Books: 799

“The Land in Winter”
Andrew Miller
Europa
$27

The story explores the lives of two neighboring couples, one struggling to run a small dairy farm, the other, a doctor and an upscale wife able to throw an alcohol-fueled Christmas party. Both wives are pregnant. All, with the rest of England, are about to endure the “Big Freeze” months of 1962-63. Post-war, but bombing ruins still litter London and the surrounding areas. Each of the four is seeking footing between their earlier, constrained society and a daunting new freedom. Miller writes of small things with large consequences; Oxford dropout Bill doesn’t have the knowledge to manage a farm; Doctor Eric engages in a fling with a patient; and wives Rita and Irene form an unlikely friendship. So little remains of the old, so much of the future is unknown.

“Midnight Cowboy”
Jon Towlson
McGill-Queen’s University Press
$19.95

Part of McGill-Queens’ Queer Film Classics series, Towson offers nuanced perspectives on this groundbreaking 1969 film, considered then to be merely a homophobic view of ‘60s New York counterculture focusing on 42nd Street male hustlers. Texan Joe Buck (Jon Voight) steps off the bus intending to live by servicing wealthy socialites. Quickly disabused and broke, the Cowboy is taken under the wing of the more savvy (and increasingly ill) “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Towson redeems the original view by exploring the film as a proto-queer buddy story and the foundation for future films like “My Own Private Idaho” and “Brokeback Mountain.” Someone must have had an inkling back then: director John Schlesinger was gay, and the film won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

“Murder by Memory”
Olivia Waite
Tor
$21.99

Q: When is a “cozy” less cozy? A: When it’s spun from the nimble mind of queer science fiction author Olivia Waite. Aboard Her Majesty’s generational interstellar ship Fairweather reside 800 souls. No faster-than-light hocus-pocus; new bodies simply fabricated en route throughout the so-far 300-year journey, individual minds decanted into fresh flesh from vessels backed up securely in the ship’s library. And life goes on. Until there’s a break-in and erasure. Death. Dorothy Gentleman, a ship’s detective, wakes in a foreign body and must sort it all out. A witty, twisty tale, long enough to satisfy yet not overload. Dorothy’s savvy and one to watch; she’ll be returning in 2026 with “Nobody’s Baby.” “Ooops!” aboard the Fairweather: Who done it? And how? Watch this spot!

“What We Can Know”
Ian McEwan
Alfred A. Knopf
$30

Here we are post-apocalypse — 2119, to be specific — where folks are pretty much getting along with it, as survivors will. Enter Thomas Metcalf, humanities professor of a course called “The Politics and Literature of Inundation.” (Britain is now an archipelago.) He’s at the mountain location of the Bodleian Snowdonia, seeking the late, celebrated Francis Blundy’s “A Corona for Vivian,” a poem vanished after its reading at a birthday party in 2014. Vivian herself then begins to voice, at that birthday party a century earlier, when the dedicatory poem received its sole, known reading. Enmeshed, the reader is lured ever more deeply, not only into the “What” of the title, but down to the bedrock “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” of an equally enigmatic preacher.