Xenobe Purvis’s ‘The Hounding’; Lauren Grodstein’s ‘A Dog in Georgia’

The summer days of dogs are upon us, so of course, we read two novels that offer the best friend of a man, in an English village in the eighteenth century and Tbilisi in the modern era.

If you are looking for more readings, check our previous reviews of Maria Riva Ending David Zalay meatWhich was called the LongList Booker this week.

The summer days of dogs are upon us, so of course, we read two novels that offer the best friend of a man, in an English village in the eighteenth century and Tbilisi in the modern era.

If you are looking for more readings, check our previous reviews of Maria Riva Ending David Zalay meatWhich was called the LongList Booker this week.

Hunting: novel

Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt and Co., 240 PP., $ 26.99, August 2025)

In 1701, a doctor wrote a letter to the editor in Philosophical transactions for the royal community Rumors narrated that young girls in Oxfordshere “” repeated barks were seized in the dog’s method. “

The story that the British author Xenobe Purvis weaves in its first novel of this individual line is out of reach like the same story. It was narrated through a group of local population, hunting It tells a summer in the village of Little NettleBed, whose population – who excite a harsh dryness – convinced that the five unbridled girls in the Mansfield family turned into dogs.

hunting It is Paean for childhood and a prominent summer story, full of Halceion days in the garden of the Mansfield family. (Summer, after all, is the “strange season”, one narrator says. “It was the heat that she did. It added people’s minds.” Little women To the unknown neighbor’s children Virgin suicide. One young man, angry at the “rich fabric” of girls from Mansfield, tries to decipher their language: “early, try to make a diligence in his mind; he pointed to every hair, every fun pinch, every sigh. But the list was very long, and very precise meanings.”

Purvis is compatible above all with the inscription of the truth and the possibility of rumors in the dismantling of a society, especially for society, especially if you believe the worst outstable. When the baker’s wife tells rumors about girls, there was “something that is irresistible, like sweet cakes or March.” Even the more rational villagers, “those who urged caution with the spread of the story, looked at their hearts and found a dark lack of confidence from Mansfields.”

It is a deceptive tale, if one is sometimes sliding into Platt. (For example, a cousin “The great and exhausting trial for being a woman in a world governed by men. In our time from the climate disaster, hunting It is a disturbing reminder of those who are paid when “all kinds of ordinary things” get worse. –Chloe Hadafas

Dog in Georgia: a novel

Lauren Grodstein (Aljonkewin Books, 304 p., $ 29, August 2025)

Tbilisi, Georgia, is not the most obvious destination for the American woman in the labor crisis. But this is the place where Lauren Grodchetein’s recent novel, Dog in GeorgiaShe chooses to escape from her uncomfortable presence in New York.

One morning, 46 -year -old Amy Webb wakes up to discover texts on her husband’s phone, which indicates that she is betraying her (again). Revelation comes just as Amy feels without a goal in her career and her family life. She trained as a cook, she got married to wealth and did not work in a job for years. Although she is the wife of her husband’s son, he is now outside the study at Cornell University and thrives on his own.

Whenever Amy enters an anxious cycle, you see animal videos on YouTube. Grodstein wrote – her younger comrades were “animals”, and she was previously working in the shelters – and her apartment in Manhattan with “Menagerie” from cats and dogs. Amy is obsessed with a specific video of a reckless dog in Tbilisi called Angel “famous for walking children across the street to school. After the angel disappeared, Amy decided to fly to Tbilisi and try to find the dog herself.

This is the way a good -intentioned American woman with little international experience in a political storm was not fully prepared for her. Although Tbilisi is the home of “forty -six thousand stray dogs”, according to GRODSTEIN, amy discovers that Georgia is facing more serious problems than the lost dog. “The Georgians hate the Russians … because they were spreading this low invasion since 2008, and not like what they do in Ukraine, but they are still bad,” Amy told her via the phone. Amy, the main suspects in the disappearance of the owners, are learning “Hoodlums, the saboteurs, the Russians,” the Russians.

Amy’s hunt for owners occur in the spring of 2024, when Georgia was sometimes involved in violent protests against the “foreign agents” law inspired by Russian. Dog in Georgia It is part of the novel of vibrant animals and part of politics after the Soviet Union 101. The narration stimulates a smile even when they manipulate the dogs to tear gas. In addition to dogs-many dogs-Amey meets a variety of human figures, including “Three Jeddles post-Soviet Union”, a mortal teenager, and Russian eloquence materials. The result is a novel that is still very funny even when you explore some of the darkest days in the last Caucasus history.

Grodstein refuses the simple duets that often determine Western writing from the former Soviet Union. Amy has profound repercussions on how to look at it, as an American, abroad. (It was immediately recognized as this as it has “clear skin and beautiful teeth”, telling her Georgia.)

Amid the protests in Tbilisi, Amy praises democracy, but she is not ready to deal with the Georgian line skeptical in interrogation about “the thing in which the person gets the largest number of votes in the United States,” when Amy asks one of the British arrivals about the reason for the hunger of Russia in order to influence Georgia, he responds strongly: “Certainly you know that there is no other country in the history of the world that dominated every aspect of the world system in the way that works It has the United States today.

Amy also tends to throw money in her problems – and feels a pits in her stomach when Georgia’s woman notes that “your child goes to a university, if I believe in my eyes, the cost of money is more than I will earn in my whole life.” Amy is critically reflected in the dominance of the English language and the development of an emotion for the “beautiful and beautiful Georgian”, which you find “beautiful, gentle and self”. GRODSTEIN includes some Georgian words and phrases (Anglicized) all over the book.

However, Amy is still loving – if it is sometimes naive -. Dog in Georgia It is evidence that the hero’s journey should not be inflated and that the political novel can be strange and upbringing. In a book on the surface of animals, Grovstein benefits from the limits of human sympathy. The Georgian also tells the young Emmy, “It is easier for us to sponsor dogs more than taking each other.” –Alison Micheim

August publications in short

Millions of dollars are stealing in the latest geopolitical excitement from the CIA officer Elliot Akraman, shepherd. The late Fumio Yamamoto 2000 classic feminist, Difficulties of working womenIt is translated into English by Brian Bergstrom. Sefi Atta’s Indigo He picks up major moments in the lives of four professional Nigerian women. in FONSECAJessica Francis Kane, the imagination of the English author, Bennube Fitzgerald, in 1952, to Mexico to compete for a distant inheritance. Zhang Yuran Women, sittingTranslated by Jeremy Tiang, narrates the wealth of the elite Chinese family.

In the British Nigerian writer Helen Emimi New to me newA woman in Prague is divided into seven themselves. The first Yiming M novel, These memories do not belong to usIt envisions a future from China as a single superpower in the world. A shipwreck collapses in a strange puzzle on the eve of World War II in Peter Man The Pacific Ocean world. French art historian Thomas Schlesseer’s runaway bestseller, Mona’s eyesTranslating into English by Hildgerd Serle. The American Taiwanese author Eileen Hesse Zhou collection of the curved story, Where are you really fromMix taboos and surrealism.-to