Yiyun Li's 'Music Against the Night' Tops the Week's Best Reviewed Books

Yiyun Li's Music Against the Night leads this week's best reviewed books, collecting six rave reviews against two positive and two mixed verdicts in Book Marks' weekly tally (Lit Hub's review-aggregating service). The novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, beat out nine other fiction and nonfiction titles for the top spot.

Book Marks grades each review on a scale from Rave to Pan, then ranks titles by the balance of scores. The result works as an early signal of which books critics are actually rallying behind. Here's how this week shakes out.

Which novels are critics praising?

Li's collection of stories about young virtuosos drew the week's strongest consensus. Cory Oldweiler wrote in The Boston Globe: "Wonderful and bewitching … Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative here … It's the kind of sui generis novel that doesn't come around that often, just like the virtuosos whose young lives it explores."

Bonnie Garmus's Peck & Peck (Scribner), the follow-up to Lessons in Chemistry, landed at number two with four raves and four positives. Claire Clark reviewed it for The Guardian: "It is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus's irrepressible humor and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count."

Two titles tied at number three, each with five raves and two positives:

• Will Maclean's Solace House (Grove) — Julia Kelly, writing in The Irish Times, noted "faint echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History" and praised a novel "less interested in delivering conventional scares than in evoking a slow, disorientating collapse of reality itself."
• Julie Orringer's Luna, Phoenix, Queen (Knopf) — Meg Wolitzer called it "Astonishing" in The New York Times Book Review, praising how it "brilliantly emphasizes the agony of isolation in its various forms."

M. John Harrison's The End of Everything (Riverhead) rounded out the fiction list at number five with four raves and one positive. Dave Kim, in the NYT Book Review, described "a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing."

What's leading in nonfiction?

Lieke Marsman's On Another Planet They Can Save Me (Catapult) took the nonfiction crown with four raves and one positive. Publishers Weekly called it "Cathartic and often wondrous … Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity's most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure."

Two books tied at number two, each with three raves and two positives:

• Shawn Gude's American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs (Simon & Schuster) — Matthew E. Stanley wrote in Jacobin that it's "A page-turning delight … an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme."
• Saul Justin Newman's Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science (MIT Press) — Rachel Clark's Guardian review concluded bluntly: "Longevity 'science' is largely built on nonsense data."

Kim Ghattas's The Best Kind of American (Henry Holt) placed fourth with a perfect four-for-four rave record — the only book this week with no non-rave verdicts. Christopher de Bellaigue, in the NYT Book Review, called it an "excellent book" that "commemorates a breed that is all but extinct."

Paul Mason's Reds: A Global History of Communism (Scribner) closed the nonfiction list at five, with three raves and one mixed. Kirkus called it "A deeply researched, thought-through, essential history of a protean ideology."

What does this change for readers?

Not much immediately — but the pattern is worth watching. A debut-week sweep like Li's, or Ghattas's clean four-rave record, tends to foreshadow year-end lists and prize shortlists. If you're building a fall reading pile, these ten titles are where the critical conversation currently sits.