日本道一区二区免费一级毛片

Edwards debuts with an inspired tale of a devout and defiant young woman in medieval Bruges, in Flanders. Aleys, 16, grows up with adoration for the church. After her mother dies, she becomes more devout. Her friend Finn teaches her Latin and she falls in love with him, but her hopes for their future together are dashed when he says he’s joining the monastery. Then her father declares that she’ll marry the head of a guild. Distraught, Aleys runs away from home. She’s taken in by the beguines, a group of women who secretly translate religious texts from Latin into Dutch. Deeply committed to finding her calling, she asks God, “What’s my gift,” and an answer seems to come while she prays for a deathly ill boy, whose infected wounds disappear. Nervous about the attention paid to Aleys for the miracle, the bishop places her in isolation, where she’s preyed upon by a sexually abusive priest. Her efforts to escape threaten the beguine community, already under scrutiny for the translations, and Aleys is forced to make an impossible choice. Drawing on stories and biographies of medieval saints, Edwards faithfully highlights the lives of 13th-century religious women and the sacrifices they were forced to make. Readers of Lauren Groff’s Matrix ought to take a look. Agent: Jonah Straus, Straus Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Devereaux (Escape to Tuscany) serves up a dramatic story of fascist resistance and a love triangle in 1944 Genoa. After Anna Pastorino’s home is destroyed by an RAF bomb, Father Vittorio arranges to hide her in the home of a typographer and his wife, knowing that the fascist police would arrest and turn her over to the Germans if they find out she is Jewish and has been using false papers. The industrious Anna once worked as a bookkeeper for a prominent shipbuilder. Now, seeking to keep busy, she helps aviator Massimo Teglio create forged identity cards for the resistance. As they work together, Anna falls for Massimo, who remembers meeting her brother years earlier. Meanwhile, as Father Vittorio’s tuberculosis symptoms worsen, he grapples with his attraction to Anna. The plot thickens when Vittorio learns Anna had been fired by the shipbuilder shortly before the war for being Jewish and her dismissal was linked to her husband’s death. Devereaux sustains an acute sense of the danger faced by her characters, and she adds depth with their personal dilemmas, such as Vittorio’s crisis of faith. Fans of WWII fiction won’t want to miss this. Agent: Broo Doherty, DHH Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Davis (X) unfurls a fascinating if at times frustrating narrative of art and desire. Adrian, 29, is so beautiful that people follow him on the street in New York City, and he takes any lover he wants, man or woman. Suddenly, with spring fever in the air amid the first wave of Covid-19 vaccinations in 2021, he finds he’s either lost his beauty or people no longer see him. He books an appointment with therapist Lola and tells her how “it kind of feels like I’m disappearing.” Meanwhile, in Northern California, Adrian’s painter friend, Mark, is dying of a mysterious undiagnosed illness that previously claimed the lives of his mother and sister. He invites Adrian to visit, and Davis adds intrigue and subtle connective tissue with the cache of VHS tapes left behind by Mark’s sister, notably one entitled “Hot World,” which Adrian and Mark view together. These videos depict strange and surreal scenes such as “a woman draped like Salome” dancing while “behind her, an alcazar stretches back against the dunes by the setting sun.” The main plot line eventually resolves as the pair grapple with their mortality. Despite being a bit unfocused, this ethereal work holds the reader’s attention. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. There, the unnamed narrator posts an ad in the local paper about her interest in collecting people’s dreams. Krysia, a senior employee at a nearby bank, dreams of hearing a voice in one ear, which feels like it’s “making the whole world vibrate.” Aging wigmaker Marta is mum about her own dreams but claims she can know other people’s dreams just by looking at them. The narrator also takes an interest in Saint Kummernis, a 14th-century folk saint who saved a group of children sickened by poisonous mushrooms. Meanwhile, the narrator is unsettled by the monstrous, undying wolves who stalk the landscape at night, while her husband begins detecting a strange smell only he can perceive following a car accident. Mushrooms figure prominently in the episodic narrative, as the narrator eats so many that she dreams of becoming one. What emerges from this cornucopia of curiosities is a rich and pulsating view into life itself, which the narrator views as “beautiful despite the terrible things other people say about it.” It’s a marvel. Agent: Laurence Laluyaux, RCW Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Rowley (The Guncle) serves up a feel-good if fluffy novella about a heartbroken American man alone in Venice for Christmas. Paul’s partner, Darren, left him just before the trip to Italy they’d planned to take together, but Paul goes anyway. Rowley paints Paul as disarmingly sweet, stumbling across the threshold of his rented Venice flat and the language barrier to charm both the landlady and her daughter. Lonesome at first, he becomes obsessed with tracking a stray dog he spies out his window one morning, a creature he views as a symbol of resilience. He walks the streets of the art-filled city, discovering San Rocco, the patron saint of dogs and bachelors. He eats well, and after a tryst with a beautiful waiter, finally encounters the dog again and begins coming to terms with his loss (“the Dog too, was afraid,” Rowley writes. “Perhaps how to be alone wasn’t even the lesson Paul was seeking; how to be present was”). There’s not much nuance, but Rowley sprinkles in the right amount of sweetness and melancholy. This will do in a pinch. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this uneven debut from YA author Nunnery (The Next Best Thing), a girl goes on a crusade to save the family business. Twelve-year-old Eleanor Black has been raised by her father since she was six and her mother vanished after a day of work at the family’s small-town Georgia bookstore. Eleanor’s lonely life gets a boost with the arrival of Maggie, who’s visiting her reclusive aunt, Ruby, while her parents are settling their divorce. The girls become friends and Eleanor confesses to Maggie that she learned from “foreboding letters” found in her father’s desk that they’re about to lose the bookstore. The girls start scheming ways to save it, and as Eleanor spends time at Ruby’s mansion, the two form a kinship based on the fact that Ruby also lost her mother when she was young. When Eleanor discovers an old manuscript in a desk’s hidden compartment at the bookstore, she hopes it’s valuable enough to save the shop. Researching the book and its author, however, leads her down an unexpected path with supernatural implications. The fantasy elements are a jarring shift from the thoughtful character-driven story. Still, this tenderhearted tale has its moments. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Greene (Ostrich) delivers a weighty metaphysical and metafictional novel about a near future in which a virus wipes out people’s memories. The unnamed narrator lives in a rehabilitation center where those who were infected are educated in art, ethics, math, and 21st-century history, with the promise that once they’ve learned enough, they’ll be released. The narrator is writing down their memories in hopes of holding on to them and pondering how one’s identity is shaped by language and narrative (“It was impossible to capture an essence in a word,” they think, concluding that “words, regardless of their inexactness... had the power to knit people together into novel arrangements”). Their interactions with fellow patients often combine the banal and grotesque: the narrator is asked at one point to bite a wart off another patient’s toe because she is unable to reach it (“I was disgusted, and, at the same time, I was strangely drawn to it”). Elsewhere, the narrator muses on lessons from the center’s English teacher (“for a story to be a story, it had always to be escalating. Otherwise, it was just a description”). The dystopian premise feels a bit thin, but the narrator’s playful riffs on the nature of fiction gradually reveal what Greene is up to. Readers will find much to ponder. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

An adrift Chinese American woman unexpectedly becomes an online celebrity in Chang’s lively sophomore effort (after The Wangs vs. The World). The story opens at a Los Angeles cemetery, where Lola Treasure Gold, 31, is reeling during the funeral for her best friend Alex, a skateboarder who died while attempting a stunt. “I felt outside of time,” Lola narrates. Later, Lola and Alex’s other friends play a game in which they take turns delivering mock TED Talks on random subjects. Lola’s “drunken monologue” about scams is recorded and posted online. A couple of weeks later, someone posts a clip of Lola’s speech cut together with a video of Alex’s final moments, and the post goes viral, partly due to Alex’s catchphrase “be your own beacon,” which was meant to spoof self-help language, but is taken as the real thing. Lola gets a major spike in followers, and in need of cash, she reluctantly embraces her new influencer role. She also begins searching for her birth mother, who was deported to China when she was a girl and has been unreachable since then. Chang’s irresistible narrative effortlessly toggles between story lines as Lola explores her origins and deals with her grief and youthful angst. Readers will be glad to encounter Lola’s arresting voice. Agent: Marc Gerald, Europa Content.

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Karon returns to her bestselling Mitford Years series, eight years after To Be Where You Are, with a charming story about a misplaced love letter that touches everyone who reads it in their town of Mitford, N.C. As Christmas approaches, Episcopal priest Tim Kavanagh writes a heartfelt note to his wife, Cynthia. Father Tim is delighted with the result, which he places in a gift-wrapped volume of poetry before losing the package. Through a comedy of errors, the letter winds up being read by several of the couple’s neighbors, each of whom are restored by Tim’s message to Cynthia. Among them are piano teacher Helene, who gains faith in love (“that such depth of feeling exists in the human spirit was itself a gift”); elderly former mayor Esther, now homebound, who’s reminded of a love she’s felt throughout her life; and bookstore manager Hope, who recalls how she once harbored romantic feelings for Father Tim and, recognizing his handwriting, places the book and letter under the counter before it winds up in yet another set of hands before Christmas comes. Karon infuses the story with down-home charm and an earnest belief in the importance of community, family, and grace. Series fans will be enchanted. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This clear-eyed novel from Boschwitz (The Passenger), who died in 1942, excavates the resentments of a broad cast of German characters as the country slides toward fascism during the Great Depression. Old man Sonnenberg was blinded during WWI. The beggar Fundholz, who had a normal life just a decade earlier, roams Berlin with dim-witted Tonnchen, gone mad from a tragic incident in his youth. There’s also Minchen Lindner, now a mistress to a wealthy man after her bailiff father’s fall from grace, and handsome Wilhelm Winter, who becomes a pimp out of economic necessity. The unemployed schizophrenic Grissmann was fired over misplacing 20 Reichsmarks several years before, while Frau Fliebusch still believes everyone is lying to her about her husband’s death in the war. The plot threads are seamlessly stitched together by the end, when the characters converge at a raucous bar on the edge of Berlin full of others down on their luck and those preying off them. As schnapps flows freely, Wilhelm invites Minchen into a meeting with other pimps; then an argument between Grissmann and Sonnenberg turns tragic and sends the cast into a chilling and vividly portrayed frenzy. With profound insight, Boschwitz evokes a country’s descent into madness. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink