Michael Bishop’S The City and the Cygnets is an alternate history of the city of Atlanta. Bishop’s Atlanta does not grow to become the American South’s largest sprawling metropolitan area. Instead, the city encases itself within a giant dome big enough to contain the entire population of the state of Georgia, and the city’s residents remain trapped inside their dome for almost a century. Bishop’s novel is an impressive achievement of speculative world-building: his domed Atlanta is a technological marvel straight out of Buckminster Fuller’s wildest geodesic dreams; his descriptions of abandoned Georgia highways and suburbs choked in kudzu are haunting and unforgettable; and his cat-eating space aliens, “the Cygnets,” are truly eerie. Yet as memorable as these fantastic sights are, The City and the Cygnets succeeds mostly because its author never loses sight of what all cities, domed and otherwise, are really made of: the people who live in them.
When I was thinking about this review there were two words in my mind – tense and mood – and although the novel is both suspenseful and atmospheric, I was using the words in a strictly grammatical sense. On reflection perhaps “syntax” would have been even better. Nobody can manipulate and modulate time in the way Maggie O’Farrell does, and this has been a consistently overlooked feature of her oeuvre.
“The Witches of Moonshyne Manor” is a remarkable read about a family overcoming daunting obstacles to reconnect and reestablish their love for each other. It weaves in relative plot lines facing a modern reader: an older generation struggling with adapting to an increasingly tech-savvy society, desperate expressions of love toward an unreciprocating individual, and the acceptance of a new, younger adept who will continue the family legacy. This wonderful novel will grab the reader’s attention until the very end to see how this family perseveres and heals to regain their love and compassion toward each other.
“Hurray then for funerals!” exclaims Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus’s 1956 novel The Fall. Camus himself was a fan of funerals, according to Olivier Todd in his 1996 biography of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist. As Todd details, Camus became obsessed with American funeral customs on his trip to the United States in 1946. Hayley Campbell, also a funeral fan, reports on what we make of our dead in her new book, All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work. She dives far deeper than just a survey of funeral ceremonies, choosing to interview professionals in the death industry in the United States and the United Kingdom, including a doctor who handles cadavers at the Mayo Clinic, a death-mask sculptor, a Black executioner in Virginia, and workers at the largest cryonics center in the world, among others.