Author most recently of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell has a new novel Land expected to release June 2. It takes place in 1865, a story about Irishman Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam on assignment for the British to map the whole of Ireland. The Brits “need native speakers to learn place names and boundaries from the locals, then render them into English,” according to the forecast in Publishers Weekly May 1 issue. But Tomás has a mystical experience in a woodland area that drives him to take drastic measures, moving his family to the copse and drawing his own map about the land’s history and magical powers. From the novel’s description:
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
I’ve noticed some attention this next book has been getting, and while it’s not by a bestselling author, it certainly concerns a bestselling topic of which the intrigue never ends. Nonfiction, The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery is about women who doubted the assassination report prepared by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission. The book is authored by Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who shines a light on their efforts. Described as “painstakingly researched and engrossing,” it takes us back into the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. I have a feeling this could become one of the summer’s big books, either obviously or as a sleeper. Further from the description:
Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as ‘scavengers’ and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in The Housewives Underground, Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin, and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory.
Popular author Ann Patchett’s new novel Whistler is expected to arrive June 2. It’s said to be about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. During a visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daphne Fuller and her husband notice an older man following them. Daphne realizes it’s Eddie Triplett, who was her stepfather for a short period of time. He had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. From the novel’s description:
Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.
Dave Eggers’ new fiction Contrapposto is due out June 9, another big-name author with a book said to be a moving and very funny novel about allies and art, and what it means to be an artist. The protagonist is Cricket Dib, whose childhood love involves him in a life-long partnership and adventure. “Together they go to art school – an experience of dubious value – and then navigate the art world for the next fifty years, together and apart,” according to the book’s description. Further from the description:
All through their lives, Cricket sees Olympia as his soulmate and destiny, and while she is always his champion, romantically her eyes are always seeking something—and someone—else. Their love changes over the decades, but their commitment to each other, and their search for meaning in the making of art, never wanes.
This promises to be one of those engaging epic stories spanning decades with characters who never romantically commit but also never romantically call it quits, grabbing at our hearts and hopes.
The Longest Chapter 