Beethoven, by Laura Tunbridge (Yale). Focussing on nine pivotal works, this study, equal parts musicological and biographical, complicates the simplistic portrait of Beethoven as an isolated, single-minded genius. Although he seemed inclined to rebellion and irreverence, he still relied upon a close circle of friends and patrons—especially as he began to lose his hearing—and saw his fortunes as bound up with theirs. His music also testifies to his political awareness. Tunbridge writes that “Fidelio,” his only opera, “roots him as a man of his time rather than allowing him to float free of worldly concerns, a transcendent genius.”
The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers, and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-century Benedictine monk who created an equatorium, a kind of analog computer for determining the positions of the planets. As John passes in and out of the historical record, Falk provides an expansive survey of Eastern polymaths, squabbling theorists, political schemers, and optimistic overreachers. Those dreamers can be the most beguiling: the eleventh-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury leaped from an abbey tower with wings attached to his hands and feet, flying two hundred metres before plunging to earth. Falk, always generous, applauds him for having “piloted an experimental glider, not wholly without success.”
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, by Peter Ho Davies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This semi-autobiographical novel relates the experiences of a father through two life-changing decisions—to have a child, and not to have one—which he comes to see as “two sides of the same coin.” His wife’s first pregnancy ends in a “virtuous abortion,” after tests reveal fatal abnormalities. The couple grieve for years, even as the father frets over the ethics of a man’s mourning a woman’s abortion, particularly when the procedure is under attack. They eventually become parents to a boy who is later diagnosed as being “somewhere on the spectrum.” Davies treats twists of fate with clear-eyed realism, humor, and grace. “All these doubts and regrets,” he writes. “And all—miraculously, paradoxically—worth it.”
Butter Honey Pig Bread, by Francesca Ekwuyasi (Arsenal Pulp). Spanning decades, this fast-paced début novel moves from Lagos to Montreal, Halifax, and London as it traces the sorrows and triumphs of a pair of estranged twin sisters and their troubled mother. The mother, seemingly schizophrenic, is in fact an ogbanje, a restless spirit believed by the Igbo to resist remaining in a human body. She struggles against the compulsion to return to her spirit kin, while the twins desperately try to shape happy, earthbound lives, despite childhood trauma and adult disappointments. The novel abounds with sex, death, and food—whose preparation offers these characters catharsis, knowledge, and sometimes simply pleasure.
