I wrote about the novel that most intrigued and bemused me in 2017, Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, for Review31‘s fiction round-up of the year:

“Jennifer Egan’s first novel since 2011’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach was trailed as its complete opposite, a ‘traditional historical novel’ set in the 1940s around the Brooklyn Naval Yard. That is partly true. The novel does bear certain hallmarks of historical fiction (it meets the 60-year test set by the Walter Scott Prize), but it’s also quite a strange book. It has a few postmodern-esque characteristics – switches of narrative perspective in the middle of a scene, acknowledgements of the opacity of the past – but those are not what make it strange.”