A BOY AND HIS DOG AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Name: A BOY AND HIS DOG AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Author: C.A. Fletcher
ISBN: 978-0-316-44945-8

by C.A. Fletcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2019

This un-put-down-able story has everything—a well-imagined post-apocalyptic world, great characters, incredible suspense,...

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At the end of the world, what matters more than loyalty?

Teenage Griz is one of only a few thousand people left in the world after the “soft apocalypse” of the Gelding, a mysterious event that left the vast majority of the world’s population unable to have children. Scattered families and other small enclaves live on, but most days, out on their tiny island off the coast of Scotland, Griz’s family sees nobody but themselves—and their dogs. Griz’s dogs are Jip and Jess, and when a strange traveler with long red hair shows up and snatches Jess in the middle of the night, Griz doesn’t even stop to think before going after them with Jip. The hunt that begins that night will take Griz and Jip through the ruins of the old world and bring them face to face with the best and worst of humanity—what it was and what it still is even after civilization has ground to a halt. Fletcher’s debut novel paints an engrossing picture of our familiar world after it’s been left to crumble and populates this haunted landscape with thoroughly compelling characters. The hunt for Jess propels this story forward like a rocket, and Fletcher does a masterful job keeping the stakes high and the suspense crackling while still creating plenty of space for readers to get to know Griz and explore this fascinating not-quite-empty world.

This un-put-down-able story has everything—a well-imagined post-apocalyptic world, great characters, incredible suspense, and, of course, the fierce love of some very good dogs.

Pub Date: April 23, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-316-44945-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Orbit

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.