Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
“The Family Man” is an absorbing and vertiginous chronicle of the trial of Alex Murdaugh, a wealthy South Carolina man who was accused of murdering his wife and his son as part of a frantic attempt to cover up a financial scandal. The book, which emerged from a dispatch that Lasdun published in this magazine in 2023, expands on his merciless sociological exploration of the corrupt milieu in which the killings took place. Beneath its gentlemanly façade, the Murdaughs’ home town is a place of bribes, grift, money laundering, drunken mishaps, and sexual secrets—along with jury tampering so brazen that Alex’s conviction was recently overturned.
This novel of exile and memory chronicles the life of Sufien, a Palestinian man displaced as a child by the Nakba, whose story unfolds across continents and encompasses entanglements with a broad range of characters. Assadi traces the full arc of Sufien’s life as he moves from Palestine to a refugee camp in Syria, then to Italy and the U.S. He deepens and matures, reflecting often on his course, but this is not a fawning portrait of a hero’s journey so much as a study of a flawed individual. Though Assadi’s prose is occasionally heavy-handed, she summons a wonderfully sprawling, almost picaresque story, which gains power from her resistance to passing simple judgment on her protagonist.
