Upcoming: LIFE OF M by Rachel Cusk (FSG / Faber)

May 8, 2026May 7, 2026 Civilian Reader Upcoming Faber & Faber, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fiction, FSG, Life of M, Most Anticipated 2026, Rachel Cusk

Yesterday, I spotted Life of M on NetGalley. It’s the next novel by Rachel Cusk, the acclaimed, best-selling author of the Outline Trilogy and many others. I haven’t actually read anything by Cusk (not actually sure why), but the synopsis for this next book caught my attention. I’ve popped it on my anticipated list, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Here’s the synopsis:

M is a famous actor. She has been famous since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. Over time she has grown so accustomed to being recognized that not to be recognized comes as a rare surprise.

This might be why she agrees to let a stranger write her biography, a stranger who knows nothing of M and yet resembles her uncannily. The project they embark upon together sprawls and expands, to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days, across hotel rooms and bourgeois facades and film sets, through the endless modern cities whose beauty requires great suffering, whose ugliness holds great beauty.

Out of the bewildering torrent of the present, Rachel Cusk has fashioned a new kind of literature. What begins with a collision between two people — M, and the ordinary stranger who begins to tell her story — evolves into a chronicle of modern life, a choral investigation into how we might find what is significant within the wreck of the ordinary. This is a novel stripped of artifice, that takes our emptiness and fills it with grace. It is a shocking achievement.

Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America (August 25th) and Faber & Faber in the UK (August 28th).

Follow the Author: Goodreads

Quick Review: PRACTICE by Rosalind Brown (FSG)

March 25, 2024 Civilian Reader Review Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fiction, FSG Books, Practice, Rosalind Brown, W&N, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Life intrudes on the life of a student struggling to write a paper

A day in the life of a young student who experiences her thoughts, fantasies, and wishes as she writes about — or tries to write about — Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Rosalind Brown’s Practice shows us just one day. Annabel, sitting in her small student room, attempts to write an essay about Shakespeare. She follows a meticulous, solitary routine but finds it repeatedly thrown off course as the day progresses: by family and friends who demand her attention and time, by thoughts of her much older boyfriend and his impending visit, by wild sexual fantasies and stories of her own invented characters — and by darker crises, obliquely glimpsed but capable of derailing Annabel’s carefully laid plans.

Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is getting some glowing and gushing pre-publication buzz, and I was lucky enough to receive a review copy from the publisher. As someone who has spent much of the past 20 years in and around academia, I was drawn to the premise: it sounded like a slightly different kind of campus novel. Brown is undoubtedly a gifted writer, but ultimately I think the premise was a little thin to maintain an entire novel. Continue reading →

Upcoming: GONE TO THE WOLVES by John Wray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

November 10, 2022 Civilian Reader Upcoming Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fiction, Gone to the Wolves, Heavy Metal, John Wray, Most Anticipated 2023

WrayJ-GoneToTheWolvesUSHC As a life-long metalhead, my eyes must be tuned to spot “metal script”, as they did on the cover of John Wray‘s upcoming new novel, Gone to the Wolves. “What’s that about?” I wondered. The new novel from the author of The Lost Time Accidents and Godsend, it delves into “the wild, risky world of heavy metal in the 1980s and ’90s”. Here’s the synopsis:

Kip, Leslie, and Kira are outliers—even in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another.

Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida’s swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they’ve found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal. On a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, in the middle of a show, she simply vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined.

In his most absorbing and ambitious novel yet, John Wray dives deep into the wild, funhouse world of heavy metal and death cults in the 1980s and ’90s. Gone to the Wolves lays bare the intensity, tumult, and thrill of friendship in adolescence—a time when music can often feel like life or death.

I’m really looking forward to reading this. John Wray’s Gone to the Wolves is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America on May 2nd, 2023.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter

Quick Review: EVERYTHING NOW by Rosecrans Baldwin (MCD)

April 19, 2021 Civilian Reader Review Culture, Everything Now, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Los Angeles, MCD, Most Anticipated 2021, Non-Fiction, Politics, Rosecrans Baldwin, Society

Lessons from the city-state of Los Angeles

America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny — this is the city-state of Los Angeles.

Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself — vastly more than its many, many parts.

Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place — Los Angeles — whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out.

Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.

It’s not just America that’s obsessed with Los Angeles. I’ve long been fascinated by the city (even though I’m not sure I’d like to live there). It’s one of my favourite fiction locations, and its diverse and fragmented nature allows for incredible variation in the novels, TV series and movies set within it. In Everything Now, Baldwin does a very good job of showing us the city from a number of different angles — some familiar, some new, all interesting. An interesting and engaging journey through various facets of Los Angeles, I enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Quick Review: UNCANNY VALLEY by Anna Wiener (MCD, FSG / Fourth Estate)

April 8, 2020May 13, 2021 Civilian Reader Review Anna Weiner, Anna Wiener, Farrar Straus & Giroux, FSG, MCD, Memoir, Most Anticipated 2020, Must Read 2020, Non-Fiction, Silicon Valley, Technology, Uncanny Valley

A page-turning memoir of contemporary Silicon Valley

In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener — stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial — left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.

Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.

Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.

Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

This memoir received a lot of buzz prior to release. In some ways, this was inevitable — Silicon Valley remains a perennial fascination for so very many people. However, one thing that was coming out of the early buzz was that this is a rather different kind of Silicon Valley memoir/book. I started reading it pretty much as soon as I got a review copy, and I’m happy to report that the hype was justified: this is a superb book. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE MERE WIFE by Maria Dahvana Headley (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

April 26, 2018 Civilian Reader Upcoming Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fiction, Maria Dahvana Headley, MCD, Mere Wife, Most Anticipated 2018

Maria Dahvana Headley‘s latest novel sounds really interesting. It is a “modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers — a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran — fight to protect those they love”. The Mere Wife is due to be published by MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux in July 2018. Here’s the synopsis:

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings — high and gabled — and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside — in lawns and on playgrounds — wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

Not going to lie — my eye was definitely caught by that cover. Really looking forward to giving this a try. The Mere Wife is published on July 17th, 2018, by MCD.

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter

Books on Film: ANNIHILATION

February 22, 2018February 22, 2018 Civilian Reader Upcoming, Video Alex Garland, Annihilation, Area X, Books On Film, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fourth Estate, Gina Rodriguez, Jeff Vandermeer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Movies, Natalie Portman, Paramount Pictures, Southern Reach Trilogy, Tessa Thompson, Trailer

Tomorrow, the highly-anticipated adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation arrives in theatres — well, in some theatres. For some reason, Paramount has decided to release the movie through Netflix in the UK, despite its internationally-popular star and critically-acclaimed director. Directed and screenplay adapted by Alex Garland, and starring Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Jennifer Jason Leigh (among others), here’s the trailer:

Annihilation is the first novel in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Fourth Estate in the UK.

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Here’s the novel’s synopsis:

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers — they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding — but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

The trilogy has also been collected into a single volume, Area X (US/UK).

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New Books (March)

March 31, 2016August 23, 2018 Civilian Reader New Books Adrian Barnes, Aidan Harte, Ben H Winters, Brenda Cooper, Catherine Cerveny, Christopher Fowler, Corgi, Curtis C. Chen, Dan Vyleta, Daniel Abraham, David Wingrove, Deena Goldstone, Del Rey UK, Drew Magary, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Gail Z Martin, Giles Kristian, Glenda Larke, Jack Grimwood, James Lovegrove, Jason Arnopp, Jason LaPier, Jo Fletcher Books, John DeCure, John Wray, Jon Skovron, L.S. Hilton, Laura van Den Berg, Madeline Ashby, Malka Older, Melissa F. Olson, Minotaur, Neil Gaiman, Orbit, Orion, Pyr Books, Richard A. Knaak, Robert Kroese, Roger Hobbs, Sam Sykes, Spencer Kope, Stephanie Saulter, Stephen Aryan, Steve Cavanagh, Terry Brooks, Thomas Dunne Books, Titan Books, Tor.com, Trevor Hoyle, Voyager

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Featuring: Daniel Abraham, Jason Arnopp, Stephen Aryan, Madeline Ashby, Adrian Barnes, Terry Brooks, Steve Cavanagh, Catherine Cerveny, Curtis C. Chen, Jennifer Close, Brenda Cooper, John DeCure, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Deena Goldstone, Jack Grimwood, Aidan Harte, Nathan Hill, L.S. Hilton, Roger Hobbs, Trevor Hoyle, Richard A. Knaak, Spencer Kope, Giles Kristian, Robert Kroese, Jason LaPier, Glenda Larke, James Lovegrove, Drew Magary, Gail Z. Martin, Malka Older, Melissa F. Olson, Stephanie Saulter, Jon Skovron, Sam Sykes, Laura van Den Berg, Dan Vyleta, David Wingrove, Ben H. Winters, John Wray

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Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS by John Wray (Canongate/FSG)

February 2, 2016January 31, 2021 Civilian Reader Upcoming Canongate, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Fiction, John Wray, Literary, Lost Time Accidents, Time

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John Wray‘s next novel, The Lost Time Accidents sounds fascinating:

Every moment that passes is a

Lost Time Accident.

Close your eyes, Children,

when you want

to stop Time…

Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar ‘Waldy’ Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back.

In his ambitious and fiercely inventive new novel, John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein’s radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.

The Lost Time Accidents is a bold and epic saga set against the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

Both the UK and US cover have been popping up on my Goodreads and Amazon recommendations. I’m certainly intrigued. The Lost Time Accidents is published in the UK on June 16th, by Canongate (above, left); and on February 9th in the US, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wray is also the author of Lowboy (published by Canongate), The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan’s Tongue (published by Vintage).

New Books: March #1

March 16, 2015August 23, 2018 Civilian Reader New Books Alastair Reynolds, Angus Watson, Arianne Tex Thompson, Col Buchanan, Dave Gross, David Wingrove, Edan Lepucki, Faber & Faber, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Gardener Dozois, Genevieve Valentine, George RR Martin, Harvill Secker, John Connolly, John Joseph Adams, Joshua Gaylord, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kim Stanley Robinson, Knopf, Kristen Painter, Lavie Tidhar, Little Brown, Marc Turner, Mulholland, Orbit, Pathfinder, Patricia Briggs, Paul Beatty, Richard Beard, Rjurik Davidson, Robert Levy, St Martin's Press, Stephen Metcalfe, Tachyon Publications, Titan Books, Tom Lloyd, Tor Books, VE Schwab

Or, “Lordy, 2015 is shaping up to be an incredible year for books…”

Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Richard Beard, Paul Beatty, Patricia Briggs, Col Buchanan, John Connelly, Rjurik Davidson, Joshua Gaylord, Dave Gross, Kazuo Ishiguro, Edan Lepucki, Robert Levy, Tom Lloyd, George R.R. Martin & Gardener Dozois, Stephen Metcalfe, Kristen Painter, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, V.E. Schwab, Lavie Tidhar, Marc Turner Continue reading →