the river's end bookstore

FICTION

Beautiful Children, Charles Bock Beautiful Children – Charles Bock (RandomHouse)

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America.

World Made By hand, James Howard Kunstler World Made By Hand – James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly)

With World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like following the long emergency. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. After the catastrophes converged—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—they are doing whatever they can to get by. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown.

As the heat of summer intensifies our narrator, Robert Earle, former marketing executive turned carpenter, and his fellow residents of Union Grove struggle with the new way of life. Driven by realistic conflicts and peopled with relatable, engaging characters, World Made by Hand is a novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope.

Life Class, Pat Barker Life Class – Pat Barker (Doubleday)

From the Booker Prize–winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, an acknowledged masterpiece of modern fiction, Life Class is an exceptional new novel of artists and lovers caught in the maelstrom of the Great War. It is the spring of 1914 and a group of young students have gathered in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two parts of an intriguing love triangle and, in the first days of war, they turn to each other. As spring turns to summer, Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross and tends to wounded, dying soldiers from the front line. By the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life and love will never be the same for him again. In Life Class, Pat Barker returns to her most renowned subject: the human devastation and psychic damage wrought by World War One on all levels of British society. If you enjoyed Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, you will want to make Life Class your next read.