What we read in this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Books: The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett; Field Work, Mischa Berlinski; I Remember You, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir; Kindred, Octavia Butler; The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton; This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; Cleanness, Garth Greenwell; The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins; Red Rising trilogy, Pierce Brown; The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune; An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole; Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich; Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell; Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life, Nina Stibbe; The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt; Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, Francine Prose; The Sally Lockhart series, Phillip Pullman; Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; The Gifted School, Bruce Holsinger; The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison; Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener; Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard; The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin.

Articles:

• John le Carré obit (NYT)
• Barbara Cartland (Jezebel)
• 👎Joseph Epstein on Dr. Jill (WSJ) 👎

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