It feels fitting, in a way, that so many notable books this week are premised on endings — of lives, relationships, eras, even. After all, Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day — also known as Veterans Day in the U.S. – is Tuesday. The day annually marks the end of one of history's most catastrophic conflicts, World War I.
For the most part, the endings that animate many of this week's new novels don't seek such world-historical consequence. Ann Packer, Quiara Alegria Hudes and the other authors who grace the list below are concerned with much more intimate details, the kind you're more likely to encounter just down the street than on a battlefield or at an international summit.
That said, the twisty history of currency — the subject of this week's one nonfiction entry in the roundup — reinforces a lesson learned with the peace of 1918: Beware of endings; they have the odd habit of being yet another beginning in disguise.
Some Bright Nowhere, by Ann Packer
Ann Packer's first novel in a decade finds the American author again pursuing a deceptively simple premise: A long-married couple must prepare for and confront their final weeks together before death comes for one of them. But don't be fooled by the saccharine-sounding summary. As Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan explained in a review of Packer's previous novel, The Children's Crusade, the author has a knack for turning what might have been "mundane mass-market fiction" into a rich, splintered narrative that "illuminate[s] the unexpected depths of the commonplace."
The White Hot, by Quiara Alegria Hudes
It's possible you've already encountered Hudes' writing without knowing it. Though her name is new to the adult fiction shelf, the veteran playwright penned the book for the Tony-winning musical In the Heights, wrote the screenplay for its 2021 film adaptation and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her play Water by the Spoonful, about the return of an Iraq war veteran. In The White Hot, she explores a departure, in the voice of a young mother who tries to understand and explain her decision to leave her family for the freedom of a one-way ticket far, far away.
The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing
Laing's writing roams a Venn diagram of memoir, art criticism, history and fiction, rarely pursuing just one genre without including at least some elements of the others. Her memoir The Lonely City, for instance, wove the stuff of academic journals into a chronicle of her life in New York City. Her only previous novel, Crudo, dressed up in the persona of author Kathy Acker for an exercise that NPR's reviewer admiringly called a "memoir in drag." For its part, The Silver Book, though a novel, sets its inventions in an especially consequential – and controversial – era of Italian cinema: the final year or two before the brutal, unsolved murder of director Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Evensong, by Stewart O'Nan
O'Nan's latest novel finds the "oracle of the ordinary and maven of the middle class" — as NPR reviewer Heller McAlpin described the novelist in 2012 — once again mining the mundane for its hidden magic. In Evensong, the cult favorite centers a small, lovingly rendered group of older women as they navigate the peculiar challenges of growing older, together as friends.
The History of Money: A Story of Humanity, by David McWilliams
McWilliams is an Irish economist, podcaster and founder of a festival that pairs world economics with standup comedy. Promoting the festival back in 2010, McWilliams explained to NPR why he orients his work more toward the hoi polloi than the ivory tower: "If you think that knowledge is power, well, then giving people the knowledge, packaging the knowledge in such a way that the knowledge becomes accessible — that empowers the people." That rings true in this lively, lightfooted life story of currency, which cares less for comprehensiveness than keeping the door open for experts and novices alike.
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