October’s Best Reviewed Fiction

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, Teju Cole’s Tremor, and Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC all feature among this month’s best reviewed fiction titles.

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

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1. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf)

13 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read Todd Portnowitz on translating Jhumpa Lahiri here

“Melancholy yet electric … The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Storiesfrom a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole. By putting many kinds of foreignness together, Lahiri shows that they all belong.”

–Lily Meyer (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Tremor by Teju Cole
(Random House)

15 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Pan

“As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor … Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling … Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident … To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

3. The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
(Penguin Press)

7 Rave • 11 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read a profile of Benjamín Labatut here

“Darkly fascinating … Riveting … Labatut handles all of this with impressive dexterity, unpicking complex ideas in long, elegant sentences that propel us forward at speed (this is his first book written in English). Even in the more feverish passages, when yet another great mind succumbs to madness, haunted by the specters they’ve helped unleash on the world, he feels in full control of his material.”

–Killian Fox (The Observer)

4. Family Meal by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead)

10 Rave • 5 Positive

“Masterful … What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear … Family Meal juggles a lot…but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength.”

–Ernesto Mestre-Reed (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Blackouts by Justin Torres
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 1 Positive

“A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love … Easily 2023’s sexiest novel … Astonishing … It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author’s exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era … Run, don’t walk, to buy it.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)