Virtuoso Life - May/June 2017 - 34
Passport BOOKS RICH PEOPLE PROBLEMS BY KEVIN KWAN (Doubleday, $28) When Singapore matriarch Su Yi suddenly takes to her deathbed, members of the Shang-Young family rush from around the world to gain a stake in her fortune and tony 64-acre estate. With the same wickedly funny treatment that made Kwan a star with earlier novels Crazy Rich Asians and China Rich Girlfriend, Rich People Problems shows the lunatic lengths to which the privileged set will go in order to get what they want. INTO THE WATER BY PAULA HAWKINS (Riverhead Books, $28) After her hit psychological thriller Girl on the Train, Hawkins returns true to form with another taut mystery that keeps readers guessing. When a single mother and a teenage girl are found at the bottom of the river just weeks apart, their quiet town in northern England is upended, with plenty of blame to throw around. Hawkins deftly handles multiple perspectives here, sending readers through a hall-ofmirrors-style gauntlet until the last page. THEFT BY FINDING: DIARIES (1977-2002) BY DAVID SEDARIS (Little, Brown and Company, $28) For the past 40 years, David Sedaris, humor essayist and author of blockbusters such as Me Talk Pretty One Day, has kept a diary. Nothing too deep - just snatches of conversation overheard 34 V I RT U O S O L I F E and scribbled down, random observations about people, about himself, about various IHOPs. His latest is a delicious dip into those years, which can be read at an amble or a gallop. Either way it's a fun ride, with entries like the following, taken from 1986 when Sedaris was living in Chicago and trying to find his sister an apartment: "Someone named Jerry was looking for a roommate, and we arrived to find a full-grown man with long oily hair. His teeth were amber pegs, like dried corn kernels. 'After you called, I was going to clean up, but I watched TV instead,' he admitted." WATCH ME DISAPPEAR BY JANELLE BROWN (Spiegel & Grau, $27) How well do we know the ones we love most? Janelle Brown probes this unsettling question with insight and suspense. Beautiful, confident, Californiacool mom and wife Billie Flanagan seems to get whatever she wants out of life. When she goes on a solo hike in northern California and disappears, her teenage daughter, Olive, and husband, Jonathan, mourn her death. Then Olive starts seeing signs that her mother may be alive, while Jonathan uncovers encrypted files on Billie's laptop that offer troubling signals of their own. Brown's novel is a thought-provoking page-turner that keeps readers guessing until the very end and then lingers in the memory long after. (PHOTOGRAPHY) CHRIS PLAVIDAL, (STYLING) HEIDI ADAMS SECRETS, BETRAYAL, AND A MILLION-DOLLAR LAUGH
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