1. Diana Pabst Parsell’s review of A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster). “Impressively, Conant manages to make the various storylines of this sprawling book coherent and engaging despite the galloping narrative style and thick layering of details. Even where the story digresses it proves interesting because of the many personal anecdotes that capture the drama and excitement of what it was like being part of early cloak-and-dagger operations. In one scene, we share tight quarters with Julia and her female OSS companions as they sail to Ceylon on a ship carrying 3,000 GIs. ‘Julia launched a rumor that we were missionaries,’ which helped curb the whistles and wolf calls, one of the women recalled.”


2. Robert Allen Papinchak’s review of Anxious People: A Novel by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books). “The dominoes start falling quickly when a bungled robbery turns into a mordantly serious situation. In many ways, it can be read as a locked-apartment mystery bonded with a unique variation on the police procedural. After the 39-year-old robber mistakenly attempts to steal from a cashless bank in a small Swedish town, the culprit stumbles into an open house on the day before New Year’s Eve. Inside, a ragtag group of eight — a real estate broker and unsuspecting prospective buyers — soon becomes trapped in a Rube Goldberg construction.”


3. Jennifer Showell-Hartogs’ review of One Hundred Names: A Novel by Cecelia Ahern (William Morrow). “A journalist will go a long way to break a newsworthy story, and Cecelia Ahern’s latest book, One Hundred Names, pushes the boundary of journalist dedication and desperation. One Hundred Names follows journalist Kitty Logan and details her often cringe-worthy attempts to rebuild her own life by desperately pursuing the story her mentor never had the chance to write.”


4. Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s review of French Braid: A Novel by Anne Tyler (Knopf). “There is a phenomenon at work when the quietest possible story with the sparest of plots still compels a reader to sit for hours and let the tale unspool in its own time, content to see where it will go next — even when it’s clear the path is through familiar territory. Ah, we must be reading Anne Tyler. French Braid is Tyler’s 24th novel, and that body of work forms a unified whole of style, place, and character. It is long since readers have understood her universe and eagerly return to it with each new release. Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology; as she noted in a 2015 interview, a reader looks to Philip Roth for ‘piss and vinegar’ and to her for ‘milk and cookies.’”


5. Andrea M. Pawley’s review of Sea of Tranquility: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf). “Bestselling author Emily St. John Mandel wrote and published Sea of Tranquility during a pandemic, so the novel must be about pandemics, right? Well, unseen, ubiquitous doom is its overall feeling. Incomprehensible danger suffuses settings that should be beautiful. Fear, confusion, and longing distort the passage of time, especially for the character Olive, who is on a book tour to support her blockbuster novel Marienbad. That book is about a fictional pandemic. It follows, then, that Sea of Tranquility seeks to capture how people feel during pandemics, right? Not so fast.”

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