Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes. Last year, the author won the Nobel Prize for literature. I thought I had never heard of him, but it turns out I brought home this book of his as a souvenir of my visit to Budapest in 2022. The printed book is daunting—no paragraph breaks and most sentences are very long. Recently, though, I picked up the audiobook, and listening to the narrator read it revealed a fantastic novel with fascinating characters and a portrait of post-war Hungary. The book feels as if it doesn’t really end, but I still loved the experience of reading (and listening to) it.
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy is part memoir and part a journalistic account of the difficulties that beset rural America, in particular Macy’s hometown of Urbana Ohio. Macy credits her escape from the hometown’s ills to a Pell Grant that made for her college education. That led to a career in journalism and a larger life than the one she would have lived if she’d stayed home. Along the way, her views diverged from many of her old friends and most of her family. This book was my book club’s selection for this month. Also, Macy is the Democratic Congressional candidate in my district in Virginia.
Tristan4America by Bruce Overby. After a sudden layoff from the tech company he helped build, a restless executive launches a quixotic bid for the presidency—less out of conviction than calculation. The campaign is meant to be brief, profitable, and forgettable. But along the way, Tristan begins speaking plainly about inequality, Christian nationalism, and abortion rights. Young voters, hearing something rare in American politics—logic joined with moral urgency—start to listen. Crowds grow. Expectations shift. And as Tristan’s unlikely movement gathers momentum, darker forces emerge, determined to silence him. What began as a scheme becomes a reckoning: with power, with ambition, and with the fragile promise of democracy itself. Bruce Overby’s new novel, Tristan 4 America, is a wild, twisty ride that kept me engaged from start to finish and even had me wishing the book’s protagonist was on my ballot!
Getting it Right by Karen E. Osborne. I loved Karen E. Osborne’s Getting it Right. Filled with endearing and completely relatable characters, the novel raises thought-provoking questions about bridging class and racial divides. How can two young women, the white and bi-racial daughters of a prominent New York lawyer, raised in vastly different circumstances, reach across those divides? Add in gripping suspense, some corporate intrigue, and a medical emergency, and you have one of the most compelling family dramas I’ve read in a long time.
