This week: A novelist updates Jane Austen with the story of three Connecticut women and the pitfalls of love, a memoir about gracefully aging and addressing life’s complications, one Chinese woman’s journey through the Wild West, a new thriller about a retired FBI agent called back to chase a serial killer, and a sweeping look at what immigration will do to America over the next 50 years.
The Three Weissmanns of Westportby Cathleen Schine
A Jane Austen-inspired story of Connecticut in this charming new novel.
In her latest novel, Cathleen Schine transports Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility from 18th-century England to today’s Manhattan and Westport. The modern equivalent of primogeniture in the U.S., as Schine sees it, is divorce. Betty Weissman is 75 years old when her husband of 50 years announces that he is leaving her for a woman half his age. Soon, Betty is moving out of their palatial apartment on Central Park West, and her husband’s scheming girlfriend is moving in. Betty relocates to a wealthy cousin’s neglected beach cottage in Westport, Connecticut, and her two grown daughters—who run into their own problems—soon join her. The impulsive and emotional Miranda, an updated version of Austen’s Marianne, is a literary agent sued into bankruptcy after it’s discovered that some of her authors made up their memoirs. The more restrained and pragmatic Annie, reminiscent of Austen’s Elinor, is drowning in debt and can no longer afford her apartment. Once they relocate to Westport, both daughters fall in love—Miranda with a younger actor who has a child of his own and Annie quite awkwardly with the brother of her stepfather’s paramour. Publisher’s Weekly writes, “It’s a smart crowd-pleaser with lovably flawed leads and the best tearjerker finale you’re likely to read this year.”
Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro
A moving and frank memoir about coming to terms with life’s big questions.
Plunging into what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung termed "the afternoon of life," fortysomething Dani Shapiro wrestles with self-doubt and anxiety that awakens her in the night. Is life just a string of errands, dinner dates, emails, meetings, and to-do lists, she wonders? In Devotion, a spiritual detective story, Shapiro shares her search for meaning in everyday life. Raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish home, Shapiro had discarded the rules and rituals of her childhood but needed to place her faith in something. "I was immensely moved by this elegant book, which reminded me all over again that all of us—at some point or another—must buck our courage and face down the big spiritual questions of life, death, love, loss, and surrender," writes Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Dani Shapiro probes all those questions gracefully and honestly, avoiding overly simple conclusions, while steadfastly exploring her own complicated relationship to faith and doubt.
The Poker Bride by Christopher Corbett
The untold story of a Chinese immigrant’s life in the 1870s American West.
A picture of Polly Bemis shows a woman standing with a basket and two horses, wearing the bun and ankle-length cotton dress that was the Western style at the time. The only thing that made her unique was her face—Bemis was Chinese. But her life was hardly typical: Her poor parents sold her into prostitution in China, then she was sold to a wealthy Chinese merchant in Idaho who lost her to a rancher in a poker game. The man who won her broke from the anti-Chinese sentiment of the time and married her. Journalist Christopher Corbett—who “juggles facts and apocrypha like a master” the Baltimore Sun says—uses Bemis’ incredible story to explain the experience of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush in the American West. The Sun says that The Poker Bride “is a literary and historical sleeper—a true surprise, not a snooze... Corbett cements his claim as an ace surveyor of America's borderland of fable.”
The Bricklayerby Noah Boyd
A former FBI agent returns to stop a killer kicks off this promising new series.
A former FBI agent who left the Bureau behind to be a bricklayer gets sucked back into his old job after foiling would-be bank robbers out a window in Noah Boyd’s new thriller, The Bricklayer. Steve Vail grudgingly agrees to help the FBI find the killers who promise to stop only if the Bureau pays up—a scheme that unfortunately is working. Boyd, writing under a pseudonym, is himself a former agent who spent two decades hunting serial killers, and some speculate whether his thriller is drawing on personal experience. Like his character Vail, Boyd reportedly clashed with his own bosses.
The Next Hundred Millionby Joel Kotkin
A bold prediction of what America will look like in 2050.
America’s economic outlook might seem pretty bleak by now, but in 40 years, the country could be thriving in the places worst hit by the Great Recession—the Heartland Plains states and the suburbs, Joel Kotkin argues in The Next Hundred Million. By 2050, Kotkin estimates that the U.S. population will grow by 100 million, mostly through Asian and Hispanic immigration, and that those new residents will be entrepreneurs who will flock to the center of the country instead of the huge coastal cities. “At its best, The Next Hundred Million combines deftly energetic and sweeping analysis, spanning everything from the sociology of immigrant communities to labor economics, with healthy smatterings of revelatory facts,” Tom Vanderbilt says. “Kotkin is particularly good at countering casual assumptions with larger data patterns.”
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