Best Reviewed Books of the Week: Aviv, Mason and Thompson Lead the List

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Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It , Daniel Mason’s Country People , and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Country People by Daniel Mason

(Random House)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read an excerpt from Country People here

“Mason favors an elastic, lightly ironic voice that drifts among observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative structure is playful, occasionally intrusive, and permissive; it wanders, doubles back, incorporates fragments that seem, at first, peripheral. The humor—dry, humane, occasionally absurd—is ever-present … The Vermont setting, spare and bracing, acts as a quiet amplifier of these idiosyncrasies, while Mason remains attuned to the natural world. Into this landscape he introduces a thread of the uncanny, a local legend that hovers between conspiracy theory and genuine mystery.”

–Bill Kelly ( Booklist )

2. The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders

(Henry Holt & Company)

5 Rave

“A wonderfully satisfying debut novel … Sanders doles out relevant information in a careful and controlled manner. There are four Lamb family ghosts … What could seem an overly whimsical device works here, in part because these are such rich characters on their own, not idealized spirits but complicated people who lived … Sanders keeps all the narrative plates spinning, story lines slowly converging on an ending that feels surprising yet inevitable, as all good endings do.”

–Kate Tuttle ( The Boston Globe )

3. The Simp by Roshan Sethi

(Simon & Schuster)

3 Rave • 1 Positive

“Beneath the novel’s deadpan, stinging depictions of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, The Simp also explores the painful but, in Sethi’s hands, bleakly comic ways race and colonial history collide with the dream of fame … Refracted, at times, through a potpourri of cultural sources … Still, what this exceedingly smart and funny novel finally suggests is that until the world isn’t run by rich, entitled monsters, most of us are going to pass at least a portion of our time on Earth in some degree of simpitude.”

–Sam Lipsyte ( The New York Times Book Review )

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Nonfiction

1. You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv

(Knopf)

4 Rave • 3 Positive

“Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects the next, as though you were reading a short story told in the third person … No one who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro in the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.”

–Thomas Beller ( 4Columns )

2. Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991 by Mark B. Smith

(W. W. Norton and Company)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Mark B Smith, a Cambridge historian, has written a fascinating chronicle of the Soviet Union … No single volume can adequately explain the Soviet state’s collapse, but Exit Stalin is a valiant attempt. Smith provides a teeming, collage-like picture of how ordinary Soviet citizens withstood repression and food scarcities yet clung hopefully to the 1917 revolution’s promise of a better life … Smoothly readable … Though marred at times by a surfeit of information, Exit Stalin offers a superb history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously deluded ideology.”

–Ian Thompson ( The Observer )

3. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thompson

(Simon & Schuster)

4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“So much film criticism is clichéd or unadventurous—he tackles it with a bullwhip, a magnifying glass and a sardonic grin … Is this really his last book? There’s certainly an air of finality and futility in the way he ties things up at the end, or rather unravels them … He still cares and after reading this you will you will too.”

–Ed Potton ( The Times )