New books coming August 2023

Here you’ll find delightful temptations urging you to “hop on a magic carpet ride” (my second grade teacher’s description of reading time) as you wind down your summer days: Three books by beloved literary novelists and two nonfiction accounts, one history (see below) and the other a memoir originally published in 1962, now in a new edition.

I’m amazed at the number of books concerning World War II that continue to be published, and yet at the same time not surprised, considering the war era’s historically rich and necessary stories. (I’m currently reading The Oppermanns, a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger.) France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain is set to release August 22, what’s described as a blend of courtroom drama, political intrigue, and narrative history about the French leader who collaborated with Hitler. “Five years later, in July 1945, after a wave of violent reprisals following the liberation of Paris, Pétain was put on trial for his conduct during the war.” The book’s description continues:

The defense claimed he had sacrificed his personal honor to save France and insisted he had shielded the French people from the full scope of Nazi repression. Former resisters called for the death penalty, but many identified with this conservative military hero who had promised peace with dignity.

The book’s author, Julian Jackson, is best known for the biography A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle.

Fans of Ann Patchett will be happy to learn she’s publishing a new novel next week. It presents a mother who tells her three daughters about a long ago, young romance with an actor who became world famous. They’re picking cherries on the family orchard in northern Michigan during the pandemic, sheltering in place and filling in for the pandemic’s absent workers. The mother’s storytelling fills the long working hours, as she shares what happened the summer she met Peter Duke, and why she left behind a promising stage and screen life. Tom Lake is being described (here) as a “moving portrait of a woman looking back at a formative period in her life and sharing some—but only some—of it with her children.” It’s being praised (here) for the way Patchett “blends past and present with dexterity and aplomb.”

A new James McBride novel is always reason for celebration. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store begins with workers on a redevelopment project in 1972 discovering a skeleton at the bottom of a well in a rundown area in Pottstown, PA. The answer to the mystery of its identity and fate begins 40 years in the past, a secret long held by the residents of the Chicken Hill neighborhood, and it involves a Jewish couple, Moshe and Chona Ludlow. Chona runs the eponymous grocery and Moshe a local dance hall and theater that he desegregates for their Black neighbors. Over time, the Jewish and Black communities form a bond. When the state wants to institutionalize an orphaned deaf boy, according to the book’s description, “it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.” Lots of rave advanced reviews for this new fiction by the popular and award-winning McBride.

William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is one of my forever favorite books, published in 2002, the story of Logan Mountstuart’s 20th century life told from his intimate journals. Boyd’s new novel The Romantic similarly follows another protagonist’s whole life, this time as he lives through adventures in the 19^th century. The Guardian writes in their review: “Boyd is abundantly talented at capturing life’s disconnections, in prose that provides no easy consolations. This may be why the ‘whole life’ novel, exemplified by Any Human Heart, occupies such a special place in his body of work, and why it is satisfying to see him return to this cradle-to-grave territory.” If you read the full Guardian review, you’ll find the protagonist soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo and plays billiards with the poet Lord Byron and finds the love of his life. That’s the stuff of Any Human Heart, so my hopes are high for The Romantic.

Diana Athill (1917-2019) was an esteemed British editor at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch, where she worked with some of literature’s most famous and talented literary authors, such as V.S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys (with the latter on the classic novel Wide Sargasso Sea). Athill is also famously known for writing a series of critcally praised memoirs. Next month, New York Review Books is reprinting the first one, Instead of a Letter, originally published in 1962. Athill was “nearly” forty-three when she wrote it, according to the NYRB description, which continues:

In this searching book, [Diana Athill] recalls her childhood on her grandparents’ magnificent estate, the teenage romance that was certain to lead to marriage, her university days coinciding with the Second World War, and the sudden dissolution of her engagement, a loss that became the defining experience of the next twenty years of her life.

In 2009, Athill won Britain’s Costa Biography Award for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End, and also the National Book Critics Circle Award the same year for the same book here in the States. (I’m a member of the NBCC.) I didn’t love the book as much as I thought I would, and clearly I was an outlier given its vast praise and popularity. I can’t help but to think I read it at a time that wasn’t right for me. It happens in a reading life. Timing and mood can affect connection with a book, which is why I want to read Diana Athill’s work again, and I’ve got my eyes on this new release.