Contemporary Fiction Views: Time for new books

Although I didn’t finish a single book this week, the time I spent reading was a blessing. Especially in times like these, any downtime helps us to keep going. And we must keep going.

Below are some of the new novels coming out this week. Blurbs are from the publishers as usual. Links are to The Literate Lizard, the online bookstore run by our colleague Debtorsprison in the Readers and Book Lovers section. Find something that speaks to you and spend as much time on it as possible.

Three keys by Laura Pritchett
Ammalie Brinks has just lost the three keys to her life’s meaning – her husband, her job and her role as a mother after her son went off to college. She is also baffled that she is now middle-aged: How exactly did this happen? The horrifying thought of becoming irrelevant and invisible, her life fading into insignificance, distracts her as she drives through Nebraska with a broken plastic fork in her tangled hair.

There is happiness: New and selected stories by Brad Watson
A posthumous collection of beloved and never-before-read stories from a titan of contemporary Southern literature.

Brad Watson was a master of black comedy, extraordinary lyricism, horrific grotesqueness, and raw vulnerability; a sublime prose stylist whose novels and stories testified to the fertility and capriciousness of the South.

Bright objects by Ruby Todd
A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its turbulent aftermath in a debut novel that combines mystery, astronomy and romance.

Beep by Bill Roorbach
An exuberant, funny and highly original novel, told from the perspective of Beep, a squirrel monkey who – with the help of a brilliant young girl – paves the way to the future for a planet in crisis.

The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
In the soft morning light, a man, woman and child drive beyond the confines of a sleepy French post-industrial town into the forested mountains beyond. After several years of absence, the man has re-entered the lives of his wife and their young son, determined to start a family again. He takes them to Les Roches, a dilapidated house in the mountains where he grew up with his own ruthless father. While the mother anxiously watches the days pass, the son discovers the enchanting magic of nature there, from the herds of wild horses gathering beneath a grove of plane trees to the vast expanse of a glittering night sky.

Fog & Car by Eugene Lim
Long out of print, Eugene Lim’s wry and haunting debut novel returns to shelves with a new introduction by Renee Gladman and a fresh, reversible cover.

Stranded in a small Midwestern town shortly after his divorce, Jim Fog falls into aimless nostalgia. His ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York in the hope of skipping the grieving period of her marriage. Despite everything, Jim and Sarah find that they are still connected through an old mutual friend. When they both decide to pursue him, the resulting coincidences and mysterious events culminate in a soul swap that blurs the lines between reality and something far stranger.

The melancholy of the untold story by Minsoo Kang
A beautifully crafted, enriching saga inspired by East Asian mythology, The Melancholy of Untold History follows the great tradition of exploring time, generations, history and storytelling in the modern classics RF Kuang’s Babel, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, weaving together four complex yet entertaining stories that use the themes of love and grief to shape and create a nation’s literary narrative.

TIMELINE OF THE SERIES “READERS & BOOK LOVERS”