Ask a Book Critic: I want a book that won’t stress me out before bed

Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.

I need a book for my family book club — it’s my turn to pick. The only rule is that the author has to be Black. I try to recommend sci-fi/fantasy or magical realism to my family when it’s my pick since that’s outside their comfort zones.

I am going to assume you already know about Octavia Butler. (If not, she should be your first stop.) But let’s not end our overview with the great Ms. Butler and what she accomplished with Kindred. A lot of talented new Black writers have been making waves in the fantasy-science fiction world over the last 10 years, and right now, there’s a lot of exciting work happening in that space.

N.K. Jemisin won a historic three Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy, which tells the story of a mother and daughter waging war against each other on a furious, exploited, somewhat sentient planet that may be our own, far in the future. It’s an absolutely titanic achievement, and it will keep your family busy should you choose to read through all three volumes.

Akwaeke Emezi writes in a lot of different genres (they once told me in an interview that they started with literary fiction to make sure they would be taken seriously once they veered off into romance and science fiction), but always with incredibly precise, ferocious, electric prose. Their debut novel Freshwater uses Igbo cosmology to dramatize its protagonist’s gender dysphoria and manic depressive personality, telling the story of a young girl who is ogbanje: She houses a spirit in her body, and she was born only to torture her mother by dying. Only instead of dying, she lives, and torments her mother in other ways.

Victor LaValle writes fantasy with a strong edge of horror, fairy tale, and social commentary. His most beloved work is probably The Changeling, about a man whose wife abruptly begins to claim that their baby isn’t really their baby, to unsettling and unearthly results. The Changeling is a good primer on what makes LaValle such a cult favorite: It blends a deeply evocative portrayal of what it’s like to be a parent with creepy, spine-tingling horror, plus some choice commentary on American politics. It’s also a love letter to books themselves: Our hero is a rare books dealer, and a lot of the mythology here surrounds Maurice Sendak’s classic Outside Over There. The whole thing is incredibly fun to read.

Finally, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel Chain Gang All-Stars was one of the big hits of 2023, and boy is it easy to see why. Chain Gang All-Stars imagines a near-future United States in which prisoners have the option of leaving jail to fight to the death in nationally televised gladiatorial games. If they survive three years on the circuit, the prisoners are free, sentence served. Almost no one ever lives that long. Across this propulsive, scathing novel, Adjei-Brenyah kaleidoscopes into the minds of people at all levels of complicity and victimization among the Chain-Gang All-Stars: spectators, organizers, and fighters alike. Almost no one he shows us is wholly innocent, but redemption is possible, if you have imagination enough to strive for it.

Hope in the current age. I often read fantasy and sci-fi, but I feel like a more grounded fiction (or nonfiction) story that can encourage me to look towards hope through human stories in a more modern setting will help my mental health.

One of the contemporary novels I’ve been thinking about lately is Lessons by Ian McEwan. McEwan writes a lot about how a single horrible catastrophe can warp a person’s life forever (remember Briony in Atonement, who spends the rest of her life making up for a mistake she made as a child?). But Lessons is about a man who lives through several horrible catastrophes, and yet somehow manages to build a life worth living anyway.

Lessons spans the whole life of a man named Roland, from adolescence through old age. Roland experiences tragedies both personal (childhood sex abuse, spousal abandonment) and political (the Iron Curtain, Thatcherism, Covid). Yet as dark as things can get for Roland, he still has a life full of love and warmth and companionship, and it only becomes more so as he keeps surviving each catastrophe in turn and learning what he can from it.

I do most of my reading before bed and tend to fall asleep quickly; I average about five pages a night. I’m looking for something that is interesting/thought-provoking but won’t make me too anxious. Something that’s easy to pick up and put down but still maintains a story/theme.

In your shoes, I think I would like a book short enough that I could finish it over a few weeks, even five pages at a time — I always get disoriented if I try to do a larger novel in little chunks. So you might like Small Things Like These, a brief and lovely novel by Claire Keegan.

Small Things Like These tells the story of the thoroughly decent Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father in a tiny Irish village in 1985. Making his rounds one day, Bill comes across a shocking scene in the town’s Magdalene laundry, a Catholic-run institution for unmarried mothers. The Catholic Church in 1980s Ireland is immensely powerful, but Bill, with his stubborn goodness, isn’t quite willing to back down from a fight.

Keegan describes plenty of dark things in this book, but her carefully understated language isn’t going to rile you up into insomnia. There’s a gentle, unsentimental warmth to this novel that feels like a balm in times like these.