Becoming Michelle Obama
There’s not much we can tell you about the former first lady’s hugely anticipated book, much of what we know comes from her Instagram account, where she shared the cover photo in May and told fans, “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” In a year of endless Trump books, her memoir will likely be an upbeat, inspirational reprieve for many readers.
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Kate Atkinson’s fans are as devoted as they are legion, whether for her Jackson Brodie mysteries or her singular World War II novels, Life After Life and A God in Ruins. Her latest returns us to London during the war, when a young woman is recruited by MI5 to spy on British fascists sympathetic to the Nazis. A decade later, now a producer for the BBC radio, she finds that her dangerous past may not be completely behind her. If Transcription is as stellar as Atkinson’s last two, it should be a highlight of the season.
The Feral Detective
Jonathan Letham, The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude hasn’t pleased all fans with recent outings such as Chronic City and Dissident Gardens. But hopes run high for this West Coast mystery, in which the private investigator of the title goes in search of a teenage girl who has gone missing in the desert. Being a Jonathan Lethem novel, naturally, The Feral Detective has plenty to say about American society along the way.
Lake Success
The Russian-born, Queens, N.Y.-raised author, Gary Shleyngart, is set to deliver his funniest, most big-hearted novel yet. During the fateful election year of 2016, Shteyngart travelled across the country and back on a Greyhound bus, writing a draft of this novel as went. That trip mirrors the one taken by his protagonist, a distraught New York hedge fund manager whose life is in free fall. Long Islanders will be happy to know that the itinerary includes a stop in the Nassau County village of the title.
All You Can Ever Know
Nicole Chung, The editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and former managing editor of The Toast reflects on her upbringing as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in an overwhelmingly white Oregon town. After college graduation she was asked by some white friends who were thinking of adopting a baby of a different race: Had there ‘ever been any issues’ growing up? This question prompts a sensitive, clear-eyed examination of the bullying and casual racism that had marked her childhood and, eventually, leads to a search for her birthparents and the origin story she has never known.
Small Fry
What was it like to grow up the daughter of Steve Jobs, mercurial co-founder of Apple computers? For Lisa Brennan-Jobs it was a decidedly mixed blessing: For the first 10 years of her life she barely saw him and he frequently denied paternity altogether. Brennan-Jobs was born to Jobs’ former high school girlfriend after they’d split up. Later he tried to include her in his family with wife Laurene, but Lisa never felt secure in their bond. Much more than a Daddie Dearest tell-all, Small Fry should be a complicated reckoning with the meanings of family.
