FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Sleepwalkers Scarlett Thomas, Scribner, $34.99 This black comic mystery is masterfully crafted. Newlyweds Evelyn and Richard are honeymooning on a Greek island.
Disaster looms. Their companions are Richard’s best friend, Paul, a poshly educated London trader whom Evelyn lusts after, and Paul’s Insta-perfect girlfriend, Beth. They’re all staying at the Villa Rosa, a getaway run by the mysterious and manipulative Isabella.
Menace lurks beneath the idyllic veneer of the resort. There’s a refugee camp on the other side of the island, the resort workers seem to know more than they let on, and a macabre story emerges about the tragic fate of the villa’s previous occupants. The narrative unfolds through spiky letters from Evelyn and other scraps of evidence.
Scarlett Thomas’ unnerving black comic mystery boasts masterfully crafted unreliable narration that keeps you in suspense. It skewers the blitheness of the privileged, while transforming their paradise into a hellscape from which only dark truths may release them. In the Margins Gail Holmes, Ultimo Press, $34.
99 Book collector Frances Wolfreston is retrieved from the margins of history. We know who preserved the sole extant copy of the 1593 edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, only because she wrote her name on the books she owned. Frances Wolfreston (1607-77) was a rector’s wife, living through the turbulence of the English Civil War and the wave of Puritanism that it unleashed.