Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Grimkes, by Kerri K. Greenidge (Liveright). This multilayered history follows branches of a family of Southern slaveholders. Greenidge’s real concern is exploring the limits of white sympathy, a story vividly animated by her nuanced biographical portraits. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar (Catapult). The child of an American Mennonite mother and a Somali-born father, the author of this “palimpsestic quest” through Central Asia follows a group of nineteenth-century Mennonites who travelled from Ukraine to Uzbekistan to await the return of Jesus. Samatar blends travelogue with a larger meditation on faith, community, and colonization. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. They’re Going to Love You, by Meg Howrey (Doubleday). “What I did was forgivable,” the narrator of this ruminative novel insists. Now a former dancer trying to make it as a choreographer, she grapples with her father’s impending death by recalling wide-eyed adolescent visits to the Greenwich Village brownstone where he and his boyfriend nurtured gay artists at the height of the AIDS crisis. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Biblioasis). Ostensibly a collection of found documents assembled by a would-be biographer, this novel revolves around the nineteen-sixties fame and subsequent eclipse of an English therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, who hoped to “bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry.” With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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