Let’s be honest. None of us has read all 16 books that are competing in this year’s epic Tournament of Books at The Morning News. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pick our favorites, make snap judgments, and moan about the eventual winners and losers.
Here is everything you need to know to fake your way through the tournament. From reviews to YouTube clips, from blog posts to formal interviews, we have compiled the best summaries of each competitor so you can get all huffy about your hasty opinions.
And just to make things extra contentious, I will list the books in numerical order, according to which ones I want to win.
– Brian Hurley
1. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Review at The New York Review of Books
Hitting Shelves at Fiction Advocate
2. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
Review at Fiction Advocate
Hitting Shelves at Fiction Advocate
3. A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor
Review at Flavorwire
Excerpt at Fiction Advocate
4. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
Review of the two previous novels in the series at The New Yorker
5. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Blog post at The New Yorker
6. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Review at Bookforum
Book Club Chat at The Rumpus
Reading at Politics and Prose
7. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Review at The Guardian
Excerpt at io9
8. Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer
Review at The Millions
9. Adam by Ariel Schrag
Graphic review at The Rumpus
10. Redeployment by Phil Klay
Review at The Rumpus
Interview at BookTV
11. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Review at The New York Times
Reading at Politics and Prose
12. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Review at NPR
Reading at Politics and Prose
13. Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball
Interview at The Paris Review
14. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Review at The New Yorker
Reading at Sceptre Books
15. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Review at The New York Times
16. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Review at The Washington Post