The canine days of summer time are upon us, so naturally, we’re studying two novels that includes man’s finest good friend, set in an 18th-century English village and modern-day Tbilisi.
And if you happen to’re searching for extra reads, try our earlier opinions of Maria Reva’s Endling and David Szalay’s Flesh, which have been named to the Booker Prize longlist this week.
The canine days of summer time are upon us, so naturally, we’re studying two novels that includes man’s finest good friend, set in an 18th-century English village and modern-day Tbilisi.
And if you happen to’re searching for extra reads, try our earlier opinions of Maria Reva’s Endling and David Szalay’s Flesh, which have been named to the Booker Prize longlist this week.
The Hounding: A Novel
Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt and Co., 240 pp., $26.99, August 2025)
In 1701, a doctor wrote a letter to the editor within the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society recounting a rumor that younger women in Oxfordshire had been “seized with frequent barking within the method of canines.”
The story that British writer Xenobe Purvis weaves in her debut novel from this single line is simply as elusive because the anecdote itself. Informed by way of a rotating forged of locals, The Hounding recounts a summer time within the village of Little Nettlebed, whose inhabitants—more and more agitated by a harsh drought—change into satisfied that the 5 unruly daughters within the Mansfield household are turning into canines.
The Hounding is a paean to girlhood and a consummate summer time story, stuffed with halcyon days within the Mansfield household’s orchard. (Summer time, in spite of everything, is “the season of strangeness,” one narrator remarks. “It was the warmth that did it. It addled folks’s minds.”) It follows a storied literary custom of sisters as an limitless supply of fascination for the younger males subsequent door, from Laurie in Little Girls to the nameless neighbor boys of The Virgin Suicides. One younger man, enraptured by the Mansfield women’ “wealthy tapestry” of sisterhood, makes an attempt to decode their language: “Early on, he’d tried to make a glossary in his thoughts; he famous every hair toss, every playful pinch, every sigh. However the listing was too lengthy, the meanings too refined.”
Purvis is attuned above all to the slipperiness of reality and the potential for rumour to rend aside a group, particularly one primed to imagine the worst of its outcasts. When the baker’s spouse recounts the rumor concerning the women, there was “one thing irresistible in it, like candy truffles or marchpane.” Even the extra wise villagers, “those who urged warning because the story unfold, appeared inside their hearts and located there a darkish distrust of the Mansfields.”
It’s a beguiling story, if one which sometimes slips into platitude. (The publican’s spouse, for example, bemoans “the good, gruelling trial of being a girl in a world ruled by males. How painful it was, and the way humiliating.”) And Purvis makes clear from the onset that the locals’ rising ire on the Mansfield women can’t be divorced from the relentless dry spell within the village and the burdens it locations on their livelihoods. In our age of local weather disaster, The Hounding serves as an unsettling reminder of who’s made to pay when “all kinds of odd issues” go fallacious.—Chloe Hadavas
A Canine in Georgia: A Novel
Lauren Grodstein (Algonquin Books, 304 pp., $29, August 2025)
Tbilisi, Georgia, will not be the obvious getaway vacation spot for an American girl within the throes of a midlife disaster. However it’s the place the protagonist of Lauren Grodstein’s newest novel, A Canine in Georgia, chooses to flee her uneasy existence in New York.
One morning, 46-year-old Amy Webb wakes to find texts on her husband’s cellphone that every one however recommend he’s dishonest on her (once more). The revelation comes simply as Amy feels particularly aimless in her profession and household life. Educated as a cook dinner, she married into wealth and hasn’t labored a line job in years. And though she is a dutiful stepmom to her husband’s son, he’s now off finding out at Cornell College and thriving on his personal.
Every time Amy enters an anxious spiral, she watches animal movies on YouTube. Her “truest companions had been animals,” Grodstein writes—Amy beforehand labored at shelters—and her Manhattan house brims with a “menagerie” of cats and canines. Amy is obsessive about one explicit video of a stray canine in Tbilisi named Angel who “was well-known for strolling children throughout the road to highschool.” After Angel disappears, Amy decides to fly to Tbilisi and attempt to discover the canine herself.
That’s how a well-intentioned American girl with scant worldwide expertise is plopped right into a geopolitical firestorm that she is completely unprepared for. Though Tbilisi is residence to “forty-six thousand stray canines,” per Grodstein’s depend, Amy discovers that Georgia is dealing with rather more severe issues than a lacking pooch. “Georgians hate the Russians … as a result of they’ve been staging this low-key invasion since 2008, not like what they’re doing in Ukraine however nonetheless unhealthy,” Amy tells her stepson over the cellphone. The principle suspects in Angel’s disappearance, Amy learns, are “hoodlums, vandals, Russians, Russians.”
Amy’s hunt for Angel happens within the spring of 2024, as Georgia was embroiled in at instances violent protests in opposition to a Russian-inspired “international brokers” legislation. A Canine in Georgia is an element lighthearted animal novel and half post-Soviet politics 101. The narrative is smile-inducing even because it toggles from terriers to tear fuel. Along with canines—so many canines—Amy meets a various forged of human characters, together with “three post-Soviet grandmothers,” a punk teenager, and a Russian draft dodger. The result’s a novel that is still deeply humorous even because it explores among the darkest days in latest Caucasus historical past.
Grodstein rejects the easy binaries that so usually outline Western writing concerning the former Soviet Union. Amy has profound reflections on how she, as an American, is perceived overseas. (She is instantly acknowledged as such as a result of she has “clear pores and skin and exquisite tooth,” a Georgian tells her.)
Amid the protests in Tbilisi, Amy praises U.S. democracy however is ill-prepared to take care of a skeptical Georgian’s line of questioning concerning the “factor the place the one who will get essentially the most votes in the US doesn’t all the time win.” When Amy asks a British expat why Russia is hungry for affect in Georgia, he responds forcefully: “Certainly you recognize that no different nation within the historical past of the world has dominated each side of the worldwide order the way in which that the US does at present. You’re a citizen of essentially the most empire-minded civilization since civilization started.”
Amy additionally tends to throw cash at her issues—and feels a pit in her abdomen when a Georgian girl remarks to her that “your youngster goes to a college that, if I’m to imagine my eyes, prices extra money for one yr than I’ll make in my whole life.” Amy displays critically on the hegemony of the English language and develops an affection for “stunning flowery Georgian,” which she finds “pretty, light and lilting.” Grodstein consists of some (anglicized) Georgian phrases and phrases all through the ebook.
Nonetheless, Amy stays a likable—if sometimes naive—character. A Canine in Georgia is proof {that a} hero’s journey needn’t be haughty and {that a} political novel may be whimsical and bubbly. In a ebook ostensibly about animals, Grodstein as an alternative probes the boundaries of human compassion. As a younger Georgian tells Amy, “It’s simpler for us to take care of canines than it’s to take care of each other.”—Allison Meakem
August Releases, in Temporary
A multimillion-dollar heist goes awry in former CIA officer Elliot Ackerman’s newest geopolitical thriller, Sheepdogs. The late Fumio Yamamoto’s 2000 feminist basic, The Dilemmas of Working Girls, is translated into English by Brian Bergstrom. Sefi Atta’s Indigene captures key moments within the lives of 4 skilled Nigerian girls. In Fonseca, Jessica Francis Kane fictionalizes English writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1952 voyage to Mexico to vie for a distant inheritance. Zhang Yueran’s Girls, Seated, translated by Jeremy Tiang, chronicles the crumbling fortunes of an elite Chinese language household.
In Nigerian British author Helen Oyeyemi’s A New New Me, a girl in Prague is cut up into seven selves. Yiming Ma’s debut novel, These Reminiscences Do Not Belong to Us, envisions a far-off future dominated by China because the world’s sole superpower. A shipwreck unravels into an outlandish thriller on the eve of World Warfare II in Peter Mann’s World Pacific. French artwork historian Thomas Schlesser’s runaway bestseller, Mona’s Eyes, is translated into English by Hildegarde Serle. And Taiwanese American writer Elaine Hsieh Chou’s genre-bending story assortment, The place Are You Actually From, blends the taboo and the surreal.—CH
