It’s Women’s History Month, and writers are looking not only backward but forward. Here are some recommendations that range from the 16th century to sometime in the future.
Isola by Allegra Goodman (Dial, Feb. 4): French noblewoman Marguerite de la Roque has been under the control of her guardian, Jean-François Roberval, since her parents died, and he’s been milking her fortune dry. When, in 1542, he sails for what’s now Canada, he takes her along—and when she has the temerity to fall in love with his secretary, Roberval deposits the young lovers on a deserted island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Based on a true story, Goodman’s novel about Marguerite’s two years on that island is written “with fluid beauty, deep empathy, and an emotional undertow that pulls you in and holds you from the first page to the last,” according to our starred review.
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, Mar. 11): In her first novel since 2011—when Swamplandia! memorably introduced readers to female alligator wrestlers—Russell heads to the Dust Bowl. Antonina Rossi is a witch in 1935 Nebraska; she relieves customers of unwanted memories, storing them in her own subconscious until a dust storm sweeps them away. That means danger. She bands together with three other misfits, including a teen basketball player and a government photographer. Our starred review says the book is “a singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on.”
The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck (Liveright, Dec. 10): The latest novel by 86-year-old Tuck tells the story of Czeslawa, a real Polish Catholic teenager who was killed in Auschwitz, leaving behind only some photographs of herself taken by the camp’s photographer. “With myriad references to the historical realities of the Holocaust, the work beautifully interweaves Tuck’s imagined story of Czeslawa’s constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz,” says our starred review. “A painful, essential, unflinching memento.”
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, March 4): The world of Lalami’s latest novel feels scarily contemporary, just taken a few steps further. Los Angeles woman Sara Hussein is flying home after a conference in London when she’s pulled aside by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that says her dreams show her to be at imminent risk of committing a crime. She’s put in a “retention center” run by a private company that doesn’t show any inclination to let her go. It’s an “engrossing and troubling dystopian tale,” according to our starred review.
Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster, March 11): A “Bloodless War” has reunified North and South Korea. Robots have become a normal part of everyday life. Jun is trans, a cop, and a recovering virtual-reality addict. His estranged sister, Morgan, is a robot programmer. Their father, a tech pioneer, brought them up alongside Yoyo, an early robot they considered their brother—and then took him away. We meet Yoyo, too, though his siblings don’t know he’s alive. Our starred review calls it “a messy, visionary debut.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
