The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos (Knopf). Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi. “On hearing that Febos was undertaking the experiment of trying to remain celibate, initially for three months and eventually for an entire year, a friend on an extended dry spell of her own glared and said, ‘Fuck you, Melissa.’ It’s true that it’s a bit hard to sympathize with someone who needs to make a project out of avoiding sex, but, by Febos’ own admission, she’d been in relationships from one to the next, ‘a daisy chain of romances,’ since age 15. Her pattern was to use a small infidelity — a kiss or an extended flirtation — committed with the target of her next relationship as the pretext to leave her current one.”

The English Masterpiece: A Novel by Katherine Reay (Harper Muse). Reviewed by Anne Eliot Feldman. “If the accusation is true, who’s to blame? The piece’s owner? Diana? Lily? Or has someone else duped them all? Lily blames her hopeful nature — ‘the bright audacity of it’ — for her impulsive outburst, and the fallout feels immense. Gone in an instant is the trust that fueled her relationship with Diana. Her chance of becoming an artist feels eviscerated, too. Writ large, Lily has put the Tate’s very reputation at risk. Her boss and the painting’s owner now look (at best) inept or (at worst) like frauds. Lily grows determined to find the truth.”

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought by Philip C. Almond (Cambridge University Press). Reviewed by Teddy Duncan Jr. “The story of Noah, with its mysteries and narratological deviations, has been central — until recently — to Christian historical legitimacy and remains an essential scene in the biblical narrative. As Almond writes, ‘the universality of the flood and the re-population of the earth from the survivors of it were crucial to the credibility of Christianity.’ Similarly, the Noahic narrative is essential to Judaism and Islam.”

A Remarkable Man: Dr. Shuntaro Hida from Hiroshima to Fukushima by Marc Petitjean; translated by Adriana Hunter (Other Press). Reviewed by Alice Stephens. “From his long experience of observing and treating radiation sickness, Dr. Hida concluded that radiation from the bombs lingered and spread far from the explosion sites by weather and other natural forces, contaminating the air, land, and water and showing up in crops, animals, and by-products consumed by the public. Working against the official narrative of governments and power companies, he continued to alert the world to the dangers of radiation until his death in 2017.”

The Rarest Fruit: A Novel by Gaëlle Bélem; translated by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions). Reviewed by Alyson Foster. “Ferréol may be Edmond’s father, his ti père, but he is also his owner. He dotes on his adopted son, teaching him the Latin names of flowers but not how to read the books in his library. He spares Edmond from toiling in the sugarcane fields, assigning him instead to the garden, but indignantly dismisses the boy’s aspirations of becoming a botanist. Edmond runs wild through a childhood paradise — Bélem vividly conjures the lush beauty of Réunion’s landscape — but it’s a corrupted Eden populated by fellow slaves, a ‘bunch of living skeletons’ who coldly eye the coddled favorite, awaiting his inevitable downfall.”

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