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The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison (Riverhead). In this accomplished work, both dreamlike and incisive, strange beings of an unknown nature have colonized Earth. Years after their arrival, an elderly woman with dementia, who lives in a house near a crashed Airbus A330, and her beachcomber nephew, embark on a kind of quest with no grail. The novel brings them, by turns, to a space-telecommunications facility, an abandoned museum, and other locales half prosaic, half bizarre. Flush with gorgeous descriptions of the environment and observations about art, science, difference, the past, and the future, Harrison’s book is also a reminder of how easily humanity can incorporate transformation, or dissolution: “The apocalypse seemed to withhold itself, quickly becoming just another historical continuity.”
Gloria Don’t Speak, by Lucy Apps (Mariner). Nineteen-year-old Gloria, the neurodivergent and minimally verbal protagonist of this début, spends her days wandering around London alone, “trying not to attract too much attention.” Then she meets Jack, a rant-prone man who feels overlooked by society. “He has no one to talk to and she has no one to listen to, so they can fit with each other”—or so Gloria thinks. They pass time drinking Coke and eating chips, until one night Jack violently lashes out. As the novel follows Gloria over the ensuing decades, she processes her and Jack’s consequential relationship, and Apps thoughtfully sketches the psychology of a person often relegated to the periphery.
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Shakespeare at Thirty, by Rory Loughnane (Princeton). Who was Shakespeare before he became the Shakespeare of “Hamlet” and “King Lear”? Loughnane considers the inevitability of the most celebrated English writer by concentrating on the Bard’s early life, when he was still “a relative nobody.” Alongside a nuanced picture of the poet-playwright’s upbringing, marriage, and professional beginnings, a simultaneous portrait of Elizabethan England emerges: a place of recurrent plague, political instability, bitter literary feuds, and a nascent theatregoing culture. Loughnane pays attention to the practice of collaborative playwriting, a common technique that Shakespeare moved away from as his artistry developed.
Almost Animal, by Amy Irvine (Spiegel & Grau). This memoir begins in Salt Lake City, on the night that the author, whose family has been in Utah for six generations, goes into labor. Until that point, Irvine writes, she had spent her “whole life taking off or getting away.” Becoming a mother limits this tendency; it also brings, for Irvine, postpartum depression. When she moves to a mesa in Colorado with her husband and daughter, she encounters the unruly ways of the wild in the form of invading creatures (a bear, black widows) and strange illnesses that afflict her young child. Growing increasingly lonely, she wonders whether her Mormon female forebears similarly felt “some unshakable sense that they were an exotic species imported from a wildly different habitat.”