More on the books (or, some suggestions for your fall reading list)
There are six books on the short list, whittled down from the 13 books on the longlist out of the 153 submissions total. Here’s what they’re about.
1. Flashlight by Susan Choi started out as a short story in the New Yorker. It’s about a man raised in Japan by Korean parents who seeks a better life in America. It chronicles his wife and daughter’s pain in the aftermath of his mysterious disappearance.
2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is the story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years before they eventually fall in love. It’s a story of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.
3. Audition by Katie Kitamura is about a successful New York-based actress whose life is cleaved in two by the appearance of a young man who may or may not be who he says he is. Two competing narratives unspool in this book that asks how well we know the people we love.
4. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits chronicles a midlife crisis in the form of a meandering road trip from Cape Cod to California. It tells the story of a middle-aged academic whose marriage, career and body are failing him.
5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller is an examination of the minutiae of life and a dazzling chronicle of the human heart. Two couples in 1960s rural England find their lives beginning to unravel when the ordinary cold of December gives way to violent blizzards.
6. Flesh by David Szalay follows the course of one man’s rags-to-riches life, as he drifts passively from a housing estate in Central Europe to the mansions of London’s super-rich. It asks what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
