1. Randy Cepuch’s review of Lake Effect: A Novel by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco). “Sweeney comfortably name-checks many of that city’s most significant institutions between 1977 and 1998, the period during which Lake Effect takes place: Eastman Kodak, Xerox, Midtown Plaza (the nation’s first indoor shopping mall), the Red Wings AAA baseball team, the Eastman School of Music, the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper (and the now-defunct afternoon Times-Union). Several scenes involve a fictitious grocery chain called Finnegan’s that’s very similar to Wegmans, which began operations in Rochester and is still based there. It’s not surprising that Sweeney has the city down cold: She’s a native (and so am I).”


2. Ryan Davison’s review of John of John: A Novel by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press). “While Cal plays contrite, he is far more focused on the sweat-soaked shorts covering the muscled thighs of nearby football players. Still, his aimlessness soon runs its course, and he agrees to leave his fast life on the metropolitan mainland to return home and work on the family farm, which sits on a speck of an island on the Isle of Harris in the Scottish Hebrides. As Cal rides the ferry home, coming down off a dose of ecstasy and concealing his long-dyed hair and homosexuality, we sense the secrets that will complicate his return. From its early pages, Douglas Stuart’s John of John compels readers to contemplate how truths are often more painful than lies.”


3. D.A. Spruzen’s review of The Shock of the Light: A Novel by Lori Inglis Hall (Pamela Dorman Books). “Theo perseveres in his search and learns that Tessa was detained by the Gestapo in Paris; he doesn’t know where she was taken from there. The French government, now led by returned hero Charles de Gaulle, isn’t cooperative when it comes to sharing information that might reflect badly on their countrymen. Unable to trace his beloved twin, Theo returns to England a broken man. Later, he is sent to Nuremberg to interview German prisoners and ascertain who will stand trial for war crimes. A colleague, Jeremy, observes that the inmates are ‘fascinatingly banal creatures, given what they’ve done.’”


4. Stuart Kay’s review of This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life by Deborah Lutz (W.W. Norton & Company). “The loss of almost all of Emily’s papers — thousands of pages of prose and poetry and all but three of her letters — no doubt partially explains the customary view of her as elusive and mysterious. In This Dark Night, Deborah Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Penn State, has attempted to reconstruct Emily’s life using a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including weather reports, the diaries of Emily’s neighbors, and local newspapers, as well as Brontë manuscripts that had been missing for over 100 years.”


5. Diane Kiesel’s review of The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun (W.W. Norton & Company). “If there were such a thing as a domestic-violence Hall of Fame, Big Red would’ve entered it at 8:49 p.m. on June 7, 2021, when he blew Paul’s brains out with a shotgun and mowed down his wife with a semiautomatic rifle on the family hunting estate, Moselle. Afterward, he established an alibi by driving 12 miles to the home of his dying father and Alzheimer’s-ridden mother, yakking away on his phone with friends and family the entire ride. He returned home at 10 p.m., ‘discovered’ the bodies, and made a weepy 911 call. Authorities were suspicious from the get-go; Alex too quickly suggested to the dispatcher that cops should focus on people who’d allegedly threatened Paul about the boat crash.”

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