new novels

The fictional killer, an itinerant taxi driver named Paul Biga, is arrested and convicted of committing 12 murders in and around the Barrow State Forest region between 1990 and 1997. The stories in Highway Thirteen flit in and out of that timeframe.

The novel’s opening pages—first narrated by Lakesha (soon caught up in the throes of office politics), then Mark, back to Lakesha, and so on—are marked by brisk prose and closely observed insights. But during Mark’s journey to England, a long stretch of exposition about soccer and related matters threatens to stall the narrative’s forward motion.

At the outset of Burma Sahib, the new novel by esteemed travel writer Paul Theroux, a woman and her husband aboard the ship Herefordshire take an interest in another passenger—a young man standing at the bow looking out to the sea. Who is he? Where is he going?

For many readers, the story of a democratic country's descent into dictatorship requires no great leap of imagination. Lynch makes no reference to how this situation came to pass, but the novel’s premise seems altogether plausible.

On the tree-lined stretch of stately condos and apartment buildings, the structure that had technically been in my possession since 7:37 p.m. two weeks ago Tuesday—the determined hour and minute my father suffered his heart attack—announced itself like Dad invariably did when entering into any setting: loudly, with exuberance, and flashing money.