Reader Favorites Bundle: 5 Books that Swept Us Away in 2023

Ex-Wife

Ursula Parrott

With a Foreword by Alissa Bennett

Afterword by Marc Parrott

“Precociously aphoristic and coolly unsentimental, the debut novel Ex-Wife appeared in 1929 to much scandalized acclaim . . . Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective, Parrott examined the fraying social fabric in the aftermath of World War I . . . Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands . . . At its most entertaining Ex-Wife is a Broadway play in novel form, with briskly clever dialogue tending toward the comic-aphoristic, as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era.”

—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

Rent Boy

Gary Indiana

“Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates from the book’s prose . . . There’s the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed.”

—Bailey Trela, Cleveland Review of Books

The Feast

Margaret Kennedy

“Love The White Lotus? . . . Your thirst for acerbic social satire about the insufferable rich—something with a soupçon of vengeance, generational conflict, depravity and death, all in an escapist holiday setting—remains unquenched . . . How about filling that void with a book? [In] the preface to Margaret Kennedy’s sharply observed novel – originally published in 1950 . . . we learn that a cliff has collapsed on the family-run Pendizack Manor Hotel in postwar Cornwall, England, entombing guests and owner alike under a heap of giant boulders. (All are presumed dead, and no efforts made to rescue them.) A deep sense of foreboding thus hangs over the playful, witty story that ensues, involving the friendships and romances of seven characters—each subtly based on one of the seven deadly sins—at the hotel shortly before disaster struck.”

—Emily Donaldson, The Globe and Mail

The Girls

John Bowen

“The trappings of this sly little novel are like the crumbs leading Hansel and Gretel to gingerbread danger. To begin with, there's the intentionally coy title . . . Next comes the Edward Gorey jacket illustration . . . a clear signal, of course, that genteel, if peculiar, mayhem is in store . . . [For] people who like Myra Breckinridge as well as Miss Marple; fans of Beryl Bainbridge, Russell Greenan and Patricia Highsmith; those who feel Barbara Pym-ish on some days and Stephen King-ish on others . . . The Girls is not high tragedy, just as Gorey isn't Goya, but neither is it high camp. Bowen's authorial voice is too steady to be precious and the novel charms us as only certain tales ‘of village life’ can.”

—Michele Slung, Washington Post

A Green Equinox

Elizabeth Mavor

“This newly republished 1973 novel about a bookshop owner’s love life is funny, surprising and unpredictable. This extraordinary novel . . . operates as a cry for passion and against lassitude . . .  A Green Equinox is a book whose transgressive nature slips by the reader easily through the comedy, colour and final tragedy of its telling. There is a particular sensibility here—unpredictability, comedy in darkness, turning things upside down in fewer than 200 pages—that recalls Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. But most of all this is that rare bird, a novel entirely sui generis, with no clear antecedents and no imitators. It is old-fashioned in the best way: intrepid, eccentric, and not giving a damn.”

—John Self, The Guardian