compiled by Sally Brewster
Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class and region — from New England to Florida to California — these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels. “In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death,” one character tells us. Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high-school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples’ good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.
Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore
Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do? In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people — under the right conditions — could govern much better? With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken, but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern — not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.
More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen
High-school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF — Polly’s book-club friends have heard about it all. But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book-club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.
To Kill a Cook by W.M. Akers
Nobody in Manhattan eats better than Bernice Black. It’s 1972, and she is the city’s busiest restaurant critic, juggling her fiance and his two young sons with demands of fine dining. Bernice talks fast, walks faster, has a razor-sharp wit and no patience for anything — or anyone — that gets in her way. When she stops by the famed restaurant of her favorite chef and mentor, Laurent Tirel, early one morning, she stumbles across a horrific scene in the kitchen: Laurent’s severed head, perfectly preserved in a flawless mold of jellied aspic. Her meeting with the cops on the case proves only one thing — they know nothing about food or the seedy underworld that Black has made her home. With layoffs looming, Bernice makes the gamble of her career — she promises her editor she can catch Laurent’s killer before the week is out.
Wolf Hour by Jo Nesbø
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016: When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past and deep connections to a notorious gang, who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past, becomes fascinated by the case: He is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own. In 2022, an enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis — a self-described crime writer — travels to the U.S. to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer’s seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe. SP
Sally Brewster is the proprietor of Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.
