Discover 9 Captivating New Books to Explore This Week

2023-11-09 08:26:03

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

We also recommend a memoir about food and literature by The Times's book critic Dwight Garner, whose way with a sentence will be familiar to regular readers of our books coverage. That skill is manifest throughout his memoir as well. Here he is, for instance, on the appeal that the chef Jacques Pépin’s cooking videos exerted during the early days of Covid lockdown: "With people out of work, and others fearful of joining them, and still others shell-shocked and instinctively practicing thrift, Pépin’s recipes spoke to a moment. I found many of his videos to be, on certain insomniac nights, strangely and almost unbearably moving. His age, his battered good looks, his accent, the slight sibilance in his voice, his culinary erudition worn lightly, his finely honed knife skills, and the ’70s-era funk of his wood-paneled kitchen: It was a mesmerizing package. I especially liked to watch him cook eggs."

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There’s more to read this week, of course, including a novel that pays homage to Shirley Jackson’s "The Haunting of Hill House" along with fiction from Teju Cole, Marie NDiaye, Jessica Knoll and others. In nonfiction, we recommend a collection of journalism out of Russia and a history of the vexing, fascinating attempt to study the mysteries of sleep. Happy reading.

—Gregory Cowles

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1. "Mulholland"

Mulholland | £27
Knoll’s assured novel begins near the end of the serial killer Ted Bundy’s gruesome spree: at a Florida sorority house where he attacked four sisters in 1978. Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy’s ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating instead the promise and perspicacity of his penultimate victims.

2. "London in the Raw"

First published in 1972, and newly reissued, this is a bubbly, empathetic and ultimately lovely novel of a belated coming-of-age in 1960s London. The heroine’s haunted relationship with her mother, and the ways that relationship reprises itself in her romantic life, give her story substance.

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3. "The Many Lives of Tiatira Mozē"

New Directions | Paperback, £17.95
Cole’s new novel collects the reflections of a Nigerian American professor who uses art to explore traumatic, sometimes violent histories. Paintings, photographs, antiques of dubious provenance: All prompt questions of identity, perspective and power, and invite readers to scrutinize themselves.

4. "That Time of Year"

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | £27
NDiaye’s latest psychological thriller, translated by Jordan Stump, follows a lawyer named Maître Susane who is reunited with a man she knew when they were both teenagers. But his presence brings fear rather than comfort: Something happened in his bedroom 30 years ago, and Maître Susane can’t recall what.

5. "Two Apples Fell from the Sky"

Hachette | £32.50
Originally published in an independent Russian newspaper, and translated here by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this collection of articles by a journalist who has since relocated to the West casts sympathetic light on the struggles of her country’s far-flung citizens.

6. "Artificial Unintelligence"

Penguin Poets | Paperback, £20
Schiff took a routine job in the Metropolitan Museum of Art soon after college; these poems revisit that time in short, staggered lines that are perceptive and often comic.

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