Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (Random House). This novel, the first by the author, who has been celebrated for her short fiction, follows a group of teen-agers who are determined to live normal lives amid intrusions of magic. Three classmates wake up to find that they have died; confused and annoyed, they make a deal with two mysterious beings, who allow them to return home in exchange for their participation in a series of trials. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What Kingdom, by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago). In this striking début novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Waheed blasts 50 Cent and loves junk food; Marie lives a few floors above her mother; and the narrator, who remains nameless, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines, and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction, “inaccessible to any other.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Rabbit Heart, by Kristine S. Ervin (Counterpoint). This memoir stretches across a quarter century to chart the investigation into the author’s mother’s murder, which occurred in 1986, after she was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. Ervin, who was eight at the time of the tragedy, follows the case with devastating rigor, shingling its developments with her memories of growing up without a mother. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. On Giving Up, by Adam Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss. Phillips enlivens these explorations with examples from literature and history: Kafka and Shakespeare appear, as does the Crow Nation, whose existence was radically altered by the decimation of the animals on which its people depended. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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