A Peek at Peak Picks for April 2022

We’re adding ten Peak Picks for April!

For fiction, Jennifer Egan returns with The Candy House, a sibling novel to the Pulitzer-Prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, which imagines a world of constant surveillance where privacy no longer exists; Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel) explores 500 years of time travel from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a colony on the moon in the metaphysical Sea of Tranquility; Douglas Stuart, the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain, revisits 1980s Glasgow with a story of queer love and the working-class in Young Mungo; singer Janelle Monáe returns to the dystopian world of her concept album Dirty Computer with five science fiction short stories in The Memory Librarian; and Jenny Tinghui Zhang debuts with the tale of a Chinese girl trying to find her place in the 1880s American West amidst the Chinese Exclusion Act in Four Treasures of the Sky.

In nonfiction, Susan Cain, whose book Quiet: The Power of Introverts was a New York Times bestseller for seven years, returns with an examination of the underestimated virtues of melancholy in Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole; Ocean Vuong (Night Sky With Exit Wounds, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) finds beauty among grief following the death of the woman who raised him in his second poetry collection Time is a Mother; Viola Davis tells her life story, from a childhood of poverty and violence in Rhode Island to hard-won success as a star of stage and screen on her own terms in Finding Me; Elizabeth Alexander (The Light of the World) discusses the power of Black joy and community in the shadow of violence directed at Black people in America in The Trayvon Generation; and fans of Into the Wild and Nomadland will be captivated by the riveting story of Dick Conant, who solo canoed thousands of miles of America’s waterways only to disappear without a trace in Ben McGrath’s debut Riverman: An American Odyssey.

~posted by Frank