A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF – Megha Majumdar

“Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present.”

Next up on my NBA reading list is Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf 2025). This slim novel packs a powerful punch, each word a balled fist of intent and despair. The writing is beautiful without being pompous, and the multi-faceted characters reveal themselves in a prism of contradicting colors without ringing hollow or over the top. Despite it being well done and palatable (book clubs will love it), this is one story my heart couldn’t have handled if it was even one page longer – as is that ending stings.

The novel is set in the near future in Kolkata, where climate change has rendered the town nearly unrecognizable. Famine and floods have overwhelmed the country, and many have turned to the city for survival; it is bursting at the seams. Children are starving. Meanwhile, the sole remaining billionaire observes the devastation from a floating hexagon, occasionally donating food (never enough) to those in need (everyone).

Ma, the former manager of the homeless shelter, is preparing to go to America. Her husband is already there, and immigration has approved her, her two-year daughter, and her father to join him. The novel takes the reader through their last seven days before the flight is to depart as the city descends into a starved madness around them.

It’s a novel about what a parent will do when their child is starving, how the communities we build look out of each other, and how there is a bit of both guardian and thief in us all.

Read this book.

SHADOW TICKET – Thomas Pynchon

“Cheese – wait, cheese… has feelings, you say? You mean like… emotions?”

“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”

“Secretly?”

“Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we… wouldn’t want to go through all that Christian-and-Romans business again, would we?”

I once had a shirt that read “I am Thomas Pynchon.” I’m pretty sure I stole it from some guy, but I have seemingly lost track of it as well. I need another one in my life because people don’t talk about Pynchon enough.  Every so often a grainy photo shows up allegedly of the author, but Pynchon is never in the spotlight.  He has long held the policy that his works should speak for themselves, and he has furiously guarded his privacy. I wanted him to get longlisted for the Booker, but the requirements of the nominees directly conflict with his longstanding pattern and practice of not doing appearances and interviews.  At 88 years old, his recent novel,  Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press 2025) is likely his last chance – maybe he’ll come out of the shadows for it.

V. was Pynchon’s debut novel and my favorite – and that satirical, postmodernm wtf am I reading voice is still the same.  Shadow Ticket is the third of his “detective” novels. It’s set in 1932 Milwaukee – smack dab in the Great Depression with the Nazis beginning their rise – and follows a private detective named Hicks who has been tasked with finding the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune. (An heiress he’s a bit familiar with already.)  The “ticket” will see him drugged and tossed on a transoceanic liner, eventually ending up in Hungary. There’s a sub marine hanging out in Lake Michigan, a missing Al Capone of Cheese, crooked cops, a Statute of Liberty made of Jell-O to welcome immigrants, radioactive cheese, would-be assassins masquerading as Santa’s elves, and fascists on the cusp of a war that would change the world as Hicks knows it.

“Somebody better sell you a ticket on the next train out forever,” his once girl April croons on the album he loses. But this job is Hicks’s ticket out. And there’s something about the novel that reads like a goodbye.

The satire, the absurd, the pop culture references, the writing in general … Shadow Ticket is Pynchon.  And it does speak for itself.

Read this book.

THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (AND HIS MOTHER) -Rabih Alameddine

“She asked me to tell you she would break the world for you.”

“I begin this story with the lie, and like a great whale leading other sea creatures in her wake, it was followed by a whole pod. I wish I can say I had doubts. I didn’t. I jonahed that whale, swam right through and settled in.”

The National Book Association journey continues with finalist Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), (Grove Press 2025). A love story set in Lebanon, the novel dances in a nonlinear fashion, covering 1960-2023 in the life of Raja, “the neighborhood homosexual” and his mother – the greatest love of his life.  The setting alone is going to pack a punch – we have the Lebanese liquidity crisis, a civil war, the Beirut port explosion, and a pandemic.  Throw in a gay professor who lives with his mom (who curses like a sailor) and two cats named Monet and Manet and you know this going to be one hell of a ride down memory lane.  Buckle up.

What makes this novel is Ameddine’s writing – a biting humor that spills over the pages through Raja’s unique voice. You will love Raja and his mom, and that humor somehow balances out the tragedies that befall them.  Sometimes the humor falls flat and sometimes Raja’s voice does seem to falter – particularly in the civil war section. It could have been intentional due to the fact he’s being held captive in that section, but it seemed more the struggle of a writer trying to do a delicate balancing act between witty little quips and an extremely tragic and sexually exploitive kidnapping.

I’m not going to spoil the major plot here – but the novel revolves around an invitation to a fellowship in Virginia that isn’t quite what it seems – a whale of a lie.  That set up creates the bookends to the novel, but the true (true) story , as the title indicates, is one of a mother and son.

It’s a fine book with some exceptional moments, but I wasn’t blown away.

THE IRISH GOODBYE – Heather Aimee O’Neill

“In her clenched hand, the ashes felt like the remains of something destroyed.”

Heather Aimee O’Neill’s debut novel, The Irish Goodbye ( Henry Holt 2025) immediately called to mind Joyce Carol Oates’s We were the Mulvaneys  (which I read in the ‘90s). Both are set in NY, both deal with family tragedy and family secrets, and both center around four siblings and how the tragedy impacted their childhoods and subsequently who they became as adults. Both also have themes of atonement, forgiveness and healing. I enjoyed both quite a bit.

In 1990, there is a fatal accident on Topher’s boat.  This accident nearly destroys the family, and ultimately Topher takes his own life several years later. (That’s not really a spoiler, I promise.)  Now adults, his sisters, Cait, Alice and Maggie, return to the family home for Thanksgiving in 2015.  There, ghosts will be faced, secrets exposed, and lives forever changed again.

Cait, a divorced lawyer with twin children, has flown in from London. She intends to meet up with a high school crush, the brother of the boy who died on Topher’s boat. She’s flailing, struggling with her guilt over what happened that day and her last conversation with Topher. She is not happy.

Alice is overwhelmed. She has become the caregiver for her parents, who are aging. She also has to care for her own family. Her husband does the bare minimum.  She is so angry at Cait for running away to London after Topher died. She is struggling to carve out time and space for herself, to reclaim her own identity, when she finds herself in a difficult position.  She is not happy.

Maggie is the youngest. She was the last person to see Topher, the only note left was for her to not open the door. She still has so much anger and guilt, but she is clinging to happiness. Happiness being her relationship with Isabel, the woman she is bringing home for Thanksgiving to meet her very Catholic mother who doesn’t agree with her lifestyle.

Things are going to come to a head at Thanksgiving.  Where will the Ryan family stand when the dust settles?

This is a really palatable book. I think book clubs will love it, and I can see why it’s a Reads with Jenna selection. It is a fantastic debut, with the story unraveling slowly and the alternating POVS working so well in carrying the plot. There’s no confusion over whose section you are in because the characters are so different. Each sister has their own independent issues that don’t take a backseat, which I love.  It’s messy. It’s family.

Read this book.

THE WILDERNESS – Angela Flournoy

With the Booker dozen under my belt, I decided to swing for the National Book Award .  (I’d already read two, so I figured why not.)  First up is Angela Flournoy’s longlisted The Wilderness (Mariner 2025). An ambitious novel, it felt at times much longer than its 290 pages. It’s weighty, with so much heart and heartbreak, as we time hop  – flitting from 2008 to 2027 with alternating POVS, primarily those of a core group of friends – Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia. Desiree’s sister, Danielle, does eventually get her own POV – I wish it had happened earlier, and we saw more of her throughout the years as opposed to just word dump, but it worked well at the point of the novel it appears.  (A love/lust interest also gets his POV early on, which seems  bit off putting but is needed to propel the plot.)

This female friend group is everything. The novel opens when they’re in their early 20s and takes them through middle age.  Whereas Desiree and Danielle are estranged, the group of four has a bond tighter than blood.  The individual relationships within the group change over time, but the core remains solid. They disagree with each other, they talk about each other, they hurt each other, but they love each other, and when the rubber hits the road, they are there.  Unflinchingly honest, but there. They are all trying to figure life out, while throwing out the lifelines for each other. Their lives are ugly and gritty and beautiful.

Desiree’s sections are my favorites – her relationship with her grandfather and her sister held my interest more than the other three.  But the most beautiful part of the novel is a description of a grown-over and abandoned garden after tragedy strikes. The writing takes on that grief and loss in a powerful way.

How Flournoy does character development is an art.  She’s not working with a lot of space, but she’s covering a lot of detail and time. Her writing is crisp and certain; each word placed with precision while at the same time following the unpredictable nature of life.  The structure of this novel and how it was a roaring success in telling this story of friends, is likely what prompted the nomination.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but there is something to be said for adult friends who stay, who make space and time through all stages of life.

Read this book.

WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU – Patricia Lockwood

“A warm afternoon in winter, and Shakespeare’s wife was asking to see me. She wanted to buy my brain, but how to explain that is was no longer worth anything?”

Y’all may recall the 2021 Booker season and my dark horse favorite, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This.  Her follow-up was published this year, and I put Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead 2025) on my Booker predictions. (They do like repeaters.) It wasn’t nominated, but that didn’t stop me from getting my library request in, especially after I saw that fantastic cover. I’m glad I did, but let’s go ahead and get the cat out of the bag – this one didn’t wow me quite the same way.

Will There Ever Be Another You is Lockwood’s fictional account of her dealing with long Covid. The events take place after the publication of No One is Talking About This, but there is a section dealing with the press tour and interviews she was required to participate in due to the nomination for Booker award. “You can’t win if you don’t go,” her husband tells her.  (I was unaware of the “in-person” requirements until @gygoldenreviewer advised me of them in a discussion about Pynchon. As an aside, gygoldenreviewer’s daughter makes an appearance in this novel – she is the 15 year old Mollie who posed the question to the panel.)

Much like No One is Talking About This, this novel is for the chronically online and the sections often read like viral TikToks on loop, soundbytes included.  (I didn’t expect to see That “One Mailman” but there he and his lil’ stank was!) There’s politics and pandemics and unnamed presidents that cause paranoia to even think about. But I couldn’t follow all the breadcrumbs this time, and many of the internet references went over my head as did some of the literary and fine arts.  (I’ve never read Anna Karenina – shhh don’t tell anyone.)

One aspect I really appreciated was when she talked about her mind and how she was losing words (and her identity). She’s talking about saying the wrong word, the one she wants just on the edge of brain. In the section where she explains this symptom, she sums up the problems with “A corundum, she thought, that might never be solved.”  She, of course, means conundrum, and this glitch in the mind is the best way to show not tell what she means when talks about this symptom.

The novel reads like a fever dream, even before the ‘shrooms, but it doesn’t seem as organic as No One is Talking About This – the form seems a bit more forced into madness here and some of the magic is lost, but if that epilogue says anything, it’s that Lockwood had to cling to her writing, using the disaster as her temporary reef.

 While I think it swings and misses some, I don’t think anyone writes quite like Lockwood.

I SEE YOU’VE CALLED IN DEAD – John Kenney

“Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now.”

@rolly.looks.at.books recommended John Kenney’s I See You’ve Called in Dead (Zibby Publishing 2025), and when the world’s most well-read bichon recommends something, you listen. It’s quirky, hilarious, and full of heart. I can see why it draws comparisons to Backman’s A Man Called Ove with its loveable, quirky cast and ruminations on death (and what it means to be alive.)

Bud is a 44-year-old obituary writer. His wife left him, and he’s just going through the motions. (He’s also about to be the age his mom was when she died.) He used to be good at his job, but not anymore – the obituaries he writes just a fill the blank where he often gets the information wrong. He gets drunk one night, accesses the database, and writes his own obituary – a hilarious self-depreciating one – that he publishes worldwide. He immediately gets suspended with pay pending a hearing. Everyone thinks he’s dead.  “I got better,” he says. They can’t fire him because he’s dead in the system, and they have to figure out how to convince a computer he’s alive.  (Hey – don’t fire the folks who make mistakes but also bake brownies and remember birthdays and can make sure a person isn’t dead in HR.)

The reader realizes pretty quickly what’s coming – Bud is going to face a death that will mark him forever, and in doing so, he learns to live.  Oh, it’s a kick in the teeth you see coming from miles away but every line leading up to that moment is worth it.

Bud starts going to funerals of people he doesn’t know after meeting a girl at the funeral for his ex-mother-in-law. He takes his friend, Tim, with him. Slowly he introduces us to Tim and their relationship. (You will love Tim, which is the point.) We also meet Leo, the 7 almost 8-year-old neighbor, and Clara, the woman from the funeral.  We see their traumas and how they all deal with death and living and grief and happiness.

Kenney was inspired to write this novel after his brother passed from pancreatic cancer.  What he captures in his author’s note is his brother’s humor even in being terminal.  That humor in what is a dark subject matter is what makes this book so much of a heart hug.

This year, I turned 43. My father was 43 when he died. To say it’s not something I’ve thought about at length would be a lie.   I connected to this book in both expected and unexpected ways – it’s a special one, for sure. 

Read this book.

THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY – Kiran Desai

THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY: Kiran Desai
Random House :  23 September 2025 (US)Hamish Hamilton (Penguin): 25 September 2025 (UK)
Page Count: 670

First line: The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day.

Blurbed by:

Lauren Groff – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Andrew Sean Greer – (Numerous awards, including the Pulitzer. No Booker nominations.)

Hisham Matar – (Longlisted in 2024 for MY FRIENDS. Shortlisted in 2006 for COUNTRY OF MEN)

Namwali Serpell – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Ann Patchett – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Khaled Hosseini – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Sandra Cisneros – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Junot Diaz – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Mohsin Hamid – (Shortlisted twice : In 2007 for THE RELUNCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST and 2017 for EXIST WEST)

THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY is Kiran Desai’s third novel.  She won the 2006 Booker Prize for THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS, her second novel.  Desai was born in India but moved to the US when she was 16.  She currently lives in New York. Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been shortlisted for the Booker three times (CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY (1980), IN CUSTODY (1984) and FASTING, FEASTING (1999)), making the prize a bit of a family affair.

It’s the last “Don’t Judge a Book” of the 2025 Booker 101 season! And a bit of a dud in that the covers are the same.  It is a lovely cover though – soothing shades of blue and pink, near perfect font and font sizing, interesting geometric designs that make me think of gorgeous fabric… it’s a great cover.

I have issues, however, with the paper chosen.  The paper seems a heavier weight than is standard with a  bit of gloss to it – making the book deceptively heavy and creating a glare on the words when read under a light.  Maybe it’s the thinness of the pages not the weight of the paper?  I’m not sure –  the goal was to make the book more manageable and not unwieldy to hold, but I think I’d rather have had a thicker book. 

“How can you trust that the art isn’t made from the bones and ashes of innocent people?” (201)

“Because a fairy tale compels, that’s why. You love the beauty, but secretly you also love the darkness.” (268)

“I became a ghost. There is nothing lonelier than being a ghost.” (436)

“But there was a story behind that story. A story that lived behind a story that had been told was often a story that could not be told because the person who could tell it had been destroyed.” (524)

In a lot of ways, Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny reminds me of Endling – primarily withthat meta framework of the story within a story.  Reva hits you over the hit with it in a glorious and fantastic way, while Desai kisses it throughout the chunk of a novel – appearing in primarily Sonia but also Sunny. There’s also the attempt to connect to Western readers – Reva uses dog breeds, particularly goldens, and Sonia intentionally changes guavas to peaches. I think Endling is the stronger literary work, and I remain befuddled that it wasn’t even shortlisted. But this isn’t about Endling.

Spanning 1996 – 2002, this is only Desai’s third novel, and it was twenty years in the making. It reads a bit precocious and superfluous, at times getting in its own way. It tries too hard, and it shows. That said, it’s still a very good novel. Of the Booker 13, I’d likely have shortlisted it still, but I wasn’t wowed.

Things of note:

Magical realism. The use of dogs throughout – not just the ghost hound, but the tchotchke Ilan bought her and Pasha as well. The juxtaposition of journalism and fiction.  Immigration.  (Visas, green cards, and the Appalachian “scheme”). Satya as a foil.

Food. The kebabs. Also Ulla leaving the Darjeeling tea but taking the Kansas City bbq sauce.   “He’d lost his natural sense of identity to one of T.S. Eliot and cheese sandwiches.” (282)

The nervous condition of those who leave their homelands for other lands, their home countries suddenly lacking in young people because they’ve immigrated. (My use of “nervous conditions” comes from  Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel of the same name published in 1988.)

Read this book.

AMONG THE BURNING FLOWERS – Samantha Shannon

“Hope was now a dying lamp, and hers only had a little more oil.”

“I am a wine-makers’ child – I will not waste the fruits of my labour by tipping them on to the ground.”

The Bone Season was my introduction to Samantha Shannon well over a decade ago. While I still love the Pale Dreamer and I will continue with the dystopian series (even though I have to start over since she rewrote the first four), the high fantasy Roots of Chaos series is something special. Among the Burning Flowers (Bloomsbury 2025), a short little prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree, was one of my 2025 most anticipated reads because of just how much I love that world. Among the Burning Flowers is considerably smaller, and compared to The Priory and A Day of Fallen Night, Among the Burning Flowers seems a bit more like a novella. (It was, in fact, a one-sitting read for me.)

The novel, while a good introduction to the Roots of Chaos world and a little less intimidating in size than the other two, seems to have been a gift to readers who already love the world and who wanted to see more of Donmata Marosa, a secondary but very intriguing character from The Priory. Among the Burning Flowers is her story –  The story is one of a princess held hostage in her kingdom, a princess who is betrothed to a man who will be her escape from her father’s control, or would have been.  The engagement is called off when the Draconic Army awakens, and Fyredel takes over the Kingdom of Yscalin, using Marosa’s father as his vessel.

I’m accustomed to the chunkers, so this seemed like a fragmented part of something larger. I wonder if we’re going to be seeing more of these – slim volumes that focus on a narrower cast of characters. I wouldn’t hate it, but I just love those sprawling, massive tomes.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES – Ben Markovits


THE REST OF OUR LIVES: Ben Markovits
Summit Books :  13 January 2026 (US)Faber & Faber : 27 March 2025 (UK) (I’m using the UK edition)
Page Count: 239

First line: When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.

Blurbed by:

Lucy Caldwell – (Numerous awards.  No Booker nominations.)

Sarah Hall – (Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 for THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO. Longlisted in 2009 for HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN.  She has also served as a previous Booker judge.)

THE REST OF OUR LIVES is British-American author, Ben Markovits, twelfth novel.  Markovits grew up in Texas, London, and Berlin. He studied at Yale and Oxford. After college, he played professional basketball in Germany.  Like some of the other nominees, he was selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists by Granta. (2013) He currently teaches creative writing in London.

Don’t Judge a Book…..

Here we have the case of two covers that I equally enjoy – and neither actually does the book justice.  I get it – it is a cross-America road trip so both cover designers leaned into that.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s the only part of the brief the designers were given because neither cover actually matches the book.

The UK edition is in fluorescent orange and pink with a rear view mirror in the center.  The silhouette of a boy and girl and the sun either setting or rising is reflected from the backseat.  I could make the argument it’s intentional – that it’s a setting sun on Tom’s life as a father now that his son and daughter are both grown.  On the edges of the rearview are the silhouettes of a what is likely supposed to be Tom and his wife. The steering wheel is in the bottom corner. It’s a perfect family road trip. While the novel touches on that family unit, it’s really more focused on Tom’s midlife crisis.  It’s an appealing cover and it does feel like a Midwest road trip, but Tom was alone for his journey – alone with the ghosts and regrets of days past.

The US edition is even more of a misrepresentation.  It’s cute, with the blue sky, puffy clouds and red dirt. It’s wicked cute.  But again, it doesn’t fit the novel of a 55-year-old man on a road trip across America who stops to shoot hoops and chase his own broken dreams while his body keeps trying to quit on him.  Tom did not go off-roading.  Tom didn’t drive a SUV.  His pasty, bloated body went swimming, slept in the car, became frightened of an indigenous girl, ate Subway, watched a baseball game, and played a little basketball before he ended up in a hospital. Sorry. Spoiler.

I understand why the designers leaned into the road trip, but the road trip really was just a mechanism to propel the story forward and never seemed fully developed.  This is one of the books that I questioned its inclusion on the longlist, but the two covers would make excellent covers for different books. 

“We were just voices, really, staring at the ceiling.” (46)

Ben Markvoits’s The Rest of Our Lives is a perfectly fine book. It’s well-crafted and well-written. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has somewhat likeable characters.  (And yet again, another professor involved with a student.)  Our narrator is an unhappy 55-year-old white dude having a mid-life crisis, and he decides to take us along for the ride.  There are some interesting things related to ethnic relations (in particularly in athletics but also with Tom’s Jewish wife), but they just seem to get lip-service without really peeling back any layers.

When preparing to take his daughter to college, Tom remembers that 12 years ago he’d promised himself he’d leave his wife when Miri turned 18 because his wife had an affair. Twelve years of resentment and a toxicity later, the family is on its last leg. Tom knows it, but I’m not much sure he cares to fix it.  His job is broken.  Again, I’m not much sure he cares. He fondles some old abandoned dreams of writing, remembering his plan to travel and play pickup basketball games and write about the strangers he meets along the way.    He stumbles into a half-hearted attempt at chasing his dreams while taking a road-trip down memory lane – meeting up with old friends, old girlfriends, even his brother along the way.

Best part of the novel?  The Cleveland section.  The Guardians game at the bar was a snapshot in time that captured the heart of Cleveland and the boys of summer.  Tom’s pickup basketball game with the guy from Cleveland Clinic was also well done.  “God gives you symptoms for a reason,” the young man tells him.  Tom doesn’t listen, but Markovits has hit us so repeatedly over the head about something clearly being wrong with Tom that we know the road trip will end at a hospital. 

While the novel ends waiting on the results of a biopsy, unsurprisingly the family has knit itself together around Tom’s health scare – his mid-life crisis of faith effectively becoming a health crisis of uncertainty.

It’s a perfectly fine book.