Paperback Picks
Time again for a round of Paperback Picks! This month: some impressive follow-up novels from bestselling authors, an Oscar-winning actor's poignant memoir, a truly hilarious political satire, and more — all freshly out in paperback. Happy reading!
"Finding Me: A Memoir" by Viola Davis (HarperCollins, $17.99). The great Davis, whose performances on screen have thrilled us for many years (among my favorites: "Doubt," "Fences," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," and "Widows"), here writes of her devastatingly difficult childhood and "gives a master class in triumphing over poverty and despair" wrote Publishers Weekly in a starred review. "Davis's grit and determination are moving, and her unflinching reckoning with the 'racism and misogyny' she faced in Hollywood makes her story of overcoming all the more effective."
"Let's Not Do That Again" by Grant Ginder (Henry Holt & Co., $18.99). OK, so this one isn't actually out until April 11, but I enjoyed it so much when I read it in hardcover last year that I can't resist slipping it in. Ginder's novel centers on a smooth New York congresswoman running for the Senate (think Julia Louis-Dreyfus in "Veep"), but whose path to success is blocked by her slacker daughter, who's taken up with a French nationalist with the absolutely perfect name of Xavier de la Mariniere. Things unfold rapidly and hilariously (there's a Joan Didion musical lurking in a subplot), and there's a warm heart beneath the satire. Here's hoping there's a screen adaptation simmering.
"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel (Vintage, $17). Mandel follows "Station Eleven" and "The Glass Hotel" with this time-travel novel, beginning in Western Canada in 1912 and eventually jumping to 2203, as a novelist takes a book tour around Planet Earth. "This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose," wrote Ron Charles in The Washington Post, calling the book "an elegant demonstration of Mandel's facility with a range of tones and historical periods."
"The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles (Penguin, $19). Named a best book of 2021 by NPR, The Washington Post and Barack Obama, Towles' follow-up to "A Gentleman in Moscow" became an instant bestseller. Seattle Times reviewer Wingate Packard called this 1950s road-trip tale "a hefty slab of clever storytelling," adding that "Towles plays stylishly with elements of the picaresque, the coming-of-age novel and the epic quest."
"The Immortal King Rao" by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton, $17.95). Vara's acclaimed debut is a sweeping father-daughter tale that encompasses science fiction, climate change, dystopia, capitalism and family drama. It is, wrote New York Times reviewer Justin Taylor, "a monumental achievement: beautiful and brilliant, heartbreaking and wise, but also pitiless, which may be controversial to list among its virtues but is in fact essential to its success. Vara respects her reader and herself too much to yield to the temptation to console us."
"The It Girl" by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press, $18.99). I always like to include a mystery in these roundups, and Ware's psychological thrillers are always a reliable pleasure. This one, in which a woman is drawn back into the death of an Oxford classmate 10 years ago, had me turning pages late at night. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote "Alternating past and present chapters build toward a gripping denouement as nicely chosen details bring each character vividly to life. This showcases Ware's gifts to the fullest."
"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara (Anchor Books, $18). The author of "A Little Life" took on a challenging structure for her follow-up novel: a 700-page saga, beginning in New York in 1893 and spanning 200 years, with characters morphing and reincarnating into new eras. "This ambitious novel tackles major American questions and answers them in an original, engrossing way," wrote Gish Jen in The New York Times.
"Crying in H Mart: A Memoir" by Michelle Zauner (Vintage, $17). Zauner, a musician under the name Japanese Breakfast, chronicles the recent loss of her mother in this bestselling memoir. Seattle Times reviewer Sarah Neilson described it as "a warm and wholehearted work of literature, an honest and detailed account of grief over time, studded with moments of hope, humor, beauty, and clear-eyed observation. It is not to be missed."
