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Fiction can also offer meaningful family insights. In his debut novel, The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma revisits the classic Bible story about feuding brothers Cain and Abel, setting it in 1990s Nigeria. He blurs the line between fact and fable to tell a morally complex story about four brothers, a dreadful prophecy, and fratricide.
Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas.
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What We’re Reading
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“Mon dieu, what a mother!”
“The symbiosis of Mary and Marianne Moore created its own melodies, and it’s hardly imaginable that Moore’s poems would have sounded the same—as wonderfully original—without it.”
📚 Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, by Linda Leavell
A gilded cage
“[Janny Scott’s] father, having promised Scott in her 20s that she would inherit his many diaries, made her hunt long and hard for them after his death in 2005. The bequest was brilliant: A man in unhappy thrall to a place lured his daughter further and further in—and she escaped with priceless insight into its, and his, hidden depths.”
📚 The Beneficiary, by Janny Scott
A primal and eccentric family drama
“[Michael] Frank brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come.”
📚 The Mighty Franks, by Michael Frank
Illustrating the messy reality of life in an interracial family
“We have moments of tremendous love, and we have tremendous dissonance. We have moments when we get each other, and moments when we’ve really failed each other. That’s what that love looks like. It’s complicated and it is real.”
📚 Good Talk, by Mira Jacob
Cain and Abel, without the moral clarity
“[Chigozie] Obioma does more than transplant a familiar biblical story to 1990s Nigeria. He also does away with its moral clarity, along with any clear sense of justice, responsibility, and blame.”
📚 The Fishermen, by Chigozie Obioma
About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
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