Cape Fever, by Nadia Davids (S&S). Set in a version of Cape Town in the years after the First World War, this sure-handed, gothic-tinged novel tells the story of Soraya, a young Muslim woman who works as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly English widow. Soraya has “a fanciful mind” and is able to see ghosts and communicate with spirits, including previous domestic workers. Much of her time is spent preparing the house, “a strange place full of fright,” for a promised visit from the widow’s son, Timothy, a war veteran who lives in England—a stay that is repeatedly postponed. Meanwhile, the widow offers to write letters for Soraya to her fiancé, a seemingly generous gesture that becomes an opportunity for control and exploitation which also sets up the novel’s explosive conclusion.

A Very Cold Winter, by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit). This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war.

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Strangers, by Belle Burden (Dial). This engrossing memoir of divorce, by a former corporate lawyer who hails from two of America’s wealthiest families, begins in March, 2020, at the start of Covid lockdown, on the day Burden learns that her husband of two decades has been having an affair. The following morning, he tells her, “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” and leaves. As the divorce unfolds, Burden discovers that their prenuptial agreement favors her husband, who worked as a hedge-fund executive while she left her career to raise their children, and who has quietly amassed “a fortune” held “in his name alone.” Though this story of betrayal hits familiar beats—shock, grief, self-recrimination, resignation—it is enlivened by its particulars.

The Death and Life of Gentrification, by Japonica Brown-Saracino (Princeton). This wide-ranging study explores how the term “gentrification” has slipped the bonds of its original, “brick-and-mortar” usage, becoming a way to signal loss while addressing “structural inequalities and concomitant social changes.” As a metaphor, its meaning has become fluid; it is now commonplace to read of the “gentrification” of subjects as varied as music, the internet, sandwiches, and queer culture. Brown-Saracino also zeroes in on a crucial aspect of the term’s appeal: in an era of ideological land mines, “gentrification,” she writes, “is politically charged without evoking a specific, narrow political stance.”