Kirkus Bookclub Fiction 2023

Booker-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's third novel, Birnam Wood, is a psychological thriller set in a remote area of New Zealand, where scores of ultra-rich foreigners are building fortress-like homes in preparation for a coming disaster. It follows the guerrilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a ragtag group of leftists who move about the country cultivating other people's land. Their chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events that questions how far any of us would go to ensure our own survival — and at what cost.

Tom Kettle, a retired policeman and widower, is settling into the quiet of his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His solitude is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask about a traumatic, decades-old case that Tom never quite came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed when his new neighbour, a mysterious young mother, asks for his help. A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is an unforgettable exploration of family, loss and love. Endorsements Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. The Sunday Times top ten bestseller. Twice winner of the Costa Book of the Year. "A masterpiece" — Sunday Times. "Stunning" — Liz Nugent. "Extraordinary" — Irish Times. "To borrow a word that recurs in its pages, it is stupendous, in the sense that it shocks and astonishes." — Irish Times. "Rare indeed are those novels worth cherishing and keeping close. Old God's Time is one of them." — Daily Telegraph. "So captivating... it will live long in the minds of its readers." — Independent.

In the midst of the hottest summer on record, a woman tests the increasing tension between our social contracts and our selves.At 49, Beatrice Billings is rudderless. Her marriage is stale, her relationship with her son Thomas is limited to text messages—hostile haikus that he sends from university—and she is the primary caregiver for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. She has a complicated relationship with her older sister Ariel, with whom she carries on ongoing arguments in her head. Bea laments the loss of momentum she remembers feeling in her thirties, when she and everyone she knew was busy buying houses, having children, and renovating kitchens. Now she is reflecting on her life, worried about her inability to memorize a simple yoga sequence, and about the fact that she enjoys the idea of many things more than the actual things themselves (teaching, reading, sex). When Bea finds that she has both a talent and a passion for picking locks, the sense of anticipation that had been missing from her life returns. Breaking into other people’s houses is something she’s good at: she is a quick study, subtle, discreet, and never greedy. It's a dangerous hobby that makes her feel alive—and so she begins the guilty analysis of other people’s lives, and eventually, her own.

What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasureIn Atlanta, Kenny Bomar is a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in denial about his divorce and grieving his stillborn daughter. Chemicals killed their child, leaching from a type of plant the government is hiding in Black neighborhoods. Kenny’s coping mechanisms are likewise chemical and becoming more baroque—from daily injections of lethal snake venom to manufacturing designer drugs. As his grief turns corrosive, it taints every person he touches.Black epidemiologists Retta and Ebonee are called to the scene when a mysterious black substance is found to have killed a high school girl. Investigating these “blackouts” sends the women down separate paths of blame and retribution as two seemingly disparate narratives converge in a cinematic conclusion.Liquid Snakes is an immersive, white-knuckle ride with the spookiness of speculative fiction and the propulsion of binge-worthy shows like FX’s Atlanta and HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. Transfiguring a whodunit plot into a labyrinthine reinterpretation of a crime procedural, Stephen Kearse offers an uncanny commentary on an alternative world, poisoned.

A smog has spread. Food crops are disappearing. A chef escapes her career in London to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles. There, her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body.In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in alluring language, Land of Milk and Honey is a striking novel about food, sex and the intricacies of desire and longing.A rapturous novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the worldEndorsements"A rich novel of ideas" — The Guardian"A tasty treat" — iNews"A genius balance of page-turning and lyrical prose" — The Independent"A sharp, sensual piece of art. When I read I'm always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something" — Raven Leilani"It's rare to read anything that feels this unique. A richly imagined, ambitious, and haunting novel" — Gabrielle Zevin"Truly exceptional" — Roxane Gay"A blazing writer" — Daisy Johnson"Truly gifted" — Sebastian Barry"An arrestingly original writer" — The Sunday Times

March 1919. Far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the North-South split that remains today.But what if the KPG still existed now, today — working toward a unified Korea, secretly harnessing the might of a giant tech company to further its aims? That’s the outrageous premise of Same Bed Different Dreams, which weaves together three distinct narrative voices and an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope, spinning Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives into an extraordinary and unforgettable novel.Early on we meet Soon Sheen, who works at the sprawling international technology company GLOAT and comes into possession of an unfinished book authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a mysterious, revisionist history, tying famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project. This strange manuscript links together figures from architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe. It even includes M*A*S*H and the Moonies, and traces a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.Just as foreign countries have imposed their desires on Korea, so too has Park tucked different dreamers into this sprawling bed of a novel. Among them: Parker Jotter, Korean War vet and appliance-store owner, who saw something — a UFO? — while flying over North Korea; Nora You, nail salon magnate; and Monk Zingapan, game designer turned writing guru. Their links are revealed over time, even as the dreamers remain in the dark as to their own interconnectedness. A thrilling feat of imagination and a step forward from an award-winning author, Same Bed Different Dreams begins as a comic novel and gradually pulls readers into another dimension — one in which utopia is possible.A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present — loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media.

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to live out her days in the land of her birth. Her children are divided on whether she stays or goes, and in the wake of their father's death, the imagined stability of the family begins to fray.Meanwhile, youngest daughter Melissa has never let go of a love she lost, and Michael, now married to Nicole, is haunted by the failed perfection of the past. As Alice's final decision draws closer, all that is hidden between them rises to the surface.Set against the shadows of a city and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions: How should we raise our children? How do we do right by our parents? And how, in the midst of everything, can we satisfy ourselves?Endorsements'Heart and humour in abundance... exquisite' — The Times'A gorgeous novel from one of our most outstanding writers' — Bernardine Evaristo'Diana Evans is fast proving herself a novelist to rank alongside Anne Tyler' — Daily Mail'A warm but devastating narrative... Like any Evans novel, it is unputdownable' — Harper's BazaarNew York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023 — The New York TimesShortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political FictionSelected in Best Reads of 2023 by The Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Harper's Bazaar, New Statesman and Good HousekeepingWaterstones Book of the Year — WaterstonesThe Bookseller Editor's Choice — The BooksellerNew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice — The New York Times Book ReviewStarred review — Kirkus ReviewsGuardian Book of the Day — The Guardian

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.An artist of color becomes obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI. A world of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

An art-deco sentinel, The Helena apartment building has silently witnessed the changing face of South Miami Beach for seventy years, observing—without interfering—the countless lives housed within its walls. But a single unit has seen more life (and sometimes death) than others. Those who have called Apartment 2B home include: a Cuban concert pianist who now only plays in a nursing home; the widow of an intelligence officer raising their young daughter alone; a man waiting on a green card marriage to run its course so that he can divorce his wife and marry his lover, all of whom live together in 2B; a Tajik building manager with a secret identity; a Vietnam vet receiving packages from his ex-wife. Each tenant imbues 2B with energy that can either heal or overwhelm the latest resident, Lana.A mysterious woman struggling with her own demons, Lana mourns her beloved while unaware of the apartment’s sometimes tragic history. Distraught and alone, she is watched over by a ghost, and together, these two strangers—brought into community by The Helena—will find a measure of comfort and purpose, gaining a new insight into what we all owe one another.Bristling with compassion, desire, and a longing to connect, The Apartment is a portrait of the complex and at times troubled inhabitants of a single unit in a South Miami Beach building—an excavation of the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt our lives and a celebration of the communities that shine brightest in our darkest moment.

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course.On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet on line at an ice cream kiosk in the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When two leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors—one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong.In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women—no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface—whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims.But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media.White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences…Endorsements#1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel — R.F. Kuang.New York Times bestseller — The New York Times.