The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe (Knopf). After the author’s mother was given a diagnosis of cancer, in 2007, a lifelong habit of discussing books acquired a new impetus. Forming a book club of two members, they read the same books till her death, two years later. The choices that emerge are not a bucket list but an engagingly eclectic mixture of current and vintage, literary and commercial—Stieg Larsson, John O’Hara, Günter Grass, the Bible. Schwalbe provides an account of growing up in a bookish, artistic family, and a touching portrait of his energetic mother, an educator and charity worker. (At one point, while undergoing chemotherapy, she secures a million-dollar donation to build a library in Kabul.) Schwalbe mentions that his mother, impatient to know how a book came out, always read the end first. Though his own book was begun after her death, he feels that, given the inexorability of her prognosis, “in a way, she’d already read the end of it.”
The Great Railroad Revolution, by Christian Wolmar (Public Affairs). Wolmar’s sweeping history of railroads in America is rich in drama—from the first accident in which passengers died (survivors included John Quincy Adams, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Tyrone Power) to headlines, in the nineteen-seventies, about “ ‘dates’ for top executives that took place in parked sleeper cars in a remote part of New York’s Penn Station.” Among the book’s villains are the robber barons, entrepreneurs of bribery and public appropriations who treated the lives of both employees and passengers as disposable. Among relatively few heroes is Herman Haupt, the Union Army’s rail strategist, who in just nine days rebuilt a bridge over the Potomac that the Confederates had destroyed. Wolmar’s analysis of American political culture has some weak and unresolved points, but he makes a good case that the rail system helped create not only America’s economy but its character.
The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng (Weinstein). This enchanting novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is set largely in Malaya, soon after the Second World War. The narrator, Yun Ling Teoh, apprentices with a Japanese gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, who once worked for the Emperor of Japan. Aritomo is a master of shakkei, also known as the art of borrowed scenery, a technique of incorporating surrounding landscapes into a garden’s design, so that, say, a mountain peak becomes visible through a gap in a hedge only from a particular angle. Yun Ling previously helped prosecute war crimes and now wants to create a garden in honor of her sister, who died in a Japanese internment camp. Eng builds an intricate mystery concerning each character’s past, and an unlikely friendship between the pair, as they find that “memories are a form of shakkei too,” infiltrating their lives in enigmatic ways.
A Working Theory of Love, by Scott Hutchins (Penguin). In 1950, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and artificial-intelligence pioneer, proposed a test—which today bears his name—to measure a machine’s ability to pass itself off as human. The test captivates Neill Bassett, a thirty-six-year-old divorced man adrift in Silicon Valley. Bassett, the novel’s narrator, works for a project whose goal is to create a computer program that can process language with a semblance of personality. This personality is to be derived from the voluminous journals of Bassett’s emotionally distant and now dead father. The premise is inventive and engaging, but, as an exploration of love and grief in the tech age, the novel is hampered by Bassett’s attempts at profundity (“To remain in the world is always a gamble”; “I am my only chance at love”), which often feel hollow and unearned.