All Fours

Well, this might be the best book I've read so far this year. For all the flutter of "quirkiness" that surrounds July, she is a stone cold serious artist, in whatever form she chooses, and this is a capital-N Novel in all the best ways: morally serious, formally surprising and ambitious, and frigging hilarious. Imagine a character somewhat like Ms. July (middle-aged, "semi-famous"), and then launch her into a plot of self-transformation whose first half strikingly resembles an Emily Henry rom-com (driven urban woman connects with small-town hunk) and then shifts into something closer to the rebuild-the-world-from-scratch revolution of Women Talking. Throughout, it's funny, startling, moving, vividly and charmingly weird, and so breathtakingly raunchy it reads like a vegan Sabbath's Theater. Wow.

[The audiobook, available from our partners at Libro.fm, is read, superbly, by the author, in her distinctively hesitant, questing voice, which answered a question I had never thought to ask before: "What would Marcel the Shell sound like as a grown-up?"]