Sarah Perry Leads October's Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man tops October's best reviewed nonfiction list, drawing seven rave reviews against one merely positive. Mariner publishes it. The monthly roundup, which aggregates professional critics' verdicts into ratings of Rave, Positive, Mixed or Pan, places Perry clear of a tie for second place.

Amy Bloom, reviewing in The New York Times Book Review, set the tone. "As Kafka once wrote, 'a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.' This book, and this author, are that ax," Bloom wrote. She praised "finely tuned metaphors, graceful repetitions" and called the account "a gift to the reader, grieving or not." That's the review that anchors the whole ranking.

Which books share second place?

Two titles tie at number two, each with six raves and one positive review.

• Lieke Marsman, On Another Planet They Can Save Me (Catapult). Publishers Weekly found it "cathartic and often wondrous," adding: "Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity's most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure."
• Meghan O'Gieblyn, Will and Attention: A Memoir (Doubleday). James Wood, in The New Yorker, called it "a remarkable memoir" and "brave in its disclosures but more so in its demands, its spiritual rigor, and its ardent intellectualism." He ended on "alarmingly open and unfinished" — from Wood, that reads as a compliment.

What about the McCarthy biography?

Tracy Daugherty's Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited (St. Martin's Press) lands fourth with six raves and two mixed verdicts — strong scores, but the only top-five title to draw mixed notices.

Bill Heavy, reviewing in The Wall Street Journal, praised the book's momentum. Daugherty "deftly separates the writer from the myth, capturing McCarthy's evolution from a Southern writer to a Western one with a biography that pulls you along like a novel," Heavy wrote. "But he doesn't shy away from the troubling details."

Who was the real Sherlock Holmes?

Lindsey Fitzharris closes the list at five with Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), scoring four raves and four positives.

The book restores Dr. Joseph Bell to the center of the Holmes origin story. David Pitt wrote in Booklist that "Fitzharris rescues Bell from the periphery of the Holmes story and restores him to his rightful position as the inspiration and model for the great consulting detective."

The pattern across October is telling. Memoir and biography dominate: three of the five titles grapple with individual lives, from Perry's account of grief to Marsman's record of an altered mind. Fiction's loss is nonfiction's gain this season. Whether November's roundup sustains that tilt toward life-writing will be worth watching.