“I’m lucky. I read and edit books for a living, which results in juggling many projects at once, from overseeing cookbooks to developmental edits on translated manuscripts. So, when I read for pleasure, I tend to work through one book at a time, mostly before bed, and I’ve been staying up later than usual because the last few novels I’ve read have been that good.

“All of Catherine Lacey’s books are intriguing, and her latest, ‘Biography of X,’ is no different. CM is widowed when the experimental shapeshifting artist X dies, leaving CM to both question the very nature of their marriage and her own sense of self. CM, a journalist by training, goes digging back into X’s early life against the backdrop of an alternate American history devised by Lacey in which anarchist Emma Goldman was FDR’s chief of staff and an event known as the Disunion has torn apart the nation into two diametrically opposed territories. What do histories, personal or national, really tell us about one another?

“Laurent Mauvignier’s beguiling ‘The Birthday Party’ (deftly translated by Daniel Levin Becker) is indeed about a small birthday party being thrown in a rural French hamlet that two women have sought out to remove themselves from their past lives. But now, one of those past lives has caught up to them. The story unfolds in one sumptuous, often very long, sentence after another, slowly winding up an unforgettable mystery, Mauvignier writes, ‘as though the enchantment is caused not by the words of the story, nor by the story itself, or not just that, but by the energy, the motion, the vibration circulating in the intimate spaces of the breath that bears it.’

“The overriding sense of motion — of endless, vital cycles like tides and seasons — propels ‘This Other Eden.’ Using historical events that took place on Malaga Island, right off the coast in Phippsburg, Paul Harding’s painterly prose renders a multi-generational, mixed-race, self-sufficient community on the fictional Apple Island that is ruthlessly broken apart by meddling mainlanders. As this book makes all too clear, dehumanizing marginal communities is nothing new. But even the hardships endured by the residents of Apple Island are cast so as to underscore the transcendent beauty in the sublime, and sometimes scary, power of nature that none of us can escape.”

—BUZZ POOLE, founder of the nonprofit Sandorf Passage publishing, South Portland

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Mainers, please email to tell us about the book on your bedside table right now. In a paragraph or two, describe the book and be sure to tell us what drew you to it. We want to hear what you are reading and why. Send your selection to pgrodinsky@pressherald.com, and we may use it as a future Bedside Table.

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