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Nathan Harris\u2019 best-selling debut, The Sweetness of Water, was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. In his new novel, Amity, a brother and sister recently emancipated from slavery in New Orleans travel separately through Mexico<\/a> seeking true freedom.<\/p>\n \u2018The Good Lord Bird\u2019 by James McBride (2013)<\/p>\n This is McBride at his best, blending historical fiction<\/a> of the highest order with his signature sense of humor. It\u2019s something of a buddy travelogue, one that never runs out of steam, even as you know where it ultimately ends up. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Week<\/p>\n Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \nSUBSCRIBE & SAVE\n<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters<\/p>\n From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n \u2018The Remains of the Day\u2019 by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)<\/p>\n I can still hear Butler Stevens\u2019 voice in my ear\u2014so poised, so professional, and yet brimming with loneliness, loss, and guilt. I had never encountered a narrator quite like this one, and the elegance of the performance, as orchestrated by Ishiguro, is one I return to often when I wish to see a master at work and recalibrate my own writing. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018Knowledge of Angels\u2019 by Jill Paton Walsh (1994)<\/p>\n A miraculous fable. It soars both as a philosophical meditation and as an intimate character study, with a remarkable evocation of the medieval world<\/a>. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018Little Big Man\u2019 by Thomas Berger (1964)<\/p>\n A picaresque that strikes me, above all, for its literary courage. Berger is so unafraid to go wherever he wishes with his narrative. From Jack Crabb\u2019s years with the Plains Indians to his wanderings across the frontier, the novel hums with that childhood thrill, as a reader forging on, of not knowing what might happen next. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018In the Distance\u2019 by Hern\u00e1n Diaz (2017)<\/p>\n For its prose alone, this is such a gorgeous novel. But beneath the sentence level, this story about a 19th-century journey from California to the other end of the country lights upon everything that a good adventure<\/a> novel might be. And all of it is told from such a unique perspective, that of a young foreigner who, in a foreign land, among so many misfits, still feels singularly out of place. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2018The North Water\u2019 by Ian McGuire (2016)<\/p>\n I get the shivers just thinking about this novel\u2014and a little seasick as well! When you feel transported like that, just by the faint recollections of a reading experience, well, you know you were in the hands of a master storyteller\u2014and that\u2019s Ian McGuire here, at the height of his talents. Buy it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":["post-215475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}