Reviews of the books mentioned briefly | The New Yorker

Earth in winterWritten by Andrew Miller (Europe). Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this finely written and deeply psychological novel follows a neighboring couple through a harsh English winter in 1962. The couple, a doctor and an inexperienced farmer, are often puzzled by their presence in the countryside. The wives, both pregnant, engage in a strange friendship that serves as the book’s dramatic engine. As the quartet’s secrets and longings come to light, so do the traumas of World War II and the turbulent and uncomfortable dynamics of a modern era in transition. Miller’s prose is gentle and luxurious, punctuated by stunning imagery: snowflakes on the tongue “with the taste of stone, the edges of the sky.” He relishes the internal tensions, the painful interactions between his characters and their harsh surroundings.

The era of confusionWritten by Lara Egger (Pittsburgh). “Are these sentiments/faux fur or real leather?” asks one of the poems in this charming collection, which shows a keen attunement to the ways in which seduction can become destruction, language can become meaning, and illusion can become belief. Driven by irreverent madness, Egger’s poetry combines elements drawn from contemporary idiom and lyrical traditions to present a surreal world that interrogates existential questions about desire and grief. “Honestly, / I’m a quack, so afraid of heights,” she writes. “One way to explain sadness is to assume that God never looks down.”