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…
Category: Fiction
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…
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Hogarth Review by Walter Cummins When I read The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I hadn’t known Kiran Desai had devoted twenty years to creating the novel, but I suspected…
Seven Heavens Away: A Novel by Ashraf Zaghal
Anansi Review by Brian Tanguay Three Palestinian teenagers are hanging out on the streets of Jerusalem. They insult one another as teenage boys do, smoke cigarettes, and enjoy ice cream…
The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kristen Menger-Anderson
Crown Review by Walter Cummins The Expert of Subtle Revisions opens with a conundrum in a section titled “Mira,” set in Half Moon Bay, California, in 2016: “As far as…
Loneliness & Company by Charlee Dyroff
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The world Charlee Dyroff creates in her novel, Loneliness & Company, is familiar and strange at the same time. New York City has become a…
A Wooded Shore by Thomas McGuane
Knopf Review by David Starkey The stories in A Wooded Shore are mostly set in Trump country, but Trump, and politics, are conspicuously absent. We do meet, in “Wide Spot,”…
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, published sixty-two years after his first, V, the author having reached age eighty-eight, replicates a number of themes treated…
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis
Holt Review by George Yatchisin Xenobe Purvis can write spooky, but then there are all sorts of haunts, aren’t there? Her debut novel The Hounding, set during the 18th-century in…
A Case of Life and Limb: The Trials of Gabriel Ward by Sally Smith
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In the second installment of Sally Smith’s captivating series, The Trials of Gabriel Ward, Sir Gabriel Ward, King’s Counsel, is once again confronted with a…