There’s a happy meeting of the literary minds coming to San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater at 7:30 p.m. April 11, courtesy of City Arts & Lectures. While the advertised focus is on best-selling author Emma Straub and her new novel “American Fantasy” (Riverhead Books, $30, 304 pages), we should hope for an animated, two-way dialogue that lets Straub’s gifted interlocutor plug her new book. Straub will be featured in conversation with Berkeley’s own Ayelet Waldman, whose novel “A Perfect Hand” (Knopf, $25, 304 pages), comes out May 19. Straub’s sixth novel (her most recent being 2020’s “All Adults Here” and 2022’s “This Time Tomorrow”) is set on a cruise ship with a famous 1990s boy band on board as the main attraction. A middle-aged divorcee who somewhat reluctantly signs up to please her sister finds herself caught up in nostalgia and a reawakened passion and rewarded with an unusual new friendship. “American Fantasy” hits the bookshelves on April 7. Waldman’s “A Perfect Hand,” meanwhile, is set in 19th-century England with two servants in separate privileged households scheming to get their employers to fall for each other so that the ensuing nuptials will unite them as well. But the female protagonist, Annie, is also increasingly attracted to the ideas of the burgeoning suffragette movement, which gives her some pause about the wisdom of marriage. Both novels are garnering praise for their ample doses of humor. Tickets for the joint appearance, at $49-$54, are available through www.cityarts.net.
Tóibín in triplicate: Another high-profile author is headed our way in April, as Colm Tóibín, one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, recognized here for novels including “The Master,” “Brooklyn” and “Long Island,” arrives with “The News From Dublin” (Scribner, $26, 304 pages). His third collection of short stories offers nine tales that resonate with the themes of family, responsibility and complex relationships, including the title story about a man who is pleading with health authorities for access to a new drug to save the life of his younger brother. Tóibín appears first at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn on Ranch View Road in Santa Cruz at 7 p.m. April 2, hosted by Santa Cruz Books. The United Irish Cultural Center at 2700 45th Ave. in San Francisco presents him at 7 p.m. April 3, in a ticketed event co-hosted by Bookshop West Portal. Admission is $40 plus a $2.99 fee, and it includes a copy of the book and a signing afterwards. Access it through bookshopwestportal.com. Rakestraw Books in Danville is charging $10 for admission to his 9:30 a.m. appearance on April 4, with that amount credited toward purchase of the book. Sign up at rakestrawbooks.com.
Novel treatment of an actual encounter: Who knew that the king of the Victorian novel and his contemporary, the king of the fairy tale, formed a strange and trouble-plagued friendship? Not me. But thanks to Francine Prose, author of “Five Weeks in the Country” (Harper, $30, 304 pages), we all can be aware that Charles Dickens, on the cusp of his scandalous breakup with his wife of 22 years (and mother of his 10 children), played host to the socially awkward Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, for a visit to his country estate which apparently went on waaay too long. That episode in the summer of 1857 forms the basis of the novel coming out on May 5 from the prolific and eclectically gifted New York writer, whom National Public Radio dubbed “the Meryl Streep of literary fiction.” Prose had plenty of material to plumb in the character of these two geniuses, given that Dickens was clumsily trying to hide his affair with an 18-year-old actress, and his famously gauche and clueless houseguest (the original Ugly Duckling), upon receiving an unfavorable review of one of his stories, threw himself face down on his host’s lawn and sobbed uncontrollably. Praise of the book’s humor and insights into human behavior is pouring in from other well-known writers, with my personal favorite being Griffin Dunne’s observation that “Anderson and Dickens have been known to readers since childhood, but if Francine Prose hadn’t hosted me for five weeks in their company, I’d never have gotten to really know them at all.”
Page to screen: Attention-grabbing novels that get adapted for the silver screen are certainly no novelty, but for a book to languish more than 30 years before it is made into a movie might be a bit of a head scratcher. However, popular Australian novelist Tim Winton’s 1994 thriller “The Riders,” which was short-listed for a Booker Prize in 1995, is filming now, in locations all over Europe, for a release from A24 in December or early next year. It stars Brad Pitt, who also shares producing credits with Ridley Scott and the new movie’s director Edward Berger, the Academy Award-winning director of “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave.” Pitt plays Fred Scully, an Australian man with big plans to move with his wife and child into an old cottage he has been rehabbing in Ireland. But when he drives to the airport to pick them up, only his 7-year-old daughter Billie deplanes, rendered powerless to explain what mysterious development caused her mother Jennifer (played by Julianne Nicholson) to disappear. Scully’s desperate search to find his wife, with his daughter in tow, takes them all across Europe. When news of the movie adaptation surfaced, the Booker Prize officials asked Winton to sum up “The Riders” in a single sentence, and this was his intriguing reply: “The world isn’t always what you think it is, and that includes the world of your family.”
And the winners are: The National Books Critics Circle, a consortium of working journalists in book editing and criticism, announced the winners of the top prizes for 2025 in six competitive categories on March 25, culled from 42 contenders. In the autobiography category, Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me” emerged triumphant, winning over works by Hanif Kureishi and Geraldine Brooks, among others. The winner in biography was “A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled,” by Alex Green. The award for poetry went to “Night Watch,” by Kevin Young, while Quinn Slobodian won for criticism for “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.” Karen Hao won the nonfiction award for “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” and the fiction prize went to Han King for her novel “We Do Not Part,” which explored the traumatic aftermath of the 1940s Jeju uprising in Korea.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on literary buzz and upcoming book events. Look for it on the last Thursday of the month.