INTERNATIONAL BOOKS / the best of the month
Fiction
The Porpoise
Mark Haddon (Penguin Random House, $37)
This is not a tale for the squeamish. Revelations about a disturbing, stomach-turning, father-daughter relationship are preceded by a gory plane crash and followed by bloody dagger fights, an especially chilling near-drowning and a wonderfully weird deathbed encounter with William Shakespeare’s vile sidekick. It’s a wild, clever, wholly engaging and sometimes blackly comedic journey that ventures back and forth between continents, centuries and literary references. English teenager Angelica escapes her tragic, cloistered existence by devouring stories from ancient Europe, eschewing contemporary novels for fear of being “mocked with visions of other lives she might be leading”. Her swashbuckling, seafaring Greek prince plunges readers into both intimate personal drama and sweeping saga. So strap on your Sea-Bands and leap in. SUE HOFFART
The River
Peter Heller (Hachette, $35)
The distant glow of sweeps you along on a taut, character-driven journey that moves inexorably towards fire and battle, but ultimately it’s about friendship: what it can give and what it will withstand.
