11 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/review/11-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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St. Valentine is dead; long live St. Valentine. Or long live St. Valentine’s Day reading, in any case. Just because the holiday itself is behind us doesn’t mean you can’t still cuddle up with some tantalizing books. And boy howdy do we have them. Start with Lynn Comella’s study of feminism in the sex-toy business, “Vibrator Nation,” then try Erica Garza’s memoir of porn addiction and Jamie Quatro’s debut novel about faith and infidelity. Romance fans, we’ve got you covered: Alyssa Cole’s latest, “A Princess in Theory,” is “the royal fairy tale of the young year,” according to Mary Jo Murphy.

Maybe you’re agnostic on the whole question of romantic love and its place in the industrial-entertainment complex. We don’t judge, we recommend: You might enjoy “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez’s comic novel of grief and dogs and unconventional relationships. (Dwight Garner did.) For the rest of you, pull up a blanket and settle in with Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” a smart and ambitious debut novel that opens with a particularly literary-minded love affair. As my son said the first time he saw “Titanic,” at age 13, “Things seem to be getting very kissy around here.”

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, Books

THE FRIEND, by Sigrid Nunez. (Riverhead, $25.) Nunez’s allusive and charming new novel is about an unnamed woman living in a small apartment who inherits, after the suicide of a friend, his Great Dane. The book is about the writing life, sex and mentorship, in addition to pets. Its tone can be comic but is mostly “mournful and resonant,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “It sheds rosin, like the bow of a cello. The woman grieves for her friend, who was her mentor and, if only once, her lover. His dog soothes her; they sleep in the same bed; he is a constant reminder of the man she misses.”

ASYMMETRY, by Lisa Halliday. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) The first section of this debut novel follows Alice, a 20-something assistant at a publishing house who tumbles into a relationship with a man who bears a terrifically unabashed resemblance to Philip Roth (with whom Halliday had a relationship while in her 20s). The second section transports us to a holding room in London’s Heathrow Airport, where Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, has been detained. The novel is “scorchingly intelligent,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, and it satisfies multiple appetites. “It’s a clever comedy of manners set in Manhattan as well as a slowly unspooling tragedy about an Iraqi-American family, which poses deep questions about free will, fate and freedom, the all-powerful accident of one’s birth and how life is alchemized into fiction.”

THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA: Love and Marriage in Mumbai, by Elizabeth Flock. (Harper, $27.99.) Flock focuses on three very different couples as a way of examining domestic arrangements in modern India. “Marriage is hard for these couples in the ways that it can be hard for couples anywhere,” Mythili G. Rao writes in her review. “They fight over money and work, overbearing in-laws and traffic stops. They struggle with infidelity, infertility, miscarriages, anxiety and depression, and the trauma of childhood abuse. But their lives are also difficult in culturally specific ways.”

VIBRATOR NATION: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure, by Lynn Comella. (Duke University, $25.95.) One of the factors fueling second wave feminism was women’s sexual liberation, a process of self-discovery and advocacy that included toys. Comella tells the story of the feminist sex-toy shops that led the way. “Retailers like Good Vibrations in San Francisco created an erotic consumer landscape different from anything that previously existed for women, one that was safe, attractive, welcoming and ultimately subversive,” our reviewer, Peggy Orenstein, writes. “I am woman, hear me roar indeed.”

MY LAST LOVE STORY, by Falguni Kothari. (Graydon House, paper, $15.99.) The narrator of this unconventional love story lives with her dying husband and his best friend, who has come to help out. “In the hands of another novelist,” Sally Rooney writes in her review, “the husband’s illness could function as a simple narrative device, moving him offstage at the convenient moment. … But Kothari takes the story in an unexpected direction, forcing her characters to contemplate the idea of sustained romantic commitment outside the boundaries of monogamous love instead.”

GETTING OFF: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, by Erica Garza. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Reading the 35-year-old essayist’s insight into her own experience — the lonely (if impressively multi-orgasmic) world of a woman who binges on hookups — we begin to better understand ourselves. “The adrenaline racing through my body made me feel invincible at the time,” she writes at one point. “And the shame I felt afterward was even better.” Reviewing the book, Cat Marnell says that “Garza is a master of identifying such dark, postcoital feelings as these.”

SOME HELL, by Patrick Nathan. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In the opening pages, Nathan’s evil-soaked novel about an adolescent grappling with his father’s suicide and his own sexuality reads like a tragic coming-of-age tale. Then it peels that mask off like a replicant to reveal the more sinister creature beneath, an especially dark family story. “As mother and son head off to their own separate apocalypses, made from their very different complicities,” our reviewer Alexander Chee notes, the book becomes “a canny and terrifying moral fable about our new and old American ways of both being together and missing each other.”

FIRE SERMON, by Jamie Quatro. (Grove, $24.) This fantastic debut novel (Quatro is also the author of a highly original story collection, “I Want to Show You More”) centers on both religious and sexual passion. The plot is simple: A married woman is trying to forget her lover. The book itself — erotic, spiritual, poetic — is anything but. Amity Gaige’s review calls it a “generously condensed, ardently focused” novel whose “sentences burn with desire and disquiet.”

A PRINCESS IN THEORY, by Alyssa Cole. (Avon.) Cole’s main character, a young epidemiologist pursuing her Ph.D. in New York, is refreshingly down-to-earth, and her love affair with a young African prince develops at a satisfying slow burn. This novel checks a lot of boxes: STEM girls, gaslighting, sexual consent. Mary Jo Murphy, in her review, writes that the book is “the best new romance I’ve read in a while” and says that the central relationship “blossoms sweetly and sexily. … ‘A Princess in Theory’ will do very well as the royal fairy tale of the young year.”

SUNBURN, by Laura Lippman. (Morrow, $26.99.) This thriller may be set in a small town in Delaware in the mid-1990s, but it draws its inspiration from the noir romances of the 1940s: Two strangers with secrets meet in a town where nobody goes. Our reviewer, Harriet Lane, writes that the novel, “though cool and twisty, has more heart than expected. It’s generous in other ways, too. The particular atmosphere of unlovely Belleville is deftly conveyed … yet there is beauty here too. You see the huge red sun sinking into the cornfields; you feel the dew underfoot.”

STRAYING, by Molly McCloskey. (Scribner, $24.) In this wise, discomfiting novel, a feckless American travels to the west of Ireland, marries into a local family, then looks for love elsewhere. For all that the book is “dead serious about the losses entailed in a marriage’s undermining,” Fernanda Eberstadt writes in her review, “the real heartbreak in this wise, discomfiting novel turns out to be the love between mother and daughter.”