Starling Days: A Novel

"Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s moving portrait of a marriage troubled by mental ill-health, Starling Days, was published last year in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim (and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award), but is only recently out in the United States and Canada. Full of a quiet grace and tenderness, the book opens in the aftermath of what appears to have been a suicide attempt by Mina, a Classics scholar, on George Washington Bridge. From here, Mina and her partner Oscar face an uncertain future. Softly spoken and perceptive, it is a book that asks us what it means to live when you’re not sure you want to – and how it feels to act as spectator to someone else’s pain. Other titles already out include Evie Wyld’s The B ass Rock , a haunting, three-stranded novel about women separated by time but linked by male brutality. As in Wyld’s previous novels (the superlative All the Birds, Singing and After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice ), she deploys here an ingeniously complex structure that jumps back and forth through centuries, bringing into alignment events generations apart so that we might view their commonalities. Lucid, menacing and masterfully constructed."