Emily St. John Mandel

A Look at the Best Books of 2020

Lee Polevoi

The biggest discovery of my reading year was the work of Canadian author Mavis Gallant, who died in 2014. A hundred or more of her short stories appeared in the New Yorker many years ago, and they feel as fresh and insightful as if they’d been written yesterday. Set in Montreal and later in Paris, where Gallant lived most of her life, the stories glitter with wit, hum with fascinating subtext, and abound in a kind of aristocratic luxury that’s no longer with us.

Greed, Destiny, and Death at Sea Haunt ‘The Glass Hotel’

Lee Polevoi

The Glass Hotel revolves around two events:  the collapse of a Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme in 2008 and, years later, a woman falling (or being pushed) from the deck of a container ship at sea. In between swirl a variety of interconnected subplots and a host of living, breathing secondary characters. And, as with Station Eleven, the author enjoys (and is seemingly peerless at) shuffling time and point of view in ways that subtly enrich the text, while never disorienting the reader as to where and what is going on.

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