September 2023 new books

I’m making my way through the longlisted nominees for this year’s Booker Prize, given annually for, “in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.” More on these nominees later. For now, here are some interesting books to be released next month.

Love and Missed is described as “a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love’s gains and missteps.” The publisher’s description also says it’s British author Susie Boyt’s seventh novel and the first to be published in the United States. The plot concerns Eleanor, who has just had a baby, Lily, and her mother Ruth, who attempts to help her daughter with a myriad of kindnesses. Eleanor is a drug addict. “After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor’s apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth’s past defeats and disappointment.” This sounds promising to me.

Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad by Homer is inciting big excitement among her fans. She translated The Odyssey by Homer to great praise for the way she newly rendered the poem in contemporary parlance. Here, now, she’s bringing us her rendering of “the most revered war poem of all time” concerning the conflict sparked by Trojan Prince Paris’s taking for himself the beautiful Helen of Sparta, wife of Greek King Menelaus. I read an abbreviated prose version of the story in high school – enough to be familiar with the Greek characters Agamemnon and Achilles, Patroclus and Ajax; Trojans Hector and Aeneas – but I’ve had this simmering want to read the full Homer for quite a while. It will be an undertaking: Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad is more than 800 pages.

Out of all Ron Rash’s books, I’ve only read The Cove, which I loved, such unforgettable characters. Likely, that will also be said of Blackburn Gant in his new novel, The Caretaker. He’s a young man whose life has been changed by a childhood case of polio. He’s the live-in caretaker of a cemetery near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. When his best friend Jacob Hampton is drafted to fight in the Korean War, Gant agrees to watch over Jacob’s pregnant wife, Naomi. Jacob’s wealthy parents disinherited him for marrying the girl, a poor outsider without friends or family for support. “Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.” This feels like another winner from Ron Rash, lauded for his intuitive grasp of the Appalachian region where he sets his fiction. His best-known and most popular novel is Serena.

I mentioned Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal during last month’s book show, recommending it for its amusing yet wise illumination of daily life for 90-year-old Jewish Manhattan women. One can surmise the 90-something Segal has likely drawn these spirited ladies from life experience. Several of the stories have appeared in The New Yorker, where Segal has been a lifetime contributor. They’re short, crisp, bright vignettes where I found myself laughing or smiling. But I understood Segal is up to something more than the humorous wink at aging. Her clever eye translates common situations with irony and insight, while allowing the realities of aging (regarding friendship, memory, marriage, and, for some of these ladies, the Holocaust) to exist without excuse or qualification. I enjoyed this small book, and I have this feeling, if I could make the time, I’d enjoy it even more reading it again.   

What intrigues me about Landscapes, to be published September 12 by Two Dollar Radio, is the combination of a near future setting of ecologically decimating heat and drought, and the premise of the protagonist Penelope cataloging the contents of an estate’s once notable library. The estate’s English country house has been her home for two decades, according to the description, and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. “Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before.” Much tempting me here, including the diary format as well as this part of the description: “…[Penelope] clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.”