Three Books That Won't Let You Go This Week

By Andy — 2026-08-23 — Literary News

I'm looking at the stack from the past week and something's off. These aren't books that fit neatly into categories. They sprawl. They want something from you.

Start with Anjet Daanje's *The Song of Stork and Dromedary*.

The Groningen novelist has written what the WSJ called something that advances you "as though compelled by a fierce highland wind." It's 700 pages inspired by the Brontë sisters, but not a simple retelling. The thing circles—11 interconnected stories spiral outward from an Emily Brontë-like writer, Eliza May Drayden. Kirkus called it "an overstuffed saga of life, death, love, and literature," which sounds damning until you read further: "A challenging book that rewards its readers with great depth and beauty."

Dutch awards committees have already decided twice over. The novel won both the Libris and Boekenbon prizes—the first book ever to take both. David McKay's translation doesn't betray that. The prose has rhythm. It moves. You feel the length, not like burden but like permission—permission to sit with something mysterious, something that refuses to resolve.

The problem is obvious though. Some reviewers have complained the novel lets characters sprawl verbosely without depth. That's fair. Not every book works for everyone.

Then there's Joby Warrick's *The Jackal*.

A biography of Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist. Warrick is a Pulitzer winner who offers an "un-put-downable biography." Carlos wasn't subtle. He masterminded the kidnapping of an entire conference of OPEC ministers in Vienna. He wore tailored suits. He killed people himself. Warrick actually interviewed him in prison in France.

What makes this readable instead of lurid is the restraint. Warrick doesn't make terrorism cuddly; he documents how Carlos "prized large paychecks over ideology," how he treated murder like a profession. The result is less glamorous than terrifying. A man. A pattern. No mystique.

And Dorthe Nors' *Range*.

This one's weirder in the best sense. Nors has written about an astrophysicist who retreats to the country to study gamma-ray bursts but "can't seem to get away from the messy, compelling humanity that surrounds her." That's the whole book. Not plot. Structure. Kirkus praised her for doing "the impossible: given shape to the twin mysteries of identity and consciousness without pinning either down."

She lives in Jutland now, far from Copenhagen's literary scene—on purpose. The novel reflects that. Her words "cascade into the next: it's like having a window into someone's thoughts." Gunn Haven, the protagonist, is a real person, which means she's sometimes boring, sometimes cruel, mostly trying to reconcile the vastness she studies with the smallness of daily life. The New York Times flagged it.

Three weeks in August, three books that don't settle easily. That's worth noting.