Best Reviewed Books of the Week Highlight Yiyun Li and Bonnie Garmus

**Fiction**

1. *Music Against the Night* by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It’s the kind of sui generis novel that doesn’t come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores.” – Cory Oldweiler (*The Boston Globe*)

2. *Peck & Peck* by Bonnie Garmus (Scribner)

4 Rave • 4 Positive

“It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count.” – Claire Clark (*The Guardian*)

3. *Solace House* by Will Maclean (Grove)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“There are faint echoes of Donna Tartt’s *The Secret History*: a close-knit group of students become increasingly absorbed by esoteric ideas that reshape their understanding of the world … Although it runs to more than 500 pages, *Solace House* sustains its atmosphere with remarkable consistency. Thoughtful, unsettling and ambitious, it is less interested in delivering conventional scares than in evoking a slow, disorientating collapse of reality itself.” – Julia Kelly (*The Irish Times*)

3. *Luna, Phoenix, Queen* by Julie Orringer (Knopf)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“Astonishing … *Luna, Phoenix, Queen* brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms, and the relief that can only come in telling a story for oneself.” – Meg Wolitzer (*The New York Times Book Review*)

5. *The End of Everything* by M. John Harrison (Riverhead)

4 Rave • 1 Positive

“A fascinating, sometimes frustrating and thoroughly original new novel … This book, a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing that can enlighten even when it obfuscates … This grim but powerful book portrays the many incompatible states of existence, and the baffling collapse of time, that stem from extreme crises.” – Dave Kim (*The New York Times Book Review*)

**Nonfiction**

1. *On Another Planet They Can Save Me* by Lieke Marsman (Catapult)

4 Rave • 1 Positive

“Cathartic and often wondrous … Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity’s most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure.” – *Publishers Weekly*

2. *American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs* by Shawn Gude (Simon & Schuster)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“This charmingly penned and prodigiously researched study both refreshes familiar stories and prods readers to reconsider common assumptions … A page-turning delight, *American Socialist* is an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme.” – Matthew E. Stanley (*Jacobin*)

2. *Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science* by Saul Justin Newman (MIT Press)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“Intriguing, eccentric … In an age of incessant online grifting and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy as US secretary of health, Newman’s conclusions are refreshingly simple. Longevity ‘science’ is largely built on nonsense data.” – Rachel Clark (*The Guardian*)

4. *The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East* by Kim Ghattas (Henry Holt & Company)

4 Rave

“Ghattas is well qualified to tease out the insidious relationships of ideology, convenience and betrayal that have condemned Lebanon to half a century of instability … If the best kind of American is one whose view of the Middle East is disinterested, benevolent and untainted by thoughts of commercial or strategic hegemony, Ghattas’s excellent book commemorates a breed that is all but extinct.” – Christopher de Bellaigue (*The New York Times Book Review*)

5. *Reds: A Global History of Communism* by Paul Mason (Scribner)

3 Rave • 1 Mixed

“A deeply researched, thought-through, essential history of a protean ideology.” – *Kirkus*.