If there’s one thing sure to enthrall a lot of readers, it’s a book set in the literary world—books about writers, books about editors, books about bookstores, books about Jane Austen characters. Here are some new entries for your book-world shelf.
Book Lovers by Emily Henry (Berkley, May 3): In Henry’s first novel for adults, Beach Read (2020), two novelists fall in love, while her second, People We Meet on Vacation (2021), features a travel writer. Her latest moves into the business side of publishing as Nora Stephens, a high-powered literary agent (is there any other kind?) tries to figure out her own happy-ever-after with Charlie Lastra, an editor who rejected her biggest client’s last book. According to our starred review, “Henry creates a warm, sparkling romance brimming with laugh-out-loud banter, lovable characters, and tons of sexual tension.”
Jackie & Me by Louis Bayard (Algonquin, June 14): Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did have a link to the literary world as an editor at Doubleday for the last 19 years of her life, but Bayard is writing about an earlier period, when she was a young woman courted by a man with political ambitions and the need for an appropriate wife. The me of the title is Lem Billings, a real friend of the Kennedys who’s turned into a fictional observer of Jack and Jackie’s courtship. “The result is a meditation on the definitions, possibilities, and failures of friendship,” according to our starred review. “Romance with bite: the perfect escapism for today’s anxious times.”
Joan by Katherine J. Chen (Random House, July 5): Chen’s first novel, Mary B. (2018), reimagined Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the plain middle sister. Now Chen has approached a figure who’s more literary symbol than person: Joan of Arc. “Making her real requires imagination and empathy, and Chen brings both to the task of putting solid flesh on the charred bones of a legendary figure,” says our starred review. “The Joan we meet here is not a saint. She’s a savant, and her genius is for violence.…An elegant and engaging work of historical fiction.”
Voices in the Dead House by Norman Lock (Bellevue Literary Press, July 5): Every year since 2014, Lock has published a book in the series he calls the American Novels, delving into 19th-century U.S. history through the lives of real and imagined literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Huckleberry Finn (who’s projected forward to 2077). This latest installment focuses on Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott as they’re both working with wounded Civil War soldiers. “Through the writers’ proximity to the effects of war, Lock depicts both as grappling with their feelings on racial equality and the legacy of slavery in the United States,” according to our starred review. “A haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.”
Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens (Scribner, July 19): Stevens’ previous two books have combined literary analysis with memoir: First she traveled to the Falkland Islands on a fellowship and wrote Bleaker House (2017), about how the novel she was working on was turning out to be terrible, and then she wrote The Victorian and the Romantic (2018), which combined a study of Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell with a look at her own life and the parallels between them. Now she’s written a novel, and it’s also based on the life of a writer—this time, George Sand. The narrator is a ghost, a girl who’s been 14 years old for almost four centuries and who falls in love with Sand as the French writer is staying on Mallorca with her family. “An entrancing and singular exploration of a fascinating historical footnote and a queer life after death,” according to our starred review.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
