unrelenting. Can a child ever sever herself from her mother?
Mama and Margot have lived in the woods ever since Margot can remember. Apart from the occasional lost soul looking for shelter, they are alone. Mama calls the lost people “strays,” with a certain amount of affection. She eagerly settles them in the house, feeds them and serves them wine. It’s not until it’s too late that the hemlock in the drink takes deadly effect. Then, Mama and Margot can feed. Sometimes they have a lot to eat, and sometimes they go hungry. When times are bad, Mama is inconsolable, violent and harsh. Margot covers the bruises with her coat as she rides the bus to school. However, when a new stray named Eden comes to the woods, an entranced Mama welcomes her into the family. Margot feels a change come over the house with Eden’s presence, something she’s not sure if she likes. She must decide what sort of future she wants, but will it mean leaving Mama, Eden and the gruesome truth of their lives far behind? It may be the only chance she’s got for something new.
Rose’s use of Margot’s first-person perspective in The Lamb allows for full authorial control over the shifting tones and feelings within the cabin. Much of the story happens in only a handful of locations, imbuing the plot with a sense of claustrophobia. Margot can’t escape the horrors of the house, how strays are harvested and eaten as the cycle continues. These happenings are at once terrifying and perfectly ordinary, the only thing she’s ever known. This is the genius of Rose’s folktale: She blurs the lines between hunger and gluttony, human and animal, love and revulsion. It’s hypnotic, grotesque and beautiful all at once.
Rose’s writing confidently carries the reader through some seriously disturbing moments, with blood and more staining nearly every chapter. Coming-of-age shouldn’t be this bloody, should it? Maybe it’s the only way—feeding on what came before, new and full at last.
It would be hard to find a writer whose sensibility is better suited to unsettling times than British novelist Ali Smith. Unsurprisingly, her novel Gliff neatly matches the dominant sentiment of the 2020s. This brief, dystopian tale is both an evocative story of siblings in peril and a glimpse at where some of the trends roiling our world may be taking us.
Set in an unnamed country in an unspecified future time, the novel follows two children forced to navigate a threatening environment without the benefit of an adult presence. After their mother departs to care for her ailing sister, the narrator, known variously as Briar, Brice and Bri, is abandoned with younger sister Rose by the friend whose care their mother placed them in.
Before long, the sisters are at large in a society marked by environmental degradation, omnipresent surveillance focused on a category of dissidents known as “unverifiables,” and an ominous machine called a supera bounder that randomly paints red lines around properties to mark them for destruction. Setting themselves at odds with the oppressive ethos of this culture, Briar and Rose quickly learn to survive using their wits and a handful of opportunistic alliances.
As in much of Smith’s work, there’s a pleasing fascination with language and wordplay. “It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,” says Briar. That curiosity extends to the eponymous word, gliff, whose meaning apparently encompasses everything from “a transient glance” to “an early AI tech tool used in the development of healthcare.” It’s also the name Rose gives to a horse that’s one of several she liberates from their corral and then makes her own.
The feeling one experiences reading Gliff is similar to that evoked when standing before an abstract impressionist work of art. Smith’s novel is less about creating fully fleshed-out characters or a meticulously structured plot than it is about summoning up a mood, one of “Unbelievable believable hope. . . . Impossible, possible.” That attitude offers what might serve as Smith’s paradoxical benediction over life in an increasingly anxious age.
American ideology stresses the value of hard work, tying it not just to wealth but to character. But we know hard work doesn’t always pay: Today, income inequality is worse than ever and wages have stagnated. But the pernicious idea that one’s value is tied to their employment status persists, influencing policies around welfare, housing, education and more. The COVID-19 pandemic changed many people’s views on work and government aid, but also inspired employers to rail against workers who sought employment elsewhere. It is against the pandemic backdrop that Adam Chandler begins 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, which seeks to break down the myth of the American work ethic and offer new ways to think about our relationship with our jobs.
Chandler, a journalist who traced the history of modern America through fast food in 2019’s Drive-Thru Dreams, uses the first half of his book to track how the U.S. came to place so much emphasis on the value of “hard work.” That’s not just the somber toil of farmsteading Pilgrims, but also the individualist hustle associated with Thomas Edison. Chandler dives into history, picking apart the folklore that became the basis for our modern attitude towards work, from Benjamin Franklin’s musings to the glitz of the Chicago World’s Fair.
There’s an element of travel journalism at play, as he visits areas like Plymouth Rock and an Osage Nation reservation in Oklahoma. Sometimes these excursions feel more like detours from the subject at hand, as Chandler sets up a stronger second half, which slices through modern Americans’ unhealthy relationship to work. Technology keeps office workers tethered to their desks regardless of time or location, low-wage workers struggle with erratic schedules, and politicians decry the neediest as leeches. While Chandler explores possible solutions, like a universal basic income, he also calls for a realignment of this country’s values, touting the benefits of a society more invested in the health of the community than the potential for individuals to strike it rich.
Chandler’s breezy writing style makes the book an easy read with plenty of eye-popping statistics and gut-wrenching anecdotes. More importantly, 99% Perspiration will make readers question their own relationship to work, what their jobs mean to them, and why employment is so integral to our identity.
Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he’s reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library.
Many things about Murakami’s work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.
The finale of Attica Locke’s beloved Highway 59 series starts with a shocker: Darren Mathews, the deeply moral, and deeply complicated, Black Texas Ranger hell-bent on destroying the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, turns in his badge.
Darren is worn down. A wily district attorney has relentlessly pursued his prosecution for a lie Darren told to protect an elderly Black man. Worse, the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president has left Darren in a state of utter despair, with his alcoholism “shaking him from the inside out.” Even with a stable girlfriend (whose presence will make fans of the series cheer), Darren is hurtling toward a breakdown when an unexpected source tells him about a Black teenage girl who has gone missing from a bizarre, dystopian community called Thornhill.
Both 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird and its follow-up, 2019’s Heaven, My Home, force Darren up against society’s worst humans. But his most needling nemesis is not the Aryan Brotherhood, corrupt lawmen or plain old everyday racists. It’s his manipulative mother, Bell, who abandoned him to his uncles in his infancy. Guide Me Home changes the story by making Bell the Dr. Watson to Darren’s Holmes. It’s an uneasy truce, and readers will sympathize with both characters in equal measure as they unravel the Thornhill mystery.
Many mystery fans are willing to overlook hackneyed turns of phrase and oft-used literary tropes for a walloping plot. But with Locke, there’s no need. Her language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful. The close third-person point of view immerses readers in Darren’s pain and confusion as the ghosts of his family emerge, including that of the father who died before Darren was born.
Guide Me Home isn’t a standalone novel; readers new to the Ranger will want to start with Bluebird, Bluebird and proceed chronologically to appreciate the literary triumph that is the Highway 59 series.
There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. You can sense tension lurking like a camouflaged animal in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of the worlds Williams builds.
In Beautiful Days, his first collection, Williams delivers intensity on page after page, but it’s how he uses the tension he creates that makes the work so remarkable. In stories that take the mundane to wondrous, frightening and deeply affecting places, Williams keeps finding new ways to remind us of the strangeness of being human, and the many ways our lives can transform in an unexpected instant.
There are no real limits to the subject matter of the 10 tales within this volume. The settings shift from skyscrapers to secluded cabins, seductive bedrooms to the quiet house next door. The characters are parents, roommates, neighbors, co-workers, even mice whose lives hang in the balance of another character’s quest for the right trap. In “Trial Run,” a man visits his office amid a snowstorm, only to find a storm of a different kind waiting inside. In “Red Light,” a sexually adventurous fitness buff finds himself in a particularly mysterious bedroom. And in “Wood Sorrel House,” which might be the most unsettling short story you read in all of 2024, new parents find themselves in a house outside of time, watching in horror as their baby refuses to age even as their own bodies fail.
Many of these stories push their subjects into the realm of the unreal, the supernatural and even the horrific, but genre conventions do not concern Williams any more than neat endings do. What’s most striking about Beautiful Days is not the premises of the stories, but the way in which the author lets them unfold at their own quirky pace, like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons. His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, dropping us into 10 distinct worlds that might all be part of the same dreamy landscape, or might be individual pocket universes. Either way, we can get lost, because Williams has a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.
It may not seem like CrossFit (a popular high-intensity interval training workout) and Heaven’s Gate (a cult that believed UFOs were headed to Earth on the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet) have any similarities. But as linguist Amanda Montell argues in Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, these are just two of many groups that bind their members together by employing cultish language.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Amanda Montell answers that age-old unsettling question: How susceptible am I to cults and cultish groups?
“Though ‘cult language’ comes in different varieties, all charismatic leaders—from Jim Jones and Jeff Bezos to SoulCycle instructors—use the same basic tools,” Montell writes. These tools include using insider lingo, relying on thought-terminating cliches that discourage asking questions and love-bombing with excessive flattery.
Cults may seem like a creepy relic of the past, but lots of groups successfully employ cultish language today. Simply put, a cultish group is one that promises to improve your life if you follow its regimen, buy its products or obey its leader. Such groups are common because, as Montell argues, cultish language really does bind a group together. Think of the specialized vocabulary used by Alcoholics Anonymous, for example. You can drop into any AA meeting across the world and immediately understand AA-speak.
The author’s experience as a linguist melds well with her research into the psychological underpinnings of cultish language, including interviews with several cult survivors. Montell also addresses why words like brainwashing don’t accurately describe how people come under a cultish thrall. “Language . . . reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome,” she writes. According to Montell, our loved ones adopt QAnon conspiracy theories or hawk leggings/herbal supplements/skincare on Facebook for multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes not because they’re gullible or weak but because they’re idealistic, tenacious and open to these groups’ messaging.
Few of us may interact with Scientology or NXIVM directly, but that doesn’t mean we’re beyond the purview of cultish influence. Many of us participate in “cult fitness” groups, turn to Instagram influencers for self-improvement tips or sell products for MLMs. Cultish demonstrates that we are all more susceptible to joining the in-group than we may realize.
If you’ve never pondered life’s contingencies—like what might’ve happened if you’d skipped the party where you met your spouse—then Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library will be an eye-opening experience. This gentle but never cloying fable offers us a chance to weigh our regret over missed opportunities against our gratitude for the life we have.
Fresh from the loss of her job in a dreary English town she thinks of as a “conveyor belt of despair” and not far removed from the decision to cancel her wedding two days before the scheduled date, 35-year-old Nora Seed finds herself facing profound depression. When she decides to end her life, she awakes in the eponymous library, managed by Mrs Elm, the kindly school librarian who had befriended her as a lonely teenager.
The shelves of this unique library are crammed with identical-looking volumes, each one giving Nora a chance to see how her life would have turned out if she had made different choices. After first consulting her Book of Regrets, and with Mrs Elm’s encouragement, Nora plucks one book after another from the shelf, enabling her to shed her dismal “root life” and realize her dreams to live as an Arctic researcher, an international rock star, a philosophy professor, a mother and more. In each case, a sense of dissatisfaction finally propels Nora back to the Midnight Library, looking for another path, as she gradually comes to understand that the restless search itself may ultimately prove to be her undoing.
Haig, who’s been frank about his own experiences with depression, is a sympathetic guide for Nora’s journey. His allusions to multiverses, string theory and Erwin Schrödinger never detract from the emotional heart of this alluring novel. And when Nora’s sojourn allows her to realize that perhaps “even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same,” and that “life simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough to see it,” Haig brings her story to a conclusion that’s both enlightening and deeply satisfying.
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