Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction. 
Father and Son, by Jonathan Raban (Knopf). Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths. Raban juxtaposes an account of his rehabilitation after a stroke that occurred in 2011, when he was sixty-eight, with his father’s experiences as an artillery officer in the Second World War. The stories never connect, reflecting the divide between the liberal, literary son, who immigrated to Seattle in 1990, and the conservative father, who became a vicar in the Church of England. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. 24/7 Politics, by Kathryn Cramer Brownell (Princeton). This near-encyclopedic exploration of the rise of cable news begins with the lead-up to the 1984 Presidential election, when cable executives and lobbyists set out to dismantle the power of network broadcasters and redirect it to themselves. Brownell, a historian, details how the opponents of network broadcasting successfully cast the industry as “elitist” and peddled cable as a democratizing force that would “empower people, politicians, and perspectives.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Witness, by Jamel Brinkley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Many of the stories in this powerful collection orbit figures who dwell on the past, unable to accept their “forward movement through the entanglements of time.” There is a woman who is obsessed with the wife of her brother’s killer; a son haunted by his mother as he makes plans to install his father in a nursing home; a man whose budding romance ends after he relates a horrific memory. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Details, by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson (HarperVia). This elliptical novel, narrated by an unnamed woman who is confined to her bed by a high fever, consists of four character studies. During her illness, the woman picks up a book inscribed to her by a former lover. Flipping through it brings back vivid recollections of that woman, whose frosty personality “was part of her—and not as deficiency but as tool, a useful little patch of ice.” These reminiscences lead to others: first of a wayward roommate; then of a “hurricane” ex-boyfriend; and finally of the narrator’s traumatized mother. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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