Table for Two

February 5, 2024
Bestseller Towles (The Lincoln Highway) returns with an enchanting collection of stories about fateful encounters. In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” the young title character moves to New York City to become a novelist and works in a bookstore, where his boss pays him bonuses to forge the signatures of famous dead authors in first editions of their books. The scheme pays off for a while, until Paul Auster visits the shop and spies forgeries in two of his own works. Art and crime also dovetail in “The Bootlegger,” when a Carnegie Hall concert attendee has another man thrown out for making a bootleg recording, then feels remorse after learning the man had taken to recording the concerts for his late wife when she was too ill to attend, and continued recording them after she died in order to remember her. The standout novel-length “Eve in Hollywood,” a sequel to Towles’s debut Rules of Civility, follows Evelyn Ross from New York City to Los Angeles in 1938, where she befriends film star Olivia de Havilland and has-been Prentice Symmons, and comes to Olivia’s aid after Olivia is blackmailed with nude photos. The noirish tale is rife with double crosses, exciting chases, surprising reversals, and the vivid historical atmosphere Towles is known for. The author’s fans won’t want to miss this.

May 31, 2024

In this collection of six short stories and one novella, bestseller Towles (The Lincoln Highway) seeks to highlight the uniqueness of each individual person amid the general mundanity of human experience. "New York: The Line" touches on the small ways people impact the lives around them, while "Hasta Luego" showcases the kindness of strangers, the randomness of chance interactions, and what it means to love and forgive. While the somewhat-lethargic pacing detracts from the narrative, the closing novella, "Eve in Hollywood," continues the story of The Rules of Civility's Evelyn Ross, who is also slated to appear in Towles's next novel. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini reads deliberately and pulls off the New Yorker's noir-ish fast-talking style with aplomb, but his other character voices leave something to be desired. The titular Eve, noted to have a "Midwestern lilt," sounds distinctly Southern, and even the born-and-bred Angelenos sound like they're hailing a Manhattan taxi. J. Smith-Cameron narrates one of the stories, "The Bootlegger," and while the pacing and beats of the story land much better, her raspy interpretation does not. VERDICT A captivating collection done no favors in audio form by slow narration and little characterization.--Zoey Colglazier

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.