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This week brings a number of promising new reads — but none more eagerly awaited than Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest Hunger Games adventure from Suzanne Collins (who gave us this rare interview in 2009).
Read on for full Sunrise spoilers (kidding!). But you will learn a bit about some notable books hitting your library shelves this week — including the latest from a Nobel laureate, a crypto mystery, a spot of vampiric vengeance and perhaps most outlandish of all, a case for optimism about the future.
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
You can't toss a stone these days without hitting a depiction of the untold miseries that await us: climate change, zombies, nuclear war — heck, if we survive all that, there's always the ritualized child sacrifice to consider. But what if we actually did it right — what would that future look like, and how could we get there? Two prominent political commentators and podcasters, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, lay out what they argue is the path to a sustainable future, unbound by the past's tenacious mistakes and outdated solutions.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
Genocidal violence and supernatural vengeance converge in this historical novel by one of the most prolific horror craftsmen working today. Set in the long shadow of the 1870 Marias Massacre — in which U.S. troops murdered some 200 unarmed members of the Blackfeet tribe — Jones' novel presents a northern Plains haunted by its brutal history … and by literal vampires. Don't expect many people to get out alive.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto, by Benjamin Wallace
The word cryptocurrency, though of recent vintage, partly traces its roots to the Ancient Greek kruptós, meaning "hidden, secret, concealed." How fitting it is, then, that behind Bitcoin — pioneer in decentralized cryptocurrencies and still the best known — lies an unsolved riddle: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Someone(s?) by that name is commonly credited with inventing the Bitcoin concept in 2008 and writing the code to support it; trouble is, no one professes to know just who was using that moniker. Wallace, a journalist, explains the history behind the mystery and tries to get to the bottom of it himself.
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
In announcing the novel last year, Collins said the book would not focus exclusively on the young exploits of Katniss Everdeen's complicated mentor figure. She was also "inspired by David Hume's idea of implicit submission and, in his words, 'the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,' " she said. Expect to wrestle with the grim power of propaganda and the dangerous riddle of just what is real, in what is surely a work of fantastic escapism … right? Expect the book to follow its predecessors' example and get a feature film adaptation next year. Here's our review.
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Born in colonial Zanzibar, Gurnah was forced as a young man to flee the tumult of the freshly independent East African country of Tanzania. For decades an exile living in the UK, the 2021 Nobel laureate in literature has used his books time and again to return to — and interrogate — the lost home that looms so large in his past. This time, three young people occupy the frame as they seek to find themselves and navigate the irresistible wave of globalization sweeping Tanzania.
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