Lily King won the very first Kirkus Prize for Fiction, in 2014, for Euphoria, her wonderfully smart novel based on anthropologist Margaret Mead’s relationships with her second and third husbands—and the men’s relationship with each other. So I was excited to learn that her latest, Heart the Lover (Grove, October 7), is also about a love triangle. It’s narrated by a woman we know only as Jordan, who meets two ferociously smart guys in her 17th-century lit class. She starts dating Sam while trying to ignore the fact that she’s in love with his best friend, Yash; the two of them give her the nickname Jordan after Nick Carraway’s girlfriend in The Great Gatsby. This is a novel to immerse yourself in: “King is a genius at writing love stories,” according to our starred review. When we finally learn Jordan’s real name, on the last page of the book, it’s a stunning moment.
Here are four more highlights coming up in October:
Vaim by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls (Transit Books, October 7): The latest by Nobel laureate Fosse is made up of a single sentence split into three sections, each narrated by a resident of a small Norwegian fishing village, as they “ponder life, love, and what might’ve been,” according to our review.
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead, October 14): Wyeth has hit an artist’s block. He’s a young gay Black painter in New York, working part-time for an art restorer and trying to figure out which way to go with his work. A painting he made at the height of the pandemic was mistaken for a commentary on race, but he was mainly influenced by an Ingmar Bergman film. When he meets Keating, a white man who’s recently abandoned the Catholic priesthood, he sees an opportunity for change. “A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art,” says our starred review.
Wreck by Catherine Newman (Harper/HarperCollins, October 28): Newman made a splash last year with Sandwich, set during a family vacation on Cape Cod. In this follow-up, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts, dealing once again with the perils of an overactive mind: What is that mysterious rash? What if her own family had faced a tragic death, rather than one with which they’re tangentially connected? Our starred review says, “Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life.…A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.”
Sacrament by Susan Straight (Counterpoint, October 28): Straight’s latest is something of a companion to her kaleidoscopic California novel, Mecca, which was a finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize, though it absolutely stands alone. Opening in the spring of 2020, Straight introduces three nurses—Cherrise, Larette, and Marisol—who are caring for Covid-19 patients, and who, for the safety of their own families, are living in a trailer park near the hospital where they work. Then Cherrise’s 15-year-old daughter, Raquel, goes missing. Our starred review says, “Straight reminds us of where we have been and where we are going without once looking away.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
