Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener: When the history of what went wrong in the first two decades of the 21st century is written, the rampant fragmentation of our attention, the proliferation of propaganda, the inanities and barbarities of social media, New Yorker staff writer Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley, will be instrumental in the forensics. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
Hop into the comments to let us know what we missed, and look out for the second-half Preview in July!
And yet there are even more books to be read in the first half of this year! As usual, we will continue with our monthly previews, beginning in February.
We seem to say this every year, but at 140-something books, this is truly our most gratuitously enormous Preview to date. Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.The year has gotten off to a rocky start worldwide, but we hope this semi-annual Millions tradition will be a bright spot. And at the doctor’s fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined. On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and tale-spinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods-poetry, medicine, and now music-have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors. In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair.
An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century.
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