Big things come in pairs, good things in small packages. Arundhati Royhas opened up shop for the first time in 20 years with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf), a lustrously braided and populated tale woven with ribbons of identity, love, mourning, and joy—and tied together with yellow mangoes, damask roses, and cigarettes. Also this month: Maile Meloy’s Do Not Become Alarmed (Riverhead) tells the suspenseful story of two families vacationing together; their casual bliss is broken when their respective offspring vanish somewhere in Central America. Poet and novelist Nick Laird’s Modern Gods (Viking) takes off like a shot and pierces the lives of two Irish sisters, one engaged to be married, one en route to documenting a new religion in Papua New Guinea, both about to discover the steep price of faith. Meanwhile, parenting is no fairy tale in Victor LaValle’s The Changeling (Spiegel & Grau).
Try not to get burned: Mandy Berman delivers a duffel full of drama and DEET in her debut, Perennials (Random House). Sun-soaked sin is now being served on the foredeck in Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers(Harper). Rosecrans Baldwin drives a modern murder mystery with The Last Kid Left (MCD). There’s nothing semi about Finn Murphy’s trucking tales of The Long Haul (Norton). And funny factory Jenny Allen has 35 points and one question: Would Everybody Please Stop? (Sarah Crichton).
IN SHORT
Katherine Heiny marries wit and wonder in Standard Deviation (Knopf). Jonathan Gould tries a little tenderness with Otis Redding (Crown). John McEnroe singles out and doubles down in But Seriously (Little, Brown). Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (Harper) nests in the crime-fiction tradition. The streets are paved with paparazzi in Kevin Kwan’s Rich People Problems (Doubleday). Julia Glass climbs into A House Among the Trees (Pantheon). Will Bardenwerper expertly examines Saddam Hussein, The Prisoner in His Palace (Scribner). Teju Cole sees through the Blind Spot (Random House). Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie recapture the campaign trail on The Road to Camelot (Simon & Schuster). Fascism festers on the farm in Thomas E. Ricks’s dual biography of Churchill and Orwell (Penguin Press). Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy caution against calamity in Warnings (Ecco). Dickensian deeds direct Alain Mabanckou’sBlack Moses (New Press). Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (Custom House) coils around our minds. Ann Beattie’s The Accomplished Guest (Scribner) never overstays her welcome. Catherine Lacey has all The Answers(Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Adam Lashinsky’s Wild Ride (Portfolio) surges with Uber gossip. Andrew Essex foresees The End of Advertising(Spiegel & Grau). Jessica Flint and Anna Kavaliunas cook up Matcha(Dovetail). Laughter trumps sorrow in candid comedian Eddie Izzard’sBelieve Me (Blue Rider). The sun sets on the 70s surf scene in Daniel Riley’s Fly Me (Little, Brown). And Kevin Hart lays out the life lessons in I Can’t Make This Up (37 Ink).
