I Give You My Silence

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Adrian Nathan West

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2026

The great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died a year ago, and now his American publisher has brought out his last final novel, 2023’s Le dedico me silencio, here translated into English as I Give You My Silence by Adrian Nathan West (rather than I Dedicate My Silence, even though songs are dedicated to people and people are dedicated to causes, so it would have been a nice fit; no one in this book gives anything to anybody). The book isn’t long, and it’s very specific in its obsessions, and despite the persistent skittering of rats in its background from start to finish, it’s ultimately a strangely exultant work, failing to be purely hopeful only because this author was always suspicious of pure hope.

The story centers on a disgruntled academic (naturally, this being fiction, the academic is never contentedly gruntled) Toño Azpilcueta, chair of his school’s Peruvian studies, who’s a scholar of Peru’s native “creole” music, its singers and guitarists producing marineras, huainitos, tonderos, and various waltzes and polkas. Toño at first wonders why this music he’s studying affects him so. “Why had Peru’s music so captured his imagination?” he wonders. “Among his ancestors, there was not a single singer or guitarist, let alone a dancer.” And yet, when a fellow enthusiast takes him to Abajo el Puente to listen to a guitarist named Lalo Molfino, Toño’s passion becomes a life mission. Lalo’s playing astonishes him right out of the cramped monotony of his life. “It wasn’t just his skill as his fingers danced over the frets, playing notes that sounded as though they’d been invented on the spot,” he recalls. “It was something more: wisdom, concentration, and discipline, talent, sure, but also something miraculous.”

Toño has heard hundreds of guitarists, Peruvian and foreign, but none has ever come close to this kind of genius. That night in the audience, he’s transported, he wants to kiss his neighbors. “Lalo’s music had made them his brothers and sisters,” he thinks. “Those chords and notes were Peru’s silver and gold cast out to the audience in generous handfuls.” He suddenly believes this pure realization of native music is not only revelatory but can change the entire country, “reigniting a greatness not known since the Inca Empire.” Despite the gnawing of rats he always hears in his imagination, he sets out to learn Lalo’s life story, traveling to the tiny town where the baby Lalo, abandoned by his mother, was saved from the predation of rats at the local dump by kindly Father Molfino, who becomes the first person transformed by Lalo:

“I can’t say how long I spent out there, really, half-terrified of what kind of awful creatures there must have been marauding in the muck. And then I saw him. He was wrapped up in a blanket. I picked him up, and he kept crying. He wanted to nurse, of course. He wanted his mother’s breast. He was a skeleton, the poor kid. I still recall quite clearly the way I could feel every one of his bones beneath my fingers. Walking out of there with that boy in my arms, the tears sprang to my eyes. I thought I’d forgotten how to cry, but no. That day I learned I still could.”

But Toño’s subject is no angel. The more the professor learns, the more sordid the picture becomes: Lalo was preternaturally gifted, yes, but he was also truculent, rude, and untrustworthy (one childhood friend describes him as a rat). As Toño’s picture of Lalo becomes grubbier, his vision of the importance of Lalo’s music becomes loftier, which brings him into inevitable conflict with his school, where colleagues don’t share his vision (angered, he calls them a bunch of rats), and with his hapless publisher, who was caught off-guard by the success of Toño’s book on Lalo but is nearly bankrupted by the author’s exorbitant demands for the second edition. Shipwreck of Toño’s hopes seems unavoidable.

It's entirely fitting that this most vigorous of authors would disdain any appearance of “late style” even in this final work, written after he’d received a fatal diagnosis from his doctors. All the surreal intensity and memorable imagery is here that filled In Praise of the Stepmother or Conversation in the Cathedral. And if the book sends readers on an Internet search for all that native Peruvian music, so much the better.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Roman World War: From the Ides of March to Cleopatra’s Death

By Giusto Traina

Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise

Princeton University Press 2026

When what we would consider the year AD 30 was still new, Irish High King Fiacha Finnolach found himself facing one of the most well-organized conspiracies to usurp his admittedly tenuous rule. In Vietnam, the fierce Trung Sisters were continuing to mow down their opposition in a series of the well-orchestrated blitzkrieg campaigns. The efficient officials of the Han dynasty in China were dealing with both a large rebellion and a terrifying epidemic. Korea’s Yuri Isageum was enjoying the sixth year of his fat, contented reign by simplifying and clarifying legal codes and continuing, with gentle tact, to bring his aristocracy more and more under his control. And grandees and court historians of the Mayan civilization was looking back on nearly 2000 years of their own history.

All these people had plenty of things in common (halitosis, body lice, nighttime dreaming, etc.), including: not one of them, nor any of their many thousands of subjects, ever heard Rome or the Romans. All of them, without exception, would go to their graves without ever hearing the name Octavian. The 64 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean rolled on year after year, century after century, without ever knowing a Roman prow. The sky over what would much later become Russia was untroubled. The Arctic was empty of even the faintest hint of humans, much less the extreme specificity of a Marc Antony.

So the central contention of historian Giusto Traina’s The Roman World War (here translated by Malcolm DeBevoise), that the various hostilities that roiled the Roman world between the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Antony and Cleopatra in AD 30 constituted a world war is certainly false. “The events of the Late Republic cannot properly be characterized as a concatenation of civil wars, because their implications were worldwide,” Traino writes. “To speak of them in this manner may seem anachronistic, for the term ‘world war’ was not used before the nineteenth century; the ancients, however, had no trouble telling the difference between ordinary and extraordinary wars.” It’s true, the ancient historians could tell the difference between a war and a really big war. But the anachronism persists; they no more knew what a world war is than they knew what a GPS satellite is. When Traino defines a world war as “a mixture of foreign war and civil war,” he’s being willfully unhelpful. 4000 years ago, the kingdom in control of most of what is now Eritrea fought a foreign war with what is now Ethiopia while simultaneously fighting a civil war led by members of its military caste. Would Traina call this a world war?

Its silly nomenclature overreach aside, The Roman World War is a slim but very readable account of those aforementioned Roman civil wars between Octavian and Antony and Cleopatra, which Traino captures in all its see-sawing complexity:

After Brundisium, Octavian was obliged to turn his attention once more to Italy, stricken by war and famine. It was just then that the triumvirs set about restructuring the Senate, which had lost a good many members on account of the war and the proscription lists of 43. Citizens from the lower orders who could be counted on to support the triumviral claim to authority were elected by fiat, raising the number of senators to a thousand. Never in the whole of its history had the Senate been so overcrowded or so discredited, and yet for all that it did not cease to function as a deliberative body.

And the frequent gestures he makes in the direction of his pet recasting do in fact pay some modest dividends. This concatenation of civil wars did, after all, extend more widely than most casual readers of ancient history tend to remember. Traino is right, for instance, to remind such readers that in the week that Julius Caesar was assassinated, he was in the final stages of launching a military campaign deep into what is now Iran. This might not qualify as any kind of world war, but it certainly helps to make the very familiar story presented here feel fresh.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens

By David Stuttard

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2026

Readers can forgive historian David Stuttard his boyish enthusiasm when he exclaims, in his new book Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, that a new book on the Parthenon is written every month, every day, nay, every hour. Forgiveness is all the easier because a great deal of that same enthusiasm spills over into his general narrative of the book, much to its benefit.

He tells the story of classical Athens in lock-step tandem with a detailed tour of the Acropolis itself, complete with maps, floorplans, architectural diagrams, and plenty of what look like original black-and-white photos. Stuttard writes this history of the golden age of Athens, a time when “Pericles was mooting the creation of a new world order,” with attempts at quasi-dramatic interludes in which the historian interjects more colorful, quasi-fictional re-imaginings of the scenes involved. Typically when historians try this kind of thing, the results are predictably horrifying, and at first this seems to apply here too: “Already, like an evanescent dream, the darkness was evaporating, as sunrise gilded faces, arms, gesticulating hands, for a brief moment turning commonplace Athenians into glowing heroes,” and so on.

Fortunately, Stuttard swerves his narrative back to his fascinating double history fairly early and tends to keep it there, lovingly describing every feature and dimension of the Parthenon while linking those features to the outlines of Athenian history in their victory over Persia, their lightning-fast growth as a regional superpower, their increasingly bitter rivalry with Sparta, and the many changes Pericles himself instituted in his society. Stuttard looks at the carvings and statues on the Acropolis and sees that history reflected there:

Like heroes, Athenians claimed ancestry from gods; collectively they, too, could boast miraculous achievements; they, too, could rightly claim that , overcoming what once appeared insuperable odd, they had quite literally saved their world by beating off the Persian threat, and (in their own version of the Gigantomachy) upheld those central values of civilized society: justice; order; harmony. While other Greeks had fought beside them, only Athenians had made the supreme sacrifice, abandoning their land, so that their cause could win. Only they had watched their city die, before being resurrected like a phoenix soaring from the flames, shaking out the ashes of destruction from its spreading wings.

It was all doomed to an early death, of course, when Athens would be visited by military defeat, an earthquake, and the “one force of nature that humanity could never conquer,” this time in the form of a deadly plague that killed a third of all Athenians, including Pericles himself. It’s an extremely familiar story, retold often (though not hourly) in works of history. Stuttard’s architectural angle adds some new viewpoints to this old story; the book is bound to make some readers think of booking a tourism excursion up to the Acropolis in the crushing summer heat.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Lucien

By J. R. Thornton

Harper Perennial 2026

It’s been 81 years since Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited warned readers of how dangerous elite schools can be for budding artists. In that famous story, young ingenue Charles Ryder goes up to Oxford and quickly falls under the hypnotic sway of elegant aristocratic fellow student Sebastian Flyte. It’s a spellbinding novel, which explains as well as anything why it’s been so incessantly imitated ever since.

The latest such imitation is J. R. Thornton’s bit of lightly-frosted autofiction, Lucien, in which budding artist Chris Novotny goes to Harvard and is dutifully broad-boarded by the sheer gaudy glory of the place. “Everyone seemed happy. No one looked down,” he thinks in one of the novel’s virtually numberless redundancies. “I wandered through the Square [that would be Harvard Square] in a kind of daze, swept along by a heady current of newfound possibility. This was my new home.”

Readers might be thinking “No, it’s not your new home, it’s a school you’re attending,” but Chris is sold on the place, and he shares with Charles Ryder the helpful quality of being basically a nonentity (“I was there to follow, not to ask questions or give an opinion,” he thinks at one point, long after readers will have noticed. “Which was fine because I didn’t have much of an opinion to give”). He wanders around until his daze is interrupted by fellow student Lucien Orsini-Conti, who’s everything Chris is not: “He was charming and sociable, handsome and confident, brilliant, rich, and enviable.”

Lucien never actually displays any of these qualities, but we’re repeatedly told he has them, so it must be true. Chris is certainly convinced and duly dazzled (“There was something intensely intimate about that blue-eyed gaze”) and starts running with Lucien’s louche, vaguely Euro-trash set, which alienates him more and more from the people in the previous boring old Baltimore stage of his life, including his kinda-sorta art mentor Marcus, who’s baffled when at one point the new, hedonistic Chris disappoints him. When their conversation finally ends, Chris immediately begins justifying his own rudeness. “I’d spent my whole life doing the smart thing, the responsible thing, the thing I was supposed to do,” he thinks, even though we’ve never seen him act that way or even really think about it, but wait, he’s got some whiny Gen-Z posturing to do: “And I was tired of it. I wanted to have some fun. Was that really so awful?”

Of course having some fun by endless self-indulgence or by badly disappointing people who’ve only ever supported you is, in fact, so awful, but it’s fairly clear in Lucien where your sympathies are supposed to lie.

Gradually, Lucien and Chris devise a dodgy plan to harness his artistic abilities, and gradually, Chris alienates pretty much all the new people in his life just as he’s alienated all the old people (one of them, as she’s on her way out the door, tells him “I hope you figure out who you want to be”; this is the kind of novel in which characters unironically say things like “I hope you figure out who you want to be”), and abruptly, after a bit of physical assault and a dab of drink-drugging, he comes to see the real Lucien, or at least to see that the old Lucien was almost entirely a façade. Much as in Brideshead Revisited, the story of the novel is told by an older and more embittered Chris looking back at his younger self.

Lucien is ultimately a silly novel, a feather-light fantasia on academic seduction that gets neither the academic nor the seduction parts quite right. This is the author’s second novel. By way of justification, that will have to do.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker

By Lauren Johnson

Pegasus Books 2026

Henry Tudor won the English crown by defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth; his accession ended the Wars of the Roses and launched the Early Modern Era. That is the simplistic view of the story. Far more interesting is the story of Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, who sets the stage for Henry’s path to the throne, watches from the wings during his reign, and shuts the theater lights after it ends. Historical fiction has loved to portray her as a cold, scheming witch and the mother-in-law from hell. Much of this comes from early interpretations based on warped views of women and religion, which Lauren Johnson careful refutes in her new book Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker.

Born with a royal claim and fortune as daughter and sole heiress of John, Duke of Somerset, Margaret was thrust into conflict before her first birthday, when her father’s death made her a ward of the court – a pawn. At the age of seven, she was given in marriage to John de la Pole, a Yorkist, though the marriage was annulled before she left her mother’s home. At the age of twelve, King Henry VI had her marry his half-brother, Edmund Tudor, a Lancastrian. The barely pubescent Margaret was immediately sent to live in her husband’s estates in the Welsh territories, separated from everyone and everything she had known. In rapid succession, she was impregnated, widowed, and endured a difficult birth that likely did her permanent physical injury. With her son’s wardship awarded to her husband’s brother Jasper Tudor, she left for the political safety of a third marriage: Sir Henry Stafford, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, and another Lancastrian.

This marriage was by all accounts a happy one, the partnership successfully navigating through the dangerous waters as the throne changed from Henry VI to Edward IV and back to Henry. Margaret was not as lucky when Edward IV grabbed the throne back: Stafford died in battle and Margaret’s properties were awarded to Edward’s brother. Once again, remarriage offered safety: this time in Thomas Stanley, a Yorkist, who with the byzantine twists of the Wars of the Roses actually ended up awarded Margaret’s properties. Still, the main theme of this period of Margaret’s life is that her shifting alliances were often too late or too early. “Margaret is justly celebrated as a capable political operator,” Johnson writes, “but what struck me in telling her story in this way is how seldom she acted with any clear political allegiance – despite her reputation as a ‘Lancastrian’ – and how often, in the first forty years of her life, she got things wrong.”

All of which changed when her son carried the day at Bosworth Field. Then, Margaret had to carve for herself a special role as the first king’s mother that was not a queen dowager. The new Henry VII was happy to invest her with quasi-royal powers, such as serving as his regent in the midlands where her extensive estates gave her – and him – power. And this time they were fully her own estates: on Henry’s accession she was designated a femme sole, giving her financial independence from Stanley; this was extended to full independence when Margaret became a vowess, taking a formal vow of chastity before a bishop in order to untangle herself from the Stanley family without creating rancor. Her commitment to religious devotion did not shield her from involvement at court: with pretenders threatening the Tudor rule, with the deaths of Arthur Tudor and then Elizabeth of York, with Henry himself weakening, Margaret’s steady influence only grew. And in the end, while forced to bury her son, we also see her comforted by her grandson’s smooth accession and the security to the dynasty represented by his Spanish wife.

Although the book inevitably is structured around Henry’s path to the throne and reign, the story is all Margaret’s. Johnson’s writing is crisp and evocative, and she captures moments with a poet’s skill. Speaking of Henry’s coronation:

Through the clouds of incense, Margaret might have been able to make out the glimmering stalls of goldsmiths and the silver crosses and censers of priests, their metalwork catching the sunlight as they swung between shafts of light and shadow. It was a bright morning, but clouds overhead threatened rain. With her ingrained pessimism, perhaps Margaret awaited the downfall with more certainty than her companion that day, her thirteen-year-old granddaughter Princess Mary

Still, the book’s most exciting feature is Johnson’s extensive use of financial records (grants, wills, inventories, and especially household accounts) to mold an insightful understanding of her subject. Margaret’s expenses substantiated her social network: visits to court and others were documented through payments for bread and ale in taverns where she broke her journey, and her sphere of influence (or attempted influence) is measured in the gifts she sent and their value. These details also substantiate the importance she placed on disseminating learning (she commissioned the publication of numerous works, 500-100 volumes at a time, distributing them to people she knew) and loyalty (she insisted that a good portion of the scholarships she established at Cambridge be directed at students in the north). Johnson even teases out Margaret’s sense of humor and appreciation of puns (not as difficult as this may seem: Margaret is marguerite in French, so daisies and forget-me-nots make frequent appearances). 

There have been other biographies of Margaret Beaufort, but Lauren Johnson comes at her subject through a specialization in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and gets to the heart of the convoluted developments in the Wars of the Roses without allowing the historical complexity to overwhelm the reader. Even more distinctive, Johnson successfully teases out the one element that “has been consistently missing from Margaret’s story: her womanhood. Not just her status as a woman, but her place in a network of women that extended across generations, counties, and ultimately international borders.” This gives this work tremendous weight, cementing it as a must-read narrative of the era.

Janet Wertman is the author of the Seymour Saga trilogy. Her latest work of Tudor historical fiction is “Nothing Proved,” the first installment in her Regina trilogy.

Medium Rare 

By A. Natasha Joukovsky 

Melville House, 2026 

Arun Patil of Daedalus Industries has pledged a billion dollars to anyone who can accomplish a near statistical impossibility: correctly pick the winner of every game in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) “March Madness” men’s college basketball tournament. The best sixty-four college basketball programs in the country receive an invitation to “The Big Dance” each year and face off in a single elimination tournament. Sixty-four schools are reduced to thirty-two, to the “Sweet Sixteen”, “Elite Eight”, and “Final Four”, until a champion is crowned. Yes, those phrases are owned and copyrighted by the NCAA, games are all nationally televised and men plan vasectomies around the schedule so they can lie on the couch for days of guilt-free viewing. 

You can care nothing for sports and Medium Rare will riotously entertain. It is a tragicomedy based on the myth of Icarus, using the famed basketball tournament, D.C. politics, and even Hollywood as a brilliant framework for a meteoric journey that highlights the absurdity of power and ambition in America. 

Cassandra, a Washington D.C. fundraiser, narrates. Her omniscient first-person telling of the story is truly all-knowing, for she is a modern-day oracle. She’s not the only character in the story with incredible predictive ability, for Phil Fayeton, an ‘everyman’ if there ever was one, does indeed beat infinitesimal odds and selects the near-impossible ‘perfect bracket’. Our author highlights the improbability with smart wordplay: 

The odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket are so infinitesimal statisticians disagree about just how infinitesimal they are. That’s two to the sixty-third power, mathematically speaking, Phil would explain rattling off each digit with memorial pride. After his first few public appearances, he googled a series of analogies to help contextualize a number of that size, as if to improve its marketability. Pick a grain of sand from anywhere in the world, he’d say, and you’d be twenty-three percent more likely to find it again at random than to fill out a perfect March Madness bracket. 

Each round of the tournament serves as its own chapter for the first half of the novel, progressing with the tournament. We are with Phil as he watches the University of Virginia (his alma mater and selected winner) play each game and prose every bit as suspenseful as Laura Hillenbrand’s accounts of Seabiscuit sprinting against War Admiral grips the reader. At each stage, Phil’s correct selection of every game makes him more famous, for his is the rare medium in Medium Rare. By the time Phil is one of thirteen left in the country with all perfect picks, he’s gone from notable among friends and family, to doing podcasts and Skype interviews about basketball. He’s given a Buick, tickets to watch games in premier box seats and rapidly becomes a “personal interest story” for national television networks. Upon holding the only remaining perfect bracket, he’s a topic of water cooler talk across the nation. We gain insight into his mindset as he verbally spars with billionaire Patil, who only ever sought free publicity. Phil, and wife, Raleigh, watch a game together in the DaedaDome, one that has gone into overtime: 

Arun barreled into the owner’s suite, “I will give you a million dollars right now to call off the bet. He regretted this offer the moment it escaped his lips. Phil, rising to his full height, smiled down at him, almost with a look of pity. 

“I don’t think so, man,” said Phil. 

“Phil,” said Raleigh, implicitly urging him to consider it. 

“No, babe, Auburn’s gonna win.” 

“There are other games left,” said Arun, appealing now more to Raleigh, and feeling the need, in having made the mistake, to convince himself it hadn’t been one by doubling down. “Ten million.” 

“No,” said Phil, more emphatically this time, almost unthinkingly, as Auburn drove in for a layup. 

Arun bided his time, until Kentucky again got within three. There were thirteen seconds left. “Offer stands,” he said quietly. 

“Phil,” Raleigh whispered to him. Ten million dol— 

But the game was over, Auburn had prevailed. 

The second half of the novel spotlights Phil outshining senators he once couldn’t even get a meeting with, and chronicles how he handles and mishandles the incredible fame gained as a prognosticator. He soars as high as B-list stardom in Los Angeles, his journey a sensational one, capped off by a wonderfully crafted tailspin. Medium Rare features fresh pieces to the myth and feels original in flavor. The relationship between Phil’s pregnant wife from the Deep South, Raleigh, and narrator Cassandra, is especially poignant. Their friendship evolves from the side-plot to center stage with clever literary maneuvers as Phil stumbles from the summit. This is a book flawlessly placed in modern times. 

Joukovsky’s previous novel, Portrait of A Mirror, used innovative flair to recount the myth of Narcissus, and she certainly has a knack for this type of storytelling. Medium Rare will appeal to sports and mythology lovers, while also interest readers who enjoy satirical politics and celebrity. You’ll have trouble not consuming the first half in a single sitting and, a trait increasingly uncommon in contemporary literature, enjoy experiencing characters grow and learn. Characters realize early judgments are misplaced, they are corrected in interesting ways, and we are rewarded with a slam dunk of a finale on a classic tale.

Ryan Davison, Ph.D., is a writer and literary critic residing in Portugal and the U.S.

The Shop on Hidden Lane

by Jayne Ann Krentz

Berkley, January 2026

Jayne Ann Krentz is an award-winning author with well over a hundred books to her credit, published under various pen names across a career spanning 45 years. She's hit the New York Times bestseller list more than fifty times. Booklist once dubbed her "the leading mixologist of romantic suspense." Clearly Krentz is a successful, experienced writer. Her latest novel, The Shop on Hidden Lane, is a standalone paranormal romance-mystery-thriller that falls squarely in her wheelhouse. So the question here is, can she still deliver the goods?

The opening sequence of The Shop on Hidden Lane introduces two paranormally gifted families (Krentz's Montagues and Capulets) who have been feuding for several generations. Though enemies, they're bound by a mysterious pact to protect a dangerous secret. When a pair of seniors, a woman from one family and a man from the other, disappear from a cabin in the Arizona wilderness, a cabin that now radiates bad paranormal juju, their descendants are the only ones who can find them. Psychic crime scene cleaner Sophie Harper and soon-to-be-CEO-and-mandatory-hunk Luke Wells reluctantly team up and immediately the romantic sparks start to fly. Their investigation leads them on a puzzling search as they follow leads and red herrings. They fight off bad guys. They resist sumptuous temptations. They risk more and more until they arrive at an art colony built over a supernatural vortex, where every clue and every heartstring is tied off in a neat little bow.

Krentz's writing style is, not surprisingly, clear, concise, and competent. Her characters are varied and interesting and easy to like. Or not, as the case may be. She weaves her romance and mystery-thriller threads together artfully, and hits all the required beats with the ease of a pro. Her enemies-to-lovers and what's-actually-happening-here tropes are well executed, even if the obligatory romantic conclusion is a tad silly in 2026. She hides her hints adeptly and pulls off a few satisfying surprises. Her themes of betrayal, secrets, and forbidden love are always present and never hit the reader like a cudgel as they meander through the story. Krentz's tone is inviting and (delightfully) a bit deadpan, starting right from the prologue:

She came out of the trance on a crashing wave of adrenaline that flooded her veins with a euphoric sense of relief. Once again, she had survived the treacherous crossing that separated the dreamstate from the waking state. For a wild, glorious moment she was a sorceress, a queen, a goddess. There would be a price to pay, but the ice fever would set in later. In this moment she could almost fly.

She took off her mirrored glasses and waited for the artist's reaction.

He screamed.

She winced. "Please don't do that. It's very unnerving."

It was midnight and the alley was heavily shadowed but in the light from his phone she could see the artist's face. His handsome, dramatically sculpted features had been transformed into a slack-jawed, wide-eyed mask of horror.

"No," he gasped. He stumbled back a few steps, both hands stretched out in front of him. "Stay away from me. I know what you are."

"You said I was your Muse."

"You're a succubus."

He whirled and fled . . .

Though overall a smooth ride, The Shop on Hidden Lane does hit a few potholes along the way. The first being this prologue. Krentz masks the identities of the woman and the artist, then proceeds to immediately reveal the woman and her mysterious actions in the first couple chapters. And though the identity of the artist doesn't come until later, there's no reason it couldn't have been included earlier. So why make the opening scene a prologue instead of a chapter when the former implies a specific narrative necessity? This conspicuous, short-term information-hiding causes more head scratching than its potential suspense-building is worth.

An even deeper pothole shows up halfway through the novel when Krentz suddenly introduces a new point of view character. Not usually an issue, but in this case the fact that it happens at all uncovers a major mystery in the story. Instead of experiencing this revelation along with Sophie and Luke, as will certainly be expected, Krentz's abrupt shift drops it matter-of-factly on the reader’s head. Like a ton of bricks. The result is jarring, not to mention a little disappointing. It’s hard not to conclude Krentz at times relies on structural shortcuts at the cost of better writing.

That said, The Shop on Hidden Lane, despite its narrative bumps and jostles, is a warmhearted, entertaining romance. And an engaging mystery-thriller. Long-time Krentz fans are sure to enjoy it. Newcomers will find it an excellent introduction to her work.

And it certainly demonstrates Krentz can still write a good story.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Learn more at https://jimabbiati.substack.com/

The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of Wind

By Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester's latest work is titled The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind.  With over 30 nonfiction books covering major historical events, science, nature and travelogues, including The Professor and the Madman, about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the ever-curious former journalist and world traveler extends naturally from his recent oceanic studies to an examination of wind.

This well-researched book is not theme-based but instead opts for an immense scope, covering almost every conceivable subject linked, sometimes tenuously, to the wind.  Chapters are based on wind speed ranging from gentle to robust to inclement, containing subsections of detailed stories of typically three to five pages in length. Additional chapters with scientific explanations of wind formation and wind measurement techniques break up the narrative.  

The book engages the Reader immediately with analysis of recent news and crucial historical events.  Although the wind is not often the cause, it is the messenger, and it has a story to tell. From the health impacts due to wildfire smoke a country away to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl and resultant cancer winds destroying families, even gentle winds can pack a punch.  Whether serious topics or the mundane, Winchester's research adds important insights to subjects not usually top of mind but no less interesting. Consider the ubiquitous tumbleweed:

Hollywood used to have a decided fondness for tumbleweed imagery during the heyday of the Western movie….In today's world with the American West no longer lonely and unpopulated, the wind-scattered tumbleweeds have become a menace - or at least have collided, quite literally, with what some might consider the equal menace of modern housing developments.

Wisely, the book does not immediately tackle the physics of wind formation, enabling the reader to acclimatize to the subject material.  Yet the physics and meteorology components are carefully and logically presented with the non-scientific reader in mind. Winchester skillfully moves from the First Law of Thermodynamics, critical in wind formation, combined with the earth rotation to form the three major wind cells in the Northern Hemisphere.  It does not end there:

It is these two junction points - the Hadley-Ferrel cell junction, and again at the Ferrel-polar cell junction-that the two great jet streams begin to slither and rage around the planet. Two in the Northern Hemisphere, and two farther to the South of the equator , each of them heading relentlessly eastward… As to what they do, that is now quite well known - and, in a single phrase, can be summed up as they wreak havoc.

Winchester describes the Great Stilling, a lengthy period where global winds have lessened. Climate change is touted as a possible cause, but the data has recently reversed.  A different climate change impact was keenly felt in the winter of 2026, after the publication of this book. Did a weakening jet stream cause the polar vortex to drift, punishing America, Europe and Asia with a brutal cold?  Although subject to more research and monitoring, wind cycles and jet stream formation (subject of an excellent chapter here) informs the reader about the potential of another unforeseen and unwelcomed global warming outcome.

Sailing, boat design and open sea adventuring, present-day and historical, are prominent in the book. For the uninitiated, how sailors induce forward motion when facing "into the wind" may surprise.  Winchester deftly and delightfully employs the language of the sailor to describe sailing "close to the wind" and how "the craft will be said to be close-hauled and will start to heel."

Naturally, not all segments of this broad book will appeal equally. There were one too many examples of open sea battles being impacted by the wind. The examples of storms in classic literature seem out of place. Also, the tornado explanation appears rushed and lacks the solid scientific underpinnings found in the wind formation chapter.  Still the inquisitive reader can glide through the text, diving into appealing sections while breezing over others. Human actions have consequences and the book’s best segments are where the wind reveals Man’s imprint, underscores our mistakes.

Winchester reminds us how the wind has shaped our world and how we live in it. To throw caution to the wind and ignore its latest signals is to our detriment.

Robert Genier is a former Economist with the Canadian government with housing markets, housing bubbles, operational risk management and climate change science knowledge.

Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives: A 60 Million Year Journey

By Asier Larramendi & Marco P Ferretti

Princeton University Press 2026

It’s a little-noted axiom but no less true for that: the easier it is to write a book on Subject A, the harder it will be to find a genuinely good book on Subject B. This will doubtless get even more axiomatic as AI begins to write not just some of the books but all of them, but even now, if an author is getting paid merely to slap together an easy book on the London of Charles Dickens or the elusive wonder of house cats, it will harrow the very essence of their sybaritic souls to slap together a difficult book on those subjects. Hence the vast midden-heaps of lousy books on almost every subject.

And hence the alarm-bells that might sound at the appearance of an oversized and heavily illustrated new book on elephants just like this new volume from Princeton University Press. Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives by experts Asier Larramendi and Marco Ferretti. It’s easy to imagine what a book like this could be: mentions of circus performances, for instance, glancing references to Tarzan and Hannibal, a subtitle along the lines of “Nature’s Giants,” and presto! You’ve got a book. A certain card of book, anyway.

Thanks be to Lord Ganesha, Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives is not that kind of book. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: a magnificently in-depth and unapologetically nerdy study of not just the tiny handful of elephant species still extant but also of the hundreds of proboscidean species that fill the fossil record (and are beautifully illustrated here by Shu-yu Hsu).

This parade of proboscideans brings to light the whole long evolutionary chain of these animals (not all of which were enormous; judging from the size scales provided, dozens of these species were only human-tall), from their rise in the Paleocene to their sorry state today, with only three living species of elephant, all three endangered and down some 96% from their documented peak population densities. Each species, past and present, is profiled and described, from creatures the size of beagles to Paleoloxodon namadicus, which arose in India in the late Pleistocene and towered over its world:

As tall as a giraffe and as heavy as three African savanna male elephants, this whopping proboscidean was likely the largest land mammal of all time. The most remarkable feature of the Narmada elephant is its exceptionally developed parieto-occipital crest (POC). In males, it is so prominent that it overhands the external nasal aperture, resembling an elephant head on steroids. Extraordinarily powerful and large muscles must have attached to this bony structure, making the head of the largest males possibly the heaviest of any land vertebrate in history, comparable to the mass of an adult male white rhinoceros!

As mentioned, the authors don’t hesitate to geek out all over their subject, losing sight with charming regularity of whether or not most of their readers have the first idea what they’re talking about:

One of the most common methods for estimating the body mass of extinct tetrapods is based on regression equation of body mass on limb bone variables obtained from analysis of extant taxa. The most frequently used equations, especially for their easy of application, are those based on stylopodial (humerus and femur) minimum circumferences.

Luckily, they vary things up with some cryptozoology, noting that in 1944, several pilots flying over the snows of Alaska reported seeing a herd of mammoths walking in single file, and that in 1956 a school teacher from a village near Russia’s Taz Rive “spotted a mammoth while out picking mushrooms” (the teacher doing the picking, presumably).

There’s far too much information in Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives to absorb on the first or second read-through, which is marvelous and made all the more so by our authors’ skill at clarifying even those geeky subjects in which they indulge. Readers will learn how thick elephant skin is, how heavy their trunks are, how big their hearts are, and they’ll have at their fingertips a full-color visual record of how all those things have varied over the millennia. The book is a gigantic achievement.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Son of Nobody

by Yann Martel

WW Norton 2026

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s bestseller and surprise (to me) Booker winner, the castaway protagonist/narrator, after weeks in a lifeboat with a tiger, wishes he had a Bible or some other scripture to read, but failing that, he says, “At the very least, if I had had a good novel.”  Son of Nobody is a “good novel” that would have given the bored Pi much to do: read and re-read, compare his situation with that of Martel’s new desperately marooned protagonist/narrator, try to sort out the novel’s layers of fact and fiction, and learn a great deal about the Trojan war and ancient Greek language.

Scrabbling Canadian classics scholar Harlow Donne wins a prestigious year-long scholarship at Oxford University.  His seven-year-old daughter Helen wants him not to leave; his wife tells him not to come back.  Although Donne has little money and no friends at Oxford, he soon has a metaphoric tiger by the tail: among the famed libraries’ shards and scripts, he finds fragments of a Greek manuscript that seems to offer an astonishing alternative to Homer’s aristocracy-focused Iliad—a version about a common soldier, Psoas, told, perhaps, by a fellow soldier who, again “perhaps,” may be Thersites, a minor but unique character found in Book II of the Iliad.

Like Life of Pi, where Martel refers to other castaway stories, Son of Nobody employs an old subgenre: the lost and discovered manuscript.  There’s a surfeit of such books.  Probably the best known are Don Quixote and The Scarlet Letter, but the one closest to Martel’s is less known—Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  It is composed of a long poem and even longer commentary by a disturbed academic who imagines himself the escaped King of Zembla.  Martel frames his novel as a Ph.D. dissertation with the Greek manuscript in Donne’s translation occupying the top half of the pages, his footnotes on the bottom half. 

Initially, the poem appears only as brief fragments, and the notes are mostly scholarly.  As the book proceeds, though, the poem appears in long continuous passages (unlikely given the sources), and the notes become obsessively personal, even more unlikely in a dissertation.  This information is not a spoiler, for several reasons: the novel’s drift into unreliability is similar to that in Life of Pi and in Pale Fire.  But even readers not familiar with those two books will, I think, sense something is off in the late stages of both poem and commentary.  The diction of the poem becomes oddly contemporary:”Why can’t we all just get along.”  The commentary compares at unnecessary length a crazed Psoas to soldiers in Vietnam.  By the end of Son of Nobody readers may feel they need to re-read—like my Pi in his lifeboat—to investigate the novel’s inconsistencies.

I have long been an admirer of Homer’s ugly weakling and contrarian Thersites who has the temerity to criticize the nobleman Agamemnon (and by implication other aristocratic leaders) for bringing the Greeks to Troy for ten years and hogging the spoils.  For his critique, Thersites is given a beating by clever Odysseus, who always knew where his advantage lay—though he may have felt differently about defending Agamemnon after years of wandering in the Odyssey.

Martel’s decision to use Thersites and his invented double Psoas is inspired, but the execution—as in Life of Pi—leans more toward the commercial than the Booker.  The Iliad is the first Western masterpiece—and what I call a “monsterpiece”: a very long book about outsized and thus monstrous figures (both gods and heroes), a book whose repetitions, digressions, and specific details seem—to many contemporary readers—a monstrosity, excessive like, say, an epic the Iliad influenced: Moby-Dick. I wouldn’t expect Martel’s working-soldier alternative to the Iliad to be an imitative monstrosity, but I did expect a fuller, more profound, and less jokey engagement with Homer’s poem. 

Martel’s early very basic explanatory notes demonstrate that his target readers have not read the Iliad or even know much about the Trojan war.  These are readers, like the teenage Pi and the readers of his story, who want to be entertained.  Because there’s a mismatch between those readers and Martel’s imitation of a scholarly dissertation, he chooses to deform the dissertation to gratify the public he attracted with Life of Pi.

Greeks had the “hamartia,” translated as “fatal flaw.”  The flaw in both Life of Pi and Son of Nobody is not fatal but is wounding: sentimentality.  In Life of Pi Martel keeps hitting the emotional gong until both the recently orphaned Pi and this reader no longer care.  In Song of Nobody, midway through Donne’s scholarship his daughter becomes ill and is hospitalized in Canada.  To get to Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.  I won’t say more, but Donne’s pursuit of scholarly fame and his emotional turmoil late in the book appear to be responsible for his “missing the mark,” the literal translation of hamartia.  Fragments of the poem are not authentic or are out of place.  One section describes the funeral pyre of Achilles though he is still alive—an emotional but counterfactual scene since Greeks buried their dead. 

Rather than translating a poem, Donne seems to be writing some of it, dedicating it to his Helen, displacing his anger and sadness into it.  Nabokov does something similar with his distressed narrator, but in Pale Fire a whole alternative world of Zembla is imagined.  Martel does the opposite: undermines and vulgarizes the fragile ancient world he began to create in order to keep hitting that emotional gong.

To offer some hope, another sign of Martel’s flaw, he has Donne’s notes increasingly and unpersuasively discuss the Iliad and Psoad as precursors of Christianity, with the Greeks’ dark Hades transmogrified into sunny heaven.  At the end of Life of Pi, Pi offers his Japanese interrogators two stories and asks which one they prefer.  At the end of Son of Nobody, Martel knows from Life of Pi what readers of bestsellers want and gives it to them.

Masterpieces and monsterpieces refuse that gift to readers, though such works give much else—and ask much else of readers, particularly patience with what is alien and difficult, qualities meant to expand and extend consciousness beyond genre limitations and predictable emotional responses.  I do think Martel has done considerable research.  He appears to have studied ancient Greek. He mentions recent verse translations of the Iliad by Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson. His title wittily plays on Odysseus’ self-identification to the blinded monster Polyphemus—“No man”—and on Homer’s habitually stating the patriarchal line of descent when introducing a character.  Martel is inventive; he imagines a more realistic means of entering the gates of Troy than the wooden horse. He writes an account of Troy’s sacking, not described in the Iliad.  Much of his poem has the stately, slightly antique diction and rolling rhythms of most Homeric translators.

But Martel also sometimes undercuts the Psoad.  A Trojan warrior shows his penis to Psoas as a sign of disrespect (not a Homeric gesture).  Martel parodies the Homeric catalogue.  He has a running inside joke naming a Trojan “Mestor” who goes on at great length like the aged Greek Nestor in the Iliad.  Mestor voices a long conspiracy-theory-like explanation of how Helen got to Troy.  These materials are Life of Brian stuff for readers impatient with a poem.

Harlow Donne is a dissertation-stage Ph.D. student.  But his creator is more like a clever undergrad with some poetic talent and bright ideas—historical, literary, and religious.  Donne’s tutor at Oxford compares the poem that Donne reconstructs/constructs “to the work of Dr. Frankenstein.  A corpse with a thousand stitches.”  The Iliad was also stitched together from oral and written sources.   So is Son of Nobody, but it’s not a work of monstrosity or profundity.  Instead, I think, it’s like Life of Pi, a work of ingenuity.  Since Pi is full of ingenious survival strategies, including taming the monster leopard with a whistle, fans of his story-telling may tolerate Son of Nobody even if it does ask more of readers than that earlier novel.  Son of Nobody is a more thoughtful and considerably more literary book than Life of Pi but still a wasted opportunity to create a novel, this time really worthy of a Booker Prize.

Tom LeClair further discusses monsters and monstrosity on his free Substack entitled “Monsterpieces”: https://tleclair.substack.com

The Halter

by Darby McDevitt

Diversion Books, February 2026

Award-winning video game writer Darby McDevitt has ported his storytelling skills from digital entertainment to the book publishing industry with his debut novel, The Halter. It's a dual narrative science fiction tale set in the not-too-distant future, where surrogate realities (SRs) have become a dominant form of technology. The main narrative follows down-on-his-luck Kennedy Stark, a cyber PI who's been hired to find Delia Walsh, a code slinger lost (or hiding) deep within one of these Matrix-like realms. The secondary narrative, doled out in a series of flashbacks, unveils Delia's backstory and brings readers up to speed on the evolution of coders and SR tech:

The first surreals were pretty basic. Sensory explorations. No narrative, just experience . . . An early SR called Solar Winds was the first blockbuster . . . We soared through interstellar night, jumping between eight planets and their moons. Orbiting the sun in real time. Full-scale replica of the solar system, but we could adjust our size for easy traversal. We started at one to one for contrast, then continued growing. At the one to five hundred scale, we towered above mountains and cities . . . Ten years after their debut, SR theaters started closing down . . . Commercial [SR] consoles took their place. Once we had them in our bedrooms, the mischief began . . . Cracking Hypo surreals wide open and rearranging them to satisfy our own ideas [was] interesting. We made funny stuff at first. Running a wild west surreal but we’re all riding dragons instead of horses. Or a spy thriller and we’re all packing nerf guns . . . Good times.

It wasn’t long before we started thinking bigger. We took an interest in dynamic systems. Physics, weather, biology . . . If the rain fell a little harder, would the hills erode faster? If the ambient temperature was two degrees higher would the rivers jump their banks? . . . The deadly vastness of our understanding, pushing buttons and pulling levers. Changing the force of gravity . . . Tweaking the universal constant. Watching the world fall the fuck apart. Then we’d put it back together.

The power of Gods in the hands of teenagers. What could go wrong?

Though on the surface McDevitt's story is science fiction, its bones are pure noir. The story centers on a missing person mystery and is populated with virtual and actual corrupt politicians, mafia-like criminals, gun-toting thugs, clue hunting excursions, action scenes, voluptuous broads, and plenty of whiskey served up in smoky bars. The prose is sharp and gives off a distinct aroma of 1940 (archaisms like "gams" and "Toots" are frequent). It's littered with snarky metaphors that, although McDevitt can sometimes miss the mark or repeat the same conceit, wonderfully drive home the hardboiled experience, as one can see by these two examples: 

He had a single bristling eyebrow that ran from temple to temple and his five o’clock shadow looked like someone had sandblasted his face with coffee grounds.

Then she pulled out the stool and smoothed her hands down her skirt and backed onto it like a reversing truck, giving me a long full look at her bumpers.

While McDevitt might have been satisfied with simply telling an exciting, intelligent noir tale wrapped in a cyber setting, he goes beyond that with an examination of several themes that tend to provoke thought and give the story a greater sense of heft. AI is front and center here, and McDevitt dives into its use and whether or not it can or should replace human artistry. He ponders the addictive nature of technology and what it's capable of doing to individuals and to society as a whole (social media, anyone?). He tackles issues of environmentalism and the morality of spending resources on extra-planetary expansion over intra-planetary salvation. Most interestingly, McDevitt claims that any technology will eventually be vulgarized by the basest of those among us, pointing to the obvious case of the internet and pornography. He proposes that, despite evolution, most humans are still simians who can't stop flinging their feces into our collective circuitry . . . a point that's hard to argue in these chaotic times.

These relevant themes not only tie the past and future aspects of McDevitt's tale to the present, they also serve as the parts of the story that will most likely connect with readers.

In the end, McDevitt makes two things clear with The Halter. First, the fundamental skills required to write a good story are most definitely transferrable between mediums. Good characters, good plots, good themes function the same, whether they're found in Skyrim, Skyfall, or Beneath a Scarlet Sky. And second, if you're an award winner in one medium, there's a damn good chance you’ll one day become an award winner in another.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Learn more at https://jimabbiati.substack.com/

Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity

By Matthew Avery Sutton

Basic Books 2026

“We cannot understand the United States without understanding the faith that built it,” writes Washington State University history professor Matthew Avery Sutton in his quietly brilliant new book Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, before follow it up with an observation that can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a threat: “The past that Christians constructed defines the present for both believers and unbelievers alike.”

In under 600 pages, Sutton somehow manages to chart the birth of Christianity in the New World and its many transformations over the ensuing centuries, all encompassed in a narrative that never feels rushed or cramped, never condescends to its reader, and virtually never slackens in its pace. And Sutton stays true to that initial claim: he must know that the majority of his US readers in 2026 are going to be eager for the contemporary end of his long tale, but he balances his story perfectly, starting with Martin Luther and the Puritans in New England and moving on at in a virtually novelistic sequence of dramatic moments through all the various religious revivals that gripped the country as it was growing and expanding.

He covers it all, from the revivals that shaped the character of colonial America to the crucible of the American Civil War to the story’s true inflection point, the rise of fundamentalism in the wake of the First World War and the increasingly tight welding of Christianity with conservative politics, always in response to the changing electoral landscape – and the changing personal beliefs of the faithful:

Christianity often worked more as an addition to traditional beliefs than a complete replacement. Converts wove Christianity into their existing way of life rather than embarking on an entirely new path. This kind of blending – where different faiths mix and create something new – happened again and again throughout Christian history. Because of ongoing contact, combination, and exchange, Christianity kept evolving over time, always adapting from one generation to the next.

Well past the book’s half-way point, Sutton’s story slips smoothly into the recognizable modern era, when Jerry Falwell “told Christians around the national that they had a threefold mission: to get people saved, to get them baptized, and to get them registered to vote,” and when Oral Roberts and his spiritual progeny began preaching a “prosperity gospel” the explicitly links Christianity to both capitalism and greed. By the time the story arrives at contemporary headlines, an amazingly comprehensive story has been crafted and filled in; it’s an astoundingly assured performance.

As with any book of this size and scope, there are minor shortcomings. Since this book was written in the 21st century, for instance, it has no slaves in it, only “the enslaved” or “enslaved people” according to the rhetorical fad currently ironclad law in academia. As his End Notes make clear, Sutton has consulted a vast body of sources, but inexcusably, the book contains no bibliography. He is very occasionally inaccurate (it was, for example, the Boston Phoenix in 2001, not the Boston Globe in 2002, that broke the story of the Catholic Church’s massive sex scandal) and often exerts himself to Ned Flanders-levels of politeness, as when he unironically refers to alcoholic philandering wife-beating fraudulent embezzler Cyrus Scofield (of the Scofield Reference Bible) was “a bit of a scoundrel.”

But such slips are usually both rare and relatively trivial, overshadowed by Sutton’s unfailing ability to keep his focus on the explosive main elements running through his story. Recurrent throughout his book is the quicksilver, combustible nature of Christianity itself, which could be malleable to the times but could just as often slip out of the control of even its most dedicated manipulators. “Despite enslavers’ best efforts, they could not control the way Black North Americans interpreted and practiced Christianity,” he writes, referring to Christianity as practiced by slaves. “As the Romans recognized in the first century, Christianity could inspire revolution.”

The nature of the present revolution has overtones Sutton is too polite and perhaps too optimistic to underscore. “When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025,” he notes in closing, “he did so not just as a politician, but as a self-anointed messiah.”  If that’s a culmination, it’s the most disturbing one in Sutton’s entire book, saved up for last. But in any case, no American Christian or student of American Christianity should miss this book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Cromwell’s Spy: From the American Colonies to the English Civil War: The Life of George Downing

By Dennis Sewell

Pegasus Books 2026

“This book will not advance any contrarian or revisionist line,” writes two-decade BBC News veteran Dennis Sewell in his new biography of Restoration slime-beast George Downing. “Rather, it accepts him as he was: a man who betrayed his former friends and colleagues; not to save his own skin, either, but to further his career.” 

Downing’s countless betrayals, endless iniquities, and bottomless greed were all well-known in his own day, although now, centuries later, his name is only known for the row of buildings he had built on the cheap in 1682 and that now, perhaps fittingly, houses the UK government (“who names a street after himself?” exclaims Sewell with refreshing incredulity). He was Scoutmaster-General to Oliver Cromwell’s Scottish army, married the sister of one of Cromwell’s major-generals, and as Teller of the Receipt at the Exchequer was, among other things, the boss of Samuel Pepys, who tried and failed to like the man even while appreciating the drive of his leadership. Pepys also marveled at the man’s greed for money, which, considering the source, gives a fairly clear idea of how great that greed was (referring to men like Downing, Pepys in 1665 sneered at what he called “these great dealers in everything”).

Downing had a deep connection to the New World too; he was the nephew of the Governor of Massachusetts, and he graduated second in the first class at Harvard. The school, Sewell notes, “was founded by Puritans in the pious hope that it would turn out saints, but in George Downing it apparently summoned a demon.” And on both continents, and through decades of first supporting Cromwell’s treachery against King Charles and then supporting the hunt for all of his former Cromwellian colleagues, he reveled in pure clear-eyed self-interest. As Sewell mentions, Downing learned a crucial lesson from crusty old General Monck early in his professional career: “one can swap sides and yet prosper.”

Sewell sets his book against what he views as an odd pall of silence that’s fallen over Downing’s name. Biographers and historians, he contends, tend to hustle him down into the footnotes. “Scour the indexes of Civil War histories,” he writes, “and Downing rates a scant mention.” And sure enough, he’s mentioned only in passing in Antonia Fraser’s huge bestselling biography of Cromwell, even though Downing and Cromwell were cheek-to-jowl for years.

And in all that time, Downing “was exposed, by the example of his colleagues, to a variety of enticing schemes for self-enrichment, and the moral climate of his times and profession was apparently indulgent towards a little gentle peculation here and there.” Sewell follows him in detail mainly through these peculation periods of his life; as indicated by its title, Cromwell’s Spy isn’t really a full-dress biography of the man, although it leaves out little of substance even so. And Sewell makes the whole of it lively, riveting reading, full of offhand literacy and playful allusions that would have sailed right over Downing’s head but make for mighty enjoyable reading.

The expectation hovering over all of it is that the opening contention, that this isn’t a revisionist take, will somehow be disowned, that this will even so end up being some kind of reclamation of one of the most repulsive figures in the last 500 years. The 21st century publishing world seems to love such reclamations, and even at the two-thirds point of Cromwell’s Spy some readers will doubtless be expecting the grand “…and yet.”

But it never happens, much to Sewell’s credit. “It would be wrong to portray Downing as some kind of sly-yet-endearing rogue with a brazen front and a taste for black humour, a plump metropolitan Autolycus,” he writes. “His hands were forever stained with blood.” It’s tough to make such an entertaining book about such a worthless figure, but Sewell somehow manages it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

When We Were Brilliant

by Lynn Cullen

Berkley 2026

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Marilyn Monroe is and was a projection of her beholder’s fantasies. Whether those visions are salacious or revisionist, we all know how the story ends: America’s Hollywood Blonde, née Norma Jeane Mortenson, dies at the age of thirty-six from a barbiturate overdose in the privacy of her Brentwood home, to be perpetually mourned and endlessly commodified by a public eager to claim and consume her. In the decades since her untimely death in 1962, treatments of Monroe are often exploitative, feeling fictional, if not downright conspiratorial, even when they masquerade as factual. How do we responsibly talk about a woman who has no way to defend herself and who has become mythologized to the extent that she feels like a contemporary Helen of Troy?

When We Were Brilliant, the latest novel from bestselling author Lynn Cullen, presents an empathetic portrait of Monroe through the lens of acclaimed photojournalist Eve Arnold. Arnold entered the actor’s orbit in 1952, becoming not only a frequent collaborator but a close friend. The first female full member of the Magnum cooperative agency, founded by war photographer Robert Capa in 1947, Arnold was known for her ability to capture her subjects’ inner lives compassionately. Though she photographed the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford, Arnold was adamantly not a Hollywood studio photographer. Cullen’s novel explores how the photojournalist was cast as a “tiny terror” and “Mata Hari with a camera” thanks to her fearless coverage of politically charged figures.

Despite the intimacy and friendship Cullen foregrounds, Arnold struggled to reconcile the fact that “all my work, all my sleeping in yurts, eating of sheep brains, and witnessing atrocities and kindnesses had come down to one thing: I was Marilyn Monroe’s favorite photographer.”

As a Künstlerroman, a novel that foregrounds the creative awakenings and professional struggles of an artist, When We Were Brilliant is notable for its dual woman artist subjects: the actor and her photographer, the photographer and her subject. The novel excels in offering a window into a creatively symbiotic relationship, one where “we fed off one another until I couldn’t tell where I began and she left off.” Just as Monroe was dismissed for taking herself to be serious actor and investing in her craft at the Actor’s Studio, Arnold was routinely othered as a female photographer: “I take impossible shots, shots no one else can get— I mean, Capa couldn’t have gotten any closer—and still my colleagues think of me as a woman first and a serious photographer a distant second. I am never going to get past that.” The pair shares and evolves their artistic values as they traverse the enduring inequities that come with the territory of working in male-dominated fields, as well as profound personal crises, including failing marriages and recurring pregnancy losses.

While Cullen’s novel makes gestures at Monroe’s myriad romantic entanglements, including her short-lived marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, Arnold takes pride of place as one of the “merry Marilyn makers” — trusted confidantes of Norma Jeane who helped bring Monroe to life. Cullen powerfully depicts how Monroe navigated her status as simultaneously beloved and reviled, as well as the personal negotiations that allowed her to continue living privately as Norma Jeane. The novel pushes back against popular narratives that Marilyn Monroe was a vapid studio construction, emphasizing Norma Jeane’s agency, wit, and strategic mindset in bringing the icon to life. As seen through Arnold’s eyes, “it was as if [she was] watching everyone, picking up bits from whomever, to build [her] Frankenstein’s bombshell upon the body of the feral Norma Jeane.” The photographs described in When We Were Brilliant capture her playful wildness. To best appreciate Cullen’s ekphrasis and convincing fictionalization of both artists, this is a novel best read in tandem with Arnold’s Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation, recently revised and re-released by ACC Art Books.

When We Were Brilliant rehearses the questions about Monroe that we have never been able to definitively answer. Was Marilyn Monroe “an otherworldly being in a human’s body, or a human in an otherworldly body?” The novel concludes that “neither seemed an easy fit,” refusing to box Monroe neatly into the usual scripts. In doing so, Cullen resists the usual exploitative impulses and instead asks us to critically examine our own perceptions of the star and the cultural assumptions—for better and for worse—upon which they are based.

Gabrielle Stecher Woodward writes essays and criticism on the stories we tell about creative women. Her book reviews have appeared in publications including Harvard Review, American Book Review, and Necessary Fiction. Explore her portfolio at www.gabriellestecher.com.

Behind Caesar's Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors

by Caillan Davenport

Yale University Press 2026

Readers familiar with the great fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid will remember the vivid description of the personification of rumor, the monstrum horrendum, ingens that is the untiring spawn of monsters, ready at any time to spread alarm and backbiting and even the occasional morsel of truth, all at a speed faster than any wind. In Virgil's depiction, rumor is no respecter of persons, adheres to no rules, suffers no impediments, and is heedless of the damage it causes.

That monster is at the heart of Behind Caesar's Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors by Cailan Davenport, professor of classics and head of the Centre for Classical Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. In these pages, Davenport studies the back channels, the bawdy barbershop songs, the scuttlebutt, all the non-official murmurings that filled the Roman forum and filtered their way even into the most private rooms of the Palatine. “The extent and circulation of imperial gossip has implications for understanding the aims and power of the Roman imperial monarchy,” Davenport writes. “Roman emperors, as a rule, were not deaf to what people said about them.”

In fact, as he writes, over centuries of the imperial period, people at all levels of Roman society “reacted to, joked about, criticized, and probed the limits of imperial power.” It's a quietly dazzling performance, grounded in over fifty close-packed pages of notes, seeming to miss no meaningful instance when rumor or gossip played a role in Roman history. When the emperor Trajan fell ill in Cilicia in AD 117, for instance, his wife Plotina was closeted with him alone for some time before any word was given of his condition. Even ancient sources noted the chance that something fishy was happening, that perhaps the rumors that Plotina was having an affair with Trajan's presumptive heir Hadrian and was stalling over a dead body in order to give her lover time to cement power. A young man named Phaedimus, one of Trajan's freedmen, died a few days after he did, and it immediately sparked speculation: “Was the unfortunate Phaedimus killed because he knew too much about Plotina and Attianus's actions? Or did he perhaps have a role in advancing Trajan's death, so that Plotina's beloved Hadrian could claim the purple?” Davenport asks, before adding laconically, “The possibilities are only limited by the extent of one's imagination.”

Any history of gossip in the pre-modern, our author notes, is fraught with what he refers to as “methodological issues.” Doubtless true, but it would be difficult to imagine a more imaginative and comprehensive study than this. Davenport has produced a masterwork of Roman history synthesis, something fit to stand with Fergus Millar's The Emperor in the Roman World or Richard Talbert's The Senate of Imperial Rome.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Spinosaur Tales: The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs

By David Hone & Mark P. Witton

Bloomsbury 2026

Paleontologists David Hone and Mark Witton are nothing if not diplomatic in their new collaboration, Spinosaur Tales, when it comes to the highest-profile Hollywood appearance of the Late Cretaceous creature whose broad family is their subject. Spinosaurs, large therapods that lived 100 million years ago, had a dramatic design: long toothed beak, strong grasping claws, and, most noticeably in some species, a great sail of webbed bones protruding from the back. It seems like just the kind of outré getup that would translate naturally to the big screen, and yet, when a menacing Spinosaurus did indeed show up in 2001’s Jurassic Park III, it wasn’t exactly met with cheers of enthusiasm from audiences, failing, as our gentlemanly authors put it, to “draw audiences or excite critics as expected.” The movie’s director, Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jumanji, and of course Captain America: The First Avenger), decided to hype his new villain dinosaur by having it commit paleontological and cinematic heresy, easily, almost casually dispatching a Tyrannosaurus rex. The heresy rightly disgusted audiences, who promptly walked away from the entire franchise for a decade.

In Spinosaur Tales, the latest in Bloomsbury’s Sigma series, the entire lot of spinosaurids sheepishly shuffles back onstage, hoping to be forgiven for the fact that some twenty-year-old movie thought any dinosaur could be cooler than T. rex, seeking to be appreciated for its own dorky particularities. And if readers are in a forgiving mood, they’ll find plenty of fascinating science in these pages. Hone and Witton are adroitly informative and entertaining in explaining everything science currently knows about spinosaur anatomy, biology, and behavior. The book has imaginative color illustrations, bone cross-sections, and most-likely anatomical reconstructions. The use of that signature spinal ridge? The strength of those dangling claws? The evolutionary development of that long toothy snout? Hone and Witton cover it all in fast-paced prose entirely accessible to non-specialists.

They also infuse most of the book with much-appreciated moments of humor, as when describing the statue of Sir Richard Owen in London’s Natural History Museum: “Owen’s statue is in bronze, making it nearly black, and he strikes a suitably dark and imposing figure in his skullcap and robes,” they write. “At least some staff at the Natural History Museum used to refer to the statue as ‘Darth Vader’, and it is not unknown for children to burst into tears upon seeing him.”

Spinosaur Tales brings together most of what’s known about this remarkable group and crafts it all into a handy, informative overview. So maybe bygones can be bygones.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Disappearing Act

by Maria Stepanova

translated by Sasha Dugdale

Amid a modern wave of émigré literature—led by Vladimir Sorokin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya—Russian poet Maria Stepanova anatomizes the moral attributes of language and identity in an elegiac novel mourning the disgrace of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act frames its autofictional narrative around a novelist known as M who is en route to a literary festival. Caught in an amalgam of delays and identity crises, Stepanova’s contrite reflections intertwine with her protagonist’s fretful flight from her motherland, as she is regretfully forced to voice her condemnation in the same tongue as the beast she’s fleeing.

For every émigré, their national identity is inextricably bound with who they are, turning physical relocation into just one stage in a deeper metamorphosis toward who they will become. This sort of existential sleight of hand is what Stepanova poetically renders through her protagonist’s journey, playing on the shades of meaning in the Russian title Фокус—a word that can denote either a magical trick or a stunt. With the crossing of each national border, M struggles to shed the burden of collectivized guilt, slipping between somber reveries and shameful memories of her homeland. Her journey marks a deliberate embrace of statelessness undertaken in the hope of shedding her cocoon of perceived culpability and emerging anew.

With a particularly lengthy, bloodstained history—including the infamous GULAG, Stalin’s purges, and the Massacre of Novgorod perpetrated by Ivan the Terrible’s ruthless oprichniki—Russia’s entangled glory and shame prompt painful inquiries into whether blunt oppression has seeped into the language itself. Dispersed through her sporadic travels, the character M—and Stepanova by proxy—probes the potential for collectivized guilt inherited through one’s ethnicity:

But the beast had expanded in dimension and now consisted of everyone who had ever lived in the land where she was born […] and also of those who spoke and wrote in the language she called her own-so it did seem that she must be the beast after all.

Stepanova’s statements suggest that Russians are born and raised within the maw of terror and are thus inevitably shaped by it. Therefore, they become not only subsumed by the immensity and sheer force of their oppressive homeland, but also become accomplices or silent bystanders, feebly resisting in their poisoned native language. In her political digressions, Stepanova’s rhetoric is sententious and unconvincing, insinuating inherited guilt rather than condemning the real perpetrators—those in power—with precision and nuance. Does the German language bear the indelible stain of Nazism, English the cruelty of colonialism, Spanish the barbarism of the Inquisition? Does a language carry moral attributes, or is it merely an innocent tool capable of both beauty and destruction, depending on who wields it? It’s a valid, provocative question, and one that has been examined with greater intricacy in the conflicted poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Never explicitly naming Russia or Ukraine in order to elude censorship laws, Stepanova’s work largely hinges on its poignant prose, while the plodding plot effectively reinforces the novella’s theme of identity when M joins a traveling circus. Playing the role of one being sawed in half, the glaring symbolism is amplified by M’s decision to adopt the new name A, distinctly marking a new beginning with the first letter of the alphabet.

Striking at the heart of a pressing crisis for a new wave of emigrants, The Disappearing Act is a concise investigation into the burden of national guilt and the hope for personal transformation. Despite its weak assertion of shared responsibility among a national group, it still serves as a provocative work that challenges an individual’s role as a witness to atrocities committed by their own nation.

Brock Covington is an entrepreneur and writer. He can be found on the YouTube channel "The Active Mind" and on his substack: brockcovington.substack.com

Needle Lake

by Justine Champine

The Dial Press, December 2025

Justine Champine, MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and author of Knife River, is back with her second novel, Needle Lake, a first-person coming-of-age tale that's both riveting and disturbing. 

Ida Robinson is a 14-year-old girl from Mineral, a small logging town just south of Tacoma. Ida has a defective heart, which keeps her from participating in most physical activities. She's also neurodivergent, which hampers her ability to form meaningful relationships. Ida is a good, friendless, smart kid (she wins geography bees) who's considered unconventional by adults (they bluntly tell her so) and downright weird by kids her own age (they bully her, of course). When her cousin Elna, a pretty, charismatic, self-assured 17-year-old, comes to live with Ida and her mother, Ida is immediately drawn to Elna. She fixates on those aspects of Elna that are everything she is not. Their attachment grows in intensity and, bit by bit, Ida starts to discover Elna has some defects of her own. Potentially dangerous ones. After Ida and Elna witness a man drown in an icy lake, these discoveries increase in frequency and danger (as does the unsettling relationship between the two) until they explode in a climax of life-threatening consequences.

If you like character-driven, psychological slow burns, Needle Lake should be on your nightstand. It's well written and at times rings so true it can impart its own sense of anxiety. Obsessive, unhealthy relationships between adolescents sometimes do lead to disaster. If you're familiar with best-selling author Anne Perry's tragic childhood, you'll know that’s true. So on one level, Needle Lake reflects a dynamic that can be real and alarming. Digging deeper, readers will likely notice how effectively Champine's writing brings Ida’s story to life:

. . . Elna asked me if I like living in Mineral.

"It's fine," I told her. "I don't have anywhere else to compare it to."

"What do people do for fun?"

"They go fishing."

"Fishing?"

"Well, I see a lot of people with like, fishing equipment on the weekends."

"Quaint."

Just then, a carload of young guys slowed down as they passed us. The driver stared at Elna, then the rest of them craned their necks to look at her, too. One of them tipped his baseball hat at her. She rolled her eyes and sighed. The car moved along, leaving our view.

"Do you have a boyfriend?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I did over the summer, but I dumped him."

"Why?"

"He grew a beard. It totally grossed me out."

"I don't have a boyfriend, either," I told her.

"I know," she said.

Champine's prose here and throughout might have been transcribed from actual interactions between teenage girls. It's efficient and believable and perfectly captures the type of connection growing between Ida and Elna. Champine's ability to portray realism in her scenes is surpassed only by her ability to paint vivid profiles of her characters, sometimes with the stroke of a single word or two, as in "quaint" and "I know" above. In just those three words one understands exactly who this precocious, patronizing 17-year-old is. Hence, when an unfortunate reality is combined with the realism of Champine's writing, the result is synergistic, unnerving, and captivating, not unlike witnessing a car crash.

One drawback to Champine's writing style is that it can be a little MFAish. In several places her metaphors miss the mark, as if she's trying more for aesthetics than for accurate comparisons. And her foreshadowing can be somewhat clunky, as if she spliced in additional details after a round of critiques. Finally, and most noticeable of these minor flaws, her descriptive passages occasionally parse as a list of random, jarringly specific observations that seem to check off the boxes of a "try to include each of the five senses" writing assignment:

I loved salt and vinegar potato chips, honing pencils into fine points on the hand-cranked wall sharpeners at school, the smell of mothballs, the sound of crickets, the way orange goldfish looked inside round glass bowls, heart-shaped chocolate boxes for Valentine's Day with white lace trim and pillowy sateen covers, how a cat's eyes shined in the dark, green olives from a can.

Though beautiful, it does carry a whiff of academia. Again, these are minor blemishes. The average reader will likely miss or ignore them in the process of enjoying such an engrossing and otherwise well-written novel. In fact, these may not be blemishes at all. One could argue, especially with the descriptions, Champine is merely reflecting the internal "offness" caused by Ira's neurodivergence. Fair enough. But as the effects also mirror shortcomings common to MFA writers, she may have been better served with a smidgen less narrative fidelity. Whichever the case, Needle Lake is sure to be well received by readers.

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Learn more at https://jimabbiati.substack.com/

Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler

by Sinclair McKay

Pegasus Books 2026

Literary critic and popular historian Sinclair McKay turns to well-trod ground in his new book, Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler, the extremely well-documented and inadvertently symbolic siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. This was Harrison Salisbury's subject in his magnificent The 900 Days half a century ago; it was given a new sheen of research by Anna Reid in her 2011 book Leningrad, and more recently MT Anderson's 2015 Symphony for the City of the Dead concentrated on the siege's most famous story, that of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose 7th Symphony McKay echoes all other historians in calling “an international symbol of Russian defiance.”

Shostakovich is one of the many characters who populate McKay's book, and again, that cast will be familiar to any reader of previous accounts: the musicians and performers of the Stray Dog Cabaret on Italianskaya Street, for instance, or the poet Anna Akhmatova, “a poet of genuine widespread popularity whose volumes had found thousands upon thousands of homes.” In McKay's deft dramatic brush-strokes, we see all these characters enduring the heartaches and deprivations of the besieged city.

This was filmed, as McKay reminds his readers:

The city's cinematographers filmed everything during the entire course of the siege. There were also sharp, brief moments – acknowledgements – of horror: a body slumped in the snowy doorway of an apartment block and several passers-by stopping to see whether the figure was alive or dead (The shot was not held long enough to provide an answer.) There were also scenes of cloth-wrapped corpses being drawn along the street. In one shot, the deceased had been afforded the very rare luxury of a real wooden coffin.

McKay writes with a dramatic concision that very nearly compensates for the overfamiliarity of his subject, and as an accessible introduction to this famous siege, his book is an ideal choice, particularly in his eloquent sympathy for the ordinary people of his story. “To accuse Leningraders of fatalism would be quite wrong; they were by no means passive in their acceptance and understanding of the grim ordeal that was only just beginning,” McKay writes. “But the suffering they had endured before was framed within the steel-grey familiarity of Soviet power, and the way that it was exerted; this time the malevolence was without voice, and beyond appeal or reason.”

And he continues his story past the darkest days of the siege to better days, to the partial lifting of conditions in the winter of 1943, when, as McKay writes, “the rough melody of the bells made hearts jump: they sounded like life.”

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

New Cemetery: Poems

by Simon Armitage

Knopf 2026

Moths have two collective nouns: an eclipse and a whisper. In New Cemetery, the latest collection of poems from Simon Armitage, a whispering eclipse of tercets take wing on every page. In “Speckled Yellow” (every poem is named after a different moth species) the poet addresses, well, everything, everywhere.

Dear universe,

            I shaved this morning –

                        look at these

fine black pinpricks

            constellated

                        in the white sink.

The new moon

            of this nail clipping

                        proves I’m alive,

and once every couple of months

            I regrow a fringe.

                        Universe, it’s against you

I measure myself:

            the laws of thermodynamics

                        are calling my warm atoms

into deep space,

            but for now

                        I’m holding

this hair, these bristles,

            this middle finger

                        up to your smug face.

Falling somewhere sanely between Virginia Woolf and, say, Nabokov, Armitage seems more than merely enraptured with the literary potential of Lepidoptera (though what poet could resist, on a purely linguistic level, the fragile allure of such specimens as the Dark Brocade, the Blossom Underwing, and the May Highflyer?). No, Armitage seems to care about their fate, too.

Moths, the poet announces in his preface (itself titled, you guessed it, “Moths”) – moths aren’t doing great. “Gone are the days,” he writes, “when the windscreen would be smeared with a gluey porridge of splattered bugs after a drive through a summer night.” Their populations, he reports, are in decline. So, why not make moths out of words? And tercets: Every poem offers, in measured repetition, the ideogram of a line-slim body flanked by line-thin wings, the titles themselves finding all manner of serendipitous resonance (though Armitage assigned them, apparently, at random) with their contents (such as the alliterative mirroring of the phrase “printed page” in the poem “Pauper Pug”).

But the moths are something of a distraction. The book takes its title from the construction of a new cemetery in Huddersfield, the West Yorkshire town that Armitage (Britain’s sitting Poet Laureate) calls home. It would be fair to expect such a big fish in such a relatively small pond to occasionally come across as sanctimonious, but he doesn’t – nothing new for the poet whose verbal facility has always seemed just as comfortably couched in the argot of Oxford as the patois of pubs and phonebooks.

Such a combination of circumstances has made for a bracingly intelligent, profoundly local kind of book. Documenting everything from the “bulldozers / peeling back turf” to an afternoon cloud the shape of a “retired Olympian / stealing his sister’s purse,” the poet’s role in the course of his hundred pages is to occupy a position not so much of authority or power as of hard-won jurisdiction. More Gilbert-White-in-Selborne than busy-body-binocular-fumbler, the book’s best poems hit the kind of perfectly domestic note that can’t be faked by transplants, as in “Rannoch Sprawler,” which opens with a “Site inspection / and weather report: light snow / fringing cemetery lanes, // old ice / lending all graves / a pewter-cum-frosted glass- // cum-marquisette frame.”

And then there’s the humor, that unmistakable wit that is part and parcel of Armitage’s trademark self-deprecation. In “Chevron,” as elsewhere, he addresses the poem to you – yes, you.

Dear reader,

            this evening the poet

                        has gone to his shed,

to temper his thoughts

            in the prayer-shaped furnace

                        of a candle’s flame,

to throw with his hand

            wild shadow puppets

                        onto the starched page. So what

if there’s nothing to say:

            this poem, born to itself,

                        for its own sake.

In New Cemetery, Armitage proves yet again that he can do it all. Here – in epigrams and back-of-the-napkin narratives, in brief appreciations that approximate gratitude lists in their childlike reverence and songs in their musicality – he hasn’t written a poem that wouldn’t fit on one side of a standard tombstone. Literary smallness is in, after all, and everyone is downsizing. But for Armitage the move toward brevity is a call to compression, a contest of nuance and efficiency, the same trial that any poet worth his salt has ever taken seriously – that of saying more with less. As this book so amply demonstrates, he remains one of his artform’s most brilliant holdouts, and as long as he stands at the helm poetry is bound to survive another day. When it does die, let’s hope he’s here to write its elegy.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.