In her extraordinary fiction debut, The Opium Prince, Afghan Swedish academic and communications expert Jasmine Aimaq, who lives in Canada, combines elements of literary thriller, sociopolitical exposé, and historical witnessing. The Afghan people lived in relative – albeit tense – balance between the 1973 coup d'etat...
*STARRED REVIEW Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen emerges as a fiction powerhouse, each of her 10 stories an immersive literary event. “Lulu,” which first appeared in the New Yorker, is a tale about the diverging life paths of twins, the overachieving daughter and the slacker...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrating the fourth of her own books, Sue Miller doesn’t so much perform as empathically embody her 13th title – the result is an aural gift to her avid readers. Three decades into Graham and Annie’s marriage, Graham unexpectedly dies in his sleep. He...
Almost a decade since her debut collection, This Is Not Your City, Caitlin Horrocks returns with Life Among the Terranauts. The majority of these 14 stories deliver a gut-punch reminder of the seeming unavoidability of loneliness and isolation, despite the promises of coupledom, familial bonds, and understood...
*STARRED REVIEW A dead woman opens Catherine Adel West’s startling, haunting debut. Two fathers, two daughters, and the building that is Chicago’s Calvary Hope Christian Church will unravel her unfortunate murder, revealing generations of secrets and violence that culminate in young Ruby King cradling her mother...
A stepmother's unwanted visit, a mother's unexpected phone call, a lover's departure – all happening in a single month – precipitated the breakdown that eventually engendered Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu's penetrating debut memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu spent her youth navigating multiple continents, a half dozen countries,...
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, his Sherlock Holmes legacy comprised four novels and 56 stories. Sherlock has since become an unstoppable literary institution, proliferating across mediums; although his archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, only appeared in six of Doyle’s original works, his own...
*STARRED REVIEW Born 10 months apart, September and July are the kind of sisters who don’t require words to communicate. Older September is clearly in charge, having trained July over years of playing “September says.” Something terrible has happened at their Oxford school, causing their mother,...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, when the father was a young boy – the same age as his young son now – he wanted to be a crossing guard. After that, he wanted to be a writer. “‘And now you are one!’” the son gleefully...
Measured and controlled, Amy Landon expertly ciphers this 11-story collection with a sense of purposeful detachment, as if these women’s stories are too difficult, too harrowing to risk becoming too involved. Three stories, each highlighting erasure, emerge as standouts: in “Lizards,” an angry Floridian transplant...
Always approachable, immediately engaged, Hillary Huber returns as Sigrid Nunez’s cipher after voicing her 2018 National Book Awarded, The Friend. Once more, suicide looms, this time as a future intention rather than in response to a foregone event. In this is spare, sharp, simultaneously both daunting...
*STARRED REVIEW On September 11, 1844, Heyum Lehmann from Rimpar, Germany disembarked from a ship in New York harbor to become Henry Lehman. Brothers Emmanuel and Mayer soon followed. From immigrant store owners turned cotton traders in pre-Civil War Alabama, the brothers moved to banking in...
Both Susan Dalian and Jay Aaseng are relatively new narrators, but theirs is no novice performance of historical romance novelist Alyssa Cole’s first thriller. The pair alternates bearing witness to the aggressive gentrification erasing a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood by wealthy white families and investors. Dalian’s...
For three years, I've been reading along with two fabulously erudite co-horts – my Library Journal editor Barbara Hoffert and fellow LJ reviewer Lawrence Olszewski – to recognize and celebrate the best translated world literature. This year, we had well over 100 titles to discuss, debate, negotiate,...
Once upon a time, Beth and Sam Min-Lindstrom seemed like the perfect, wealthy family with two adorable daughters. But now Beth is in prison, convicted of pharmaceutical shenanigans. Without Beth’s oversight (never mind her hefty salary), Sam and the girls need his always-reliable older sister,...
*STARRED REVIEW Spare and devastating, At Night All Blood Is Black by French Senegalese author David Diop is a bone-chilling anti-war treatise. He chooses as backdrop a little-known chapter of World War I annals, when the French government drafted some 200,000 soldiers from its colonies, including Senegal....
The late, great Dorothy West's trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy, remains presciently relevant almost three-quarters of a century after its initial publication. Racial inequity, police brutality, Black incarceration all haunt West's biting narrative, ready to resonate with a new generation of contemporary readers. Set...
*STARRED REVIEW Although Thai Italian artist Elisa Macellari’s Kusama (2020) hit U.S. shelves first, Papaya Salad is actually her debut title, originally published in 2018 in her native Italy. Introducing her tale as “a story the protagonist told me when I was a child and which I stumbled across...
Some happy endings are inevitable ...
*STARRED REVIEW It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house” – Kay Manman Mwen...
