Octavia Books

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
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This novel is uber-Murakami, the author back to the magical best of his earlier novels such as Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (note: this makes sense, as the author writes in an afterword that this novel was a second attempt at reworking a novella, the first attempt being Hardboiled Wonderland). You don’t read a Murakami novel; you live it, holding on for dear life until it lets you off at the end, slightly confused but highly entertained. A magical world slowly unravels through an unnamed girl, while everyday life interweaves with it, featuring all the traditional Murakami Bingo tropes (loneliness, high school, jazz, pasta recipes, The Beatles, wells, libraries, cats…all the greatest hits!) There were a few minor logical bugbears, but plot logic was never Murakami’s strong suit. The simplicity of his language has long been a feature, but lately has felt more like a bug at times, with the repetition of banal thoughts (‘it was just my conjecture, but I was sure of it’; I nodded vaguely’ etc.) – perhaps as one of my all-time favourite authors I have come to expect more, but it was still great to be back in Murakami world.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, (List Price: $19, Vintage, 9780593687840, November 2024)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris

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Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris
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Weaves together Butler’s own words with a well-researched, illuminating background to produce an excellent biography of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and all in under 300 pages. Masterful.

Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris, (List Price: $29.99, Amistad, 9780063212077, August 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno
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I like the game of encoding into the mind of someone who is deliberately immoral, who knows he is destroying another person, yet who nonetheless keeps doing it…One giant trigger warning of a book, full of contradictions and contrasts, starting with the juxtaposition, of the beauty of the cover to the brutal content that follows, from the very first sentence. The devastating opening paragraphs, (we are plunged straight in with the first section heading, ‘Portrait Of My Rapist,’), hit hard, and Sinno then slides into literary criticism. But this is an analysis of Nabakov’s Lolita, with all the problems that invokes in a memoir about child abuse. How can a sufferer write so acutely, so incisively about such a book? Sinno’s analogies, metaphors and references are varied, erudite, relentless. The human soul is the dark side of the moon; abuse takes place “in another dimension…physically, the same as the one in which the rest of life happens, superimposed onto it like a duplicate of unbearable clarity.” William Blake, the Rwandan genocide, fairy tales: her voice ranges far and wide, but always returns to earth with the most basic, raw, fundamental questions – why did it happen? How do I live now? How do they? Unreliable narrators run through the text, from Humbert Humbert to her step-father rapist, and even, she admits forty pages in, when we are already caught in her emotional web, Sinno herself.I would never have thought a book on incestuous rape could be so readable, but Sinno’s art is to take a topic and view it from every possible viewpoint; literature, cinema, through the eyes of her mother, the reader, even the perpetrator himself, in a hypnotic kaleidoscope that belies her own words: “I want {this book} to exist, but I hope it doesn’t have too many readers.”Too late for that, both sadly and fortunately.

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, (List Price: $22.95, Seven Stories Press, 9781644214671, April 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Night People by Mark Ronson

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Night People by Mark Ronson
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As a fan of his own music, I was intrigued what a book on Ronson’s early days learning how to DJ in 1990s New York would be like. I cracked the (digital) spine and was finished in less than two days, whisked along by the storytelling, name-dropping, nineties nostalgia. Like Questlove’s recent books on hip-hop and music generally, I found myself regularly pausing my reading to listen to songs I either didn’t know or hadn’t heard for years, a soundtrack that added even more to the reading experience. Ronson floats through NYC and the names fly, from Trumps and Diddys to Lennons and Jay-Z’s as he charts his part-fortuitous, part-hard-working rise through the small club DJ scene (some of whose names inadvertently seem like rejected Stefan scenes from SNL: “At the same time, highly exclusive lounges like Wax, Moomba, and Veruka were redefining nightlife…”). His writing style is simple, fun and friendly, making you feel like one of the crew tagging along as he tells of “burning the candle at both ends with a blowtorch,” or of a teacher being “the kind of person who’d make you want to graduate and open a sociology store, or whatever it was that sociologists did..”Ending with some poignant self-reflection and a look at the changes in contemporary music (and life generally: “Part of what made our era so special was the absence of surveillance. People were completely in the moment.”), I’m already looking forward to the follow-up and Ronson’s shift from record spinner to record maker – it can’t come soon enough for this fellow UK transplant to the US.

Night People by Mark Ronson, (List Price: $29, Grand Central Publishing, 9781538741115, September 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This by Eugene Yelchin

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I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This by Eugene Yelchin
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Strangely enough, I just watched this on Netflix, and it was definitely telling of the time we are going through now. A very talented painter is captured by the OSS and sent to an insane asylum, given meds to make him compliant, and eventually gets force-fed. Eventually, he is released and tries to marry as a way of getting out of his country. He finds his way through his traumatic enslavement and manages to regain some of his humanity. Fabulous story.

I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This by Eugene Yelchin, (List Price: $22.99, Candlewick, 9781536215533, September 2025)

Reviewed by Judith Lafitte, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

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Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
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Shteyngart is one of the funniest living novelists, so much so that he once (gently) insulted me at a book signing over a decade ago, and I took it as a compliment. In Vera, he twists words to his will with (if you’ll pardon the obvious, Russian immigré cliché, especially in a book named after the man’s wife) Nabakovian genius. With a neurotic, precocious ten year old protagonist as the vehicle through which we view the unfolding of a dystopian near-future; a manic, pants-dropping younger brother for comic relief (“the family psychiatrist had to periodically check Dylan for ADHD as if for lice”), and a father and step-mother combo keeping things on track (until they don’t), Shteyngart does what he does best: identifying and skewering the signifiers of liberal, middle-class comfort (a class to which he himself undoubtedly belongs). Thus copies of The Power Broker are faced out to impress guests, the tension between wanting your kids’ grades not to matter whilst, of course, desperately wanting them to get straight A’s is ever-present, and empathy for those trying to deny our existence is a must. All of which makes this slim novel sound heavy and imposing, when in fact it reads like a breeze; funny, touching, educational, and filled with sly linguistic and cultural winks – all the things us liberal, middle-class intelligentsia love!

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart, (List Price: $28, Random House, 9780593595091, July 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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The Wild Robot on the Island by Peter Brown

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The Wild Robot on the Island by Peter Brown
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The Wild Robot on the Island is colorfully illustrated, depicting the earth‘s seasons along with the gentle message of “helping others.” It’s an early stepping stone to the original Wild Robot Series.

The Wild Robot on the Island by Peter Brown, (List Price: $19.99, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 9780316669467, June 2025)

Reviewed by Judith Lafitte, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Akkad Omar El

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Akkad Omar El
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Brutal, incisive, a battering ram of a book calling for clarity on the Middle East situation which was tough to read, but essential to hear.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Akkad Omar El, (List Price: $28, Knopf, 9780593804148, February 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune

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One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune
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A 32-year-old with a disappointing job, a newly absent “life” partner, and a lake house filled with memories…and neighbours who have grown up a lot since they were 17: “I think the older we get, the scarier shit becomes…” One Golden Summer is a simple, yet affecting story of one Canadian summer by the lake where frustrated photographer, Alice, looking after her grandmother, finds the cock-sure tease with a heart of gold handyman, Charlie, and learns to start thinking more about herself for once.Sweet,. wry, an astute meditation on second chances, this is a summer breeze of a book with a twist straight out of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune, (List Price: $19, Berkley, 9780593638910, May 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Adventures in the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino

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Adventures in the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino
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“I had to learn how to visit the Louvre” goes an early line in this exceptional book, and I wish I’d had it with me when I visited the overwhelming museum-palace years ago. Simply and personally written, in short, punchy chapters, liberally sprinkled with excellent reproductions of some of the most important works, Sciolino blends access to everyone from curators, directors, guards, and fire fighters with history and (very) personal reflection. Brutally, amusingly blunt at times (“…the subsequent history of France in the nineteenth century is both incoherent and confusing….”!), Adventures in the Louvre is composed of bite-sized chapters on the history, architecture, pop culture, and even global significance, which makes it much more manageable than the museum itself, and will be in my luggage next time I travel to Paris. There’s even a chapter on ghosts, as well as a fascinating aside on things to do around the museum when it is closed on Tuesdays, a fact which would make this book worth its cover price alone!) It’s also filled with fascinating trivia: who knew the museum was once named the Museé Napoléon, or that the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass, or that Beyoncé recently made it cool?) I’m already salivating at the thought of a fully illustrated version showing every piece mentioned – and there are a lot! A masterpiece worthy of its subject!

Adventures in the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino, (List Price: $29.99, W. W. Norton, 9781324021407, April 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Your Forest by Jon Klassen

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Your Forest by Jon Klassen
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Everything Jon Klassen writes has me hypnotized (not to mention my 4-year-old). This one has even more eyes in it than usual!

Your Forest by Jon Klassen, (List Price: $8.99, Candlewick, 9781536230833, February 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

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The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
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This book is a delight, both as a tale and physically, a palm-sized treat with gorgeous, subtle decorations flowing through it like the river of its title. El-Mohtar employs wordplay of the most sumptuous variety from page one, in a world where grammar is magic and nature, from trees to storms to the very people, are always more than they appear. “That is the nature of grammar – it is always tense…” A faerytale of delicious tropes, from magic to riddles to metamorphoses, whose narrator doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as knock it down, sweep it aside, and come and sit in your lap in a brief but delightfully deep look at love, sisterhood, and what we would sacrifice for them both.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, (List Price: $24.99, Tordotcom, 9781250341082, March 2025)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

, , , , ,
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
buy this book

Buy from your local indie.
Get the audiobook

This novel is uber-Murakami, the author back to the magical best of his earlier novels such as Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (note: this makes sense, as the author writes in an afterword that this novel was a second attempt at reworking a novella, the first attempt being Hardboiled Wonderland). You don’t read a Murakami novel; you live it, holding on for dear life until it lets you off at the end, slightly confused but highly entertained. A magical world slowly unravels through an unnamed girl, while everyday life interweaves with it, featuring all the traditional Murakami Bingo tropes (loneliness, high school, jazz, pasta recipes, The Beatles, wells, libraries, cats…all the greatest hits!) There were a few minor logical bugbears, but plot logic was never Murakami’s strong suit. The simplicity of his language has long been a feature, but lately has felt more like a bug at times, with the repetition of banal thoughts (‘it was just my conjecture, but I was sure of it’; I nodded vaguely’ etc.) – perhaps as one of my all-time favourite authors I have come to expect more, but it was still great to be back in Murakami world.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, (List Price: $35, Knopf, 9780593801970, November 2024)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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Final Cut by Charles Burns

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Final Cut by Charles Burns
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The latest graphic novel from Charles Burns is as visually stunning as ever, in his inimitable style. In this tale, we are presented with a melancholy, teenage angst story that verges on horror by the end. as a group of friends attempt to make a home movie. The autobiographical aspects may not be subtle, as one of the protagonists struggles with the difficulties of turning the images in his head into reality, but as we flit from the tortured artist to the girl he has become fixated on, taking in their mutual friends and his situation at home, Final Cut presents us with a moving, layered tale of creation and destruction.

Final Cut by Charles Burns, (List Price: $34, Pantheon, 9780593701706, September 2024)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana

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