Month: March 2022

A careening drama of American rich and poor crashing together in the 1980s, “All the Secrets of the World” is an intoxicating read. When a poor teenage girl, brilliant, bookish, and tough, is unexpectedly injected into a rich southern family riven by dysfunction, dangerous currents mix and then explode leaving a scientist missing, a drug dealer in prison, an outsider cop reluctantly quixotic, and our teenage heroine plunged into a cross-country odyssey. Throw in cameo appearances by Barbara Bush and you can see that this is no standardized drama. All the Secrets of the World harnesses the redoubtable writing chops of a prolific short story and nonfiction writer, and this debut is exuberantly, buoyantly penned with a complex plotline masterfully controlled. The amazing thing about the debut novel is that it sounds like it should be a “difficult” literary novel. Instead it is an immersive, entertaining read that also illuminates our human world. A must-read for 2022.

Four years ago, seasoned journalist and author, Frank Bruni of New York, aged 53, woke with heavily blurred vision in his right eye. Turned out, he’d had a stroke of sorts and there was a chance that he would lose left eye vision as well. At first bereft, Bruni flailed, trying experimental treatments, watching his partner walk away, harboring desolation… Then his journalistic and authorial instincts cut in and he began to both investigate the worlds of his diminishment and those of others (many of severity much greater than his) and to recalibrate his life philosophies. The result is “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” a beautifully written, generously researched, and deeply examined memoir of his recent years. Instead of continuing to flounder, the author discovers a largely invisible world of sufferers and existential adventurers, a world that inspired him to remake his own existential underpinnings. Peppered with wonderful stories of courageous souls, The Beauty of Dusk is not a soppy self-help Instagram pitch. Rather, it is a deeply and wise journey told humbly and with flowing, almost poetic prose. As someone poleaxed by almost trivial harbingers of mortality, I sank in, riveted by the flowing narrative, blessed by the close counsel. An uncommonly graceful and profound memoir, The Beauty of Dusk will surely figure in 2022 Best Of lists.

I have read more than a few eyewitness-to-climate-change books over the last decade. It is no exaggeration to say that “Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis” is the most engrossing and revelatory. Simon Mundy, a Financial Times journalist, has used his august newspaper’s cachet to roam the world over two years and tell human stories that encapsulate the terror and hope of these climate crisis times. Mundy walks over melting, collapsing Siberian steppes, talks to citizens of the Maldives and the Solomon Islands dealing with washed-away residences, chats with front-line inventors, investigates the illegal Amazon forest clearers and their victims, hears from reinsurers, travels through drying-up Ethiopia, views Greenland’s retreating glaciers, and talks to Chilean winemakers tweaking vineyard locations. Six continents and twenty-six countries, and dozens of interlocked narratives. Mundy is an exuberant, precise stylist who renders every chapter an investigative triumph, and his special talent is for finding people-oriented stories that not only enthrall or appall but are very, very human. Race for Tomorrow is spellbinding, essential reading at the beginning of our most crucial decade.

It has been a long time since I have sunk into a delicious mystery brew like “Nine Lives,” a thriller/mystery directly in the lineage of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None yet thoroughly modern. Nine utter strangers receive a letter with all nine names printed and then they begin dying. Familiar, huh? Peter Swanson is a deft, spry developer of characters and he controls the brilliant plot with military precision. A mystery like this, even one with canny characterization, is clearly designed to be read fast to unravel the plot intricacies and twists, and as such I treated it as a fast, delicious snack rather than as a memorable meal. Of course I read Nine Lives in one transfixed sitting. Of course.

Imagine the granddaughter of Kim Philby, the “Third Man” spy, novelizing the life of the woman who first introduced him to his Soviet handler. This sounds like a publishing beat-up, but no, it’s real, and the end result is a thoroughly engrossing, low-key spy thriller-cum-drama that hews close to real life. “Edith and Kim” is a tightly plotted, stylistically elegant account of Edith Tudor-Hart, small-time Soviet pawn with a huge historical impact, also a harried mother and anxious soul. A claustrophobic narrative of Edith’s days before and after the war, interrupted by imaginary letters from Kim in Soviet exile, the novel seeps with danger and dread, even though little violence takes place onstage. Unlike anything I have read before, Edith and Kim provided me with a novelist’s evocative glimpse into that hallowed espionage era. Recommended.