Copyright Anchorage Daily News
Fiction ‘The God of the Woods’ by Liz Moore In Moore’s best-selling novel, two children from a wealthy family have disappeared, 14 years apart. When the novel opens in August 1975, 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar is missing from her bunk at camp. Barbara was conceived after the disappearance of her 8-year-old brother in 1961. Moore’s story, which jumps around nonsequentially and is crowded with characters, is wise about the vulnerability of adolescence and chillingly astute about the invisible boundaries demarcating social class. In Book World, Maureen Corrigan compared the book favorably to Donna Tartt’s classic “The Secret History” and wrote that “breaking free of the spell Moore casts is close to impossible.” ‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney Rooney’s fourth novel follows a pair of estranged brothers, Ivan and Peter, in the wake of their father’s death. Shy and awkward Ivan, 22, is a chess player who is surprised to find himself in a promising relationship with an older woman. Peter, 32, is a good-looking and successful lawyer, balancing his emotional and physical investments in two very different romantic relationships. In Book World, Lillian Fishman wrote: “Everything about this novel - its style, theme, length - shows less ruthless restraint than Rooney’s previous books. Poetry and emotion overspill their containers.” - - - ‘Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way’ by Elaine Feeney “How to Build a Boat,” the previous book by Irish novelist and poet Feeney, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023. In “Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way,” she tells the story of Claire O’Connor, a woman who moves from London back home to Ireland, outside Galway, to deal with the death of her mother. Tom, her former boyfriend in England, suddenly moves in nearby, a development that Claire says “felt like a trespass.” But this setup of domestic suspense is just the foundation on which Feeney builds a sprawling family tale that spans a century of Irish history. By the end, Barney Norris wrote in the Guardian, “the novel has become a story about what a family should do with its past. It’s a hugely satisfying, sophisticated structure.” - - - ‘Someone Like Us’ by Dinaw Mengestu Mengestu’s latest is narrated by an Ethiopian American known by his nickname, Mamush, who works as an international reporter in Paris. Set over a few days near the end of 2019, the strikingly ruminative novel follows Mamush as he travels home to the United States, thinking about his troubled marriage and his recently deceased father, a taxi driver who was “somewhere between a father and an uncle.” In his review, Ron Charles wrote: “Like all of Mengestu’s novels, it’s about the struggle to feel settled, to feel at peace, but once again he edges around that theme by a wholly unexpected route.” Memoir ‘Brothers’ by Alex Van Halen Van Halen’s memoir, when it was published last year, was the drummer’s first public statement after the death of his brother, the virtuoso guitarist Eddie Van Halen, at 65 in 2020. As the book’s title suggests, it’s not so much Alex’s own story as the story of his relationship with his younger brother. The book, co-written with the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, doesn’t attempt to encompass the full scope of their life together, concluding at the band’s critical and commercial zenith, with the release of their album “1984” in the same year. “Brothers” is “funny and breezily charming,” Jack Hamilton wrote in Book World, “one of the sweetest and most introspective rock memoirs in recent memory.” ‘Israel: A Personal History’ by Goran Rosenberg Rosenberg was born in Sweden in 1948. His parents were both Auschwitz survivors. In 1962, two years after his father took his own life at 37, Rosenberg’s family emigrated to Israel. This memoir, now translated into English, was originally published in Swedish in 1996. In it, Rosenberg writes, “I have endeavored to weave together my own personal journey with an intellectual exploration of the ideas and historical events that came to shape it.” He takes us from his initial sense of the “all-captivating promises” of the Zionist project to a deep disillusionment with it. He has added new material at the beginning and end of the book to address the events of the past two years. History and current events ‘Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022’ by Frank Trentmann “Out of the Darkness” is a rich, ambitious account of Germany’s improbable rise from a moral abyss to a prosperous democracy that is sometimes held up as a bulwark of stability and liberal values. Trentmann acknowledges the remarkable “moral and material regeneration,” but he also sets out to complicate the simple narrative that Germans’ “eventual reckoning with the past” made them “moral crusaders in the present.” In Book World, Bryn Stole wrote, “Although the book runs to more than 800 pages and its scope is extensive, in some ways encyclopedic, it remains fresh and surprising throughout, thanks in part to Trentmann’s knack for drawing on an astounding range of voices.” ‘War’ by Bob Woodward The title of Washington Post reporter Woodward’s latest was partly inspired by battles in Ukraine and the Middle East, and partly by the profound conflict represented by the 2024 presidential election. But the book is most concerned with establishing what it means to be worthy of the great responsibility of running a great power. The deep reporting serves as a vehicle for Woodward’s judgments about the importance of character and teamwork in producing good government. He assesses the strengths and flaws of how the Biden administration handled things in Ukraine and Israel and, in a book published weeks before last year’s election, warns about a second Trump administration’s possible handling of the same. - - - ‘Q: A Voyage Around the Queen’ by Craig Brown Brown’s book joins more than 50 biographies of Elizabeth II, but he sets out to do something distinct: to capture the persona as much as the person. He shows how the world responded to Elizabeth over her long life, and vice versa. Brown’s entertaining books eschew conventional techniques of biography. In writing about Princess Margaret, the Beatles and now Elizabeth, his style is deliberately kaleidoscopic, composed of many snippets and impressions from the historical record. The result, Clare McHugh wrote in The Post, is “absorbing, edifying and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.” ‘The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America’ by Aaron Robertson Robertson begins his extraordinary work of memoir and history with the story of his grandfather’s birthplace, a “blacktown” in Tennessee named Promise Land, founded in 1870, “when some of the earliest experiments in black self-rule were beginning.” The semantic tension between “running from hell” and “racing toward paradise” informs much of “The Black Utopians,” a book about trying, about failed experiments. In Book World, Gabriel Bump wrote: “Unlike many other sweeping narratives of Black life in America, Robertson’s is concerned with life on the fringes, the less-explored but no less important avenues of survival. Its protagonists operated outside the mainstream as true radicals.” - - - ‘Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers’ by Jean Strouse The latest from acclaimed biographer Strouse is a beautifully written account of the connections between the painter John Singer Sargent and a family he painted often, the Wertheimers. It will absorb readers interested in Sargent (1856-1925) - his peripatetic life, his array of rich and accomplished friends, his fluctuating critical reception - or the Wertheimers, a British family of German Jewish descent who played a major role in art and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Post’s art critic Sebastian Smee wrote: “You feel in good hands reading Strouse. She is measured, her research is impeccable, and she tells of interesting lives in interesting times.”
