Cocktails with George and Martha, by Philip Gefter (Bloomsbury). When Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway, in 1962, it marked a watershed in American theatre, simultaneously enthralling and appalling audiences with its excruciatingly intimate portrait of a dysfunctional marriage. Tracing the life of the play from its first draft through the film version, adapted by Mike Nichols in 1966, Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip to probe the story’s appeal. At the heart of his inquiry are three real-life relationships—between Albee and his longtime boyfriend, William Flanagan; between Nichols and Ernest Lehman, the film’s producer; and between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s stars—that illustrate the universality of Albee’s themes.
Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford (Scribner). In this stylishly drawn mystery novel, the tropes of noir—among them a hardboiled detective with an artist’s soul, a powerful woman with a terrible secret, and a journalist chasing the story of a lifetime—appear in an alternative Jazz Age. Here, Native Americans did not succumb to smallpox, and the powerful and ancient Cahokia nation has joined the United States. This imagined America is studded with names borrowed from the real one: St. Louis might be a mere backwater, but T. S. Eliot is still among its locals. So, unfortunately, is the Klan, which is intent on wresting control of the city from its people and putting it under white, capitalist authority.
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The Limits, by Nell Freudenberger (Knopf). Set partly in New York City and partly in French Polynesia, this novel follows a family through the distress of 2020. Stephen, an overworked cardiologist, resides in New York with his new wife, who is pregnant. His ex-wife, Nathalie, a scientist, lives in Tahiti, where she studies deepwater-coral bleaching. Moving between these two worlds is their teen-age daughter, Pia, who has become attached to a Tahitian expert diver who works with her mother, and to his mission: to prevent mining companies from destroying the reefs, even if it might require violence. The novel’s evocation of contemporary troubles—Trump, Covid, ecological devastation—endows it with a sense of chaos that is at once limiting and liberating.
The Tower, by Flora Carr (Doubleday). Based on true events, this richly detailed novel takes place over the course of a year, in the late fifteen-sixties, on an island in Scotland. Mary, Queen of Scots, has been imprisoned by rebels and forced to leave her son, the future King James, with her enemies. She is pregnant with twins, having been raped by the man who became her third husband. After a miscarriage, she directs her remaining energy toward escape. Schemes ensue: could she jump from a tower window, seduce a visiting lord, or pose as a laundress? Her attending ladies, who are also imprisoned, are devoted to helping her reclaim the throne. Through her tale, Carr depicts the ways in which women can care for and exert power over one another.
