Letters of Recommendation #4

A professor once told me that while nonfiction books can cover an endless range of subject matter, novels are, intrinsically and definitively, about the human condition. Here are three for your consideration.


Flashlight
Susan Choi
6.3.25 - NEW!
466pp

In a market oversaturated with voice and vibe books, Flashlight excels refreshingly in plot and character. Susan Choi’s latest is about a father who disappears from a beach in Japan and the lives of his daughter and wife who survive him. I loved her National Book Award winner Trust Exercise, and was surprised to find this one a complete departure. Where Trust Exercise is relatively narrow, Flashlight is huge. Sweeping through two generations and continents, Choi expertly presents us with a novel that begins as a portrait of a complicated family and switches halfway through into a geopolitical North Korean mystery. While occasionally a bit tedious, it has one of the most gratifying endings I’ve read in years. Flashlight makes great summer reading not because it's easy (it’s not!), but because it’s meaty and transportive.


Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
3.4.06
288 pp

I made it to the fourth edition of Letters of Rec without including what I’ve hailed for years as my favorite book. She’s celebrating her twentieth birthday this spring, complete with an ugly new outfit (celebratory cover redesign). Never Let Me Go has it all: it’s sci-fi, technically, while also being a campus novel, a love story, and a dystopian thriller. It’s a quiet storm, exposing evil through three deeply lovable and empathetic characters in prose that constantly proves Ishiguro’s Nobel worthiness. Without giving anything away, I expect we’ll be seeing this one step into the spotlight again with the rise of AI art. Even if all novels explore the human condition, this one does so in a literal sense.


Dogs of Summer
Andrea Abreu
8.2.22
192 pp

It’s an oppressively hot summer in the Canary Islands, and you're ten years old, bored to bits, and desperately infatuated with your best friend, Isora. Dogs of Summer, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches, is sensual to the extreme. I read this slim novel when it came out three summers ago and can still recall the stickiness of it—humidity, desire, and youth dampen every page. Through prose poetry and crass narration, Abreu reminds us what it feels like to yearn in the way only pubescent girls can. It’s short, erotic, kind of gross, and really good for the beach. Happy Pride!