Random House Review by Walter Cummins It’s the language and telling that makes Vigil such a pleasure to read. While the subject is death and the act of dying, the…
Category: Fiction
The Society by Karen Winn
Dutton Review by Walter Cummins While reading Karen Winn’s new novel, The Society, a vivid memory of a 1935 James Thurber cartoon kept popping into my head. That one has…
Railsong: A Novel by Rahul Bhattacharya
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Charulata Chitol is an unlikely heroine. The motherless daughter of a railway worker, Charu, as she’s known, lives with her father and brothers in India’s…
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Europa Review by Walter Cummins This, Miller’s tenth novel, was a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and received two major British awards for historical fiction. The story is historical…
I Could Be Famous: Stories by Sydney Rende
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The epigraph to Sydney Rende’s debut collection of short stories is a quote from Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should A Person Be? “How should a…
A Desert Between Two Seas by A. Muia
Georgia Review by Paul Willis A. Muia’s richly entangled grouping of fourteen short stories, A Desert Between Two Seas, explores the afterlife of the Spanish missions in Baja California. While…
Repetition: A Novel by Vigdis Hjorth, Translated by Charlotte Barslund
Verso Review by Brian Tanguay It’s late November in Norway and the days are cold and short. A woman and her dog occupy a small cabin in a remote, forested…
10 Best Books of 2025
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins A Guardian and a Thief is chaotic novel, filled with surprising turns and ironic shifts, with characters whose plans constantly backfire, causing accidental but often…