Hut's Place

Weekly Words About New Books in

Independent Bookstores

September 22, 2024

New Novels From Literary Titans Examine Millennial Angst and Ocean Colonization

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. With each of her first three novels, Irish author Rooney has grown her readership and her popularity. Conversations With Friends, featuring two smart but self-destructive women, put her on the literary map. She followed that with Normal People, about the relationship between a young man and woman that begins in college and is buffeted by diverging interests and poor decisions. It was greeted with a slew of starred reviews and landed on several Best of the Year book lists, which only built anticipation for her next book. When Beautiful World, Where Are You hit independent bookstores in the Fall of 2021, it flew off the shelves and it was an instant bestseller. And while Rooney adapted a different style of writing - telling much of the story through email exchanges between the two leading female characters - and was more frank in her descriptions of sex, Beautiful World also confirmed her reputation as a chronicler of the Millennial generation. It's hard to think of another author who has explored contemporary early adulthood relationships - fraught with disaffection, mistakes, recoveries, and even enlightenment - better than Rooney.

Not surprisingly, then, Intermezzo's release on Tuesday is cause for joy in the bookselling world. The story is set in Dublin and the main characters are disconnected brothers dealing with their father's death and it's effect on their lives. Peter is a successful lawyer who is finding it tough to manage his relationships with two women. His 22-year-old brother Ivan - a decade younger - is a socially challenged competitive chess player who meets an older woman dealing with issues from her own past. The grieving brothers must deal with their widening personal fissures and the emotional disarray of their relationships with women.

In its starred review Publishers Weekly wrote,"Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement . . . The novel's deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney's most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf . . . Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling."

Playground by Richard Powers. One of the book world's literary giants, Powers is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory, which remains a contemporary classic and backlist staple for indie bookstores. In 2021, his novel Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his newest work - releasing in in this country on Tuesday - was already longlisted by this year's Booker committee.

In Playground, Powers offers up familiar themes of technology and environment, weaving artificial intelligence, oceanography, and climate change into a story that follows the lives of four people who gather to contemplate a plan to colonize the ocean. Here's a brief description from the Booker Prize website:

"Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a 3,000-year-old board game. Elsewhere, Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.

All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever."

Siblings Seek Answers About Their Father's Puzzling and Suspicious Death

The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave. October's #1 Indie Next pick arrived in bookstores a couple of weeks early, much to the delight of many booksellers and fans of Dave's work. Her previous novel, The Last Thing He Told Me, was also an Indie Next choice back in 2021 and was made into a streaming series starring Jennifer Garner. In her new thriller, Liam Noone, the thrice-married patriarch of a famed hotel empire, is found dead under suspicious circumstances. His death is ruled accidental, but that doesn't sit well with his daughter Nora and her estranged brother Sam, who join forces to find out what happened. In doing so, they unravel a larger mystery about who their father really was.

The Last Thing He Told Me hits the ground running with a husband's puzzling disappearance, one that throws his wife and her step-daughter into a frantic and tension-building search. With The Night We Lost Him, Dave avoids such a breakneck pace, opting instead for richer, more emotionally charged character development. She also tells two stories, alternating between the siblings' search for answers and a decades-long relationship between Liam and a mysterious woman that proves to be linked to his demise.

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WHY THE COLUMN?

Hi, I'm Hut Landon, and I'm a bookseller in an independent bookstore in BerkeIey, CA.

My goal here is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what indie booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.

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