Not yet married a year, Homi and her husband are passionately in love. Beyond being happy at home, Homi thrives at her high-power position at a television studio. The pair share a comfortable, compatible existence in Kolkata, occasionally interrupted by extended familial demands. And then Homi...
“You stay here. I’m taking your brother over to Grandma’s. I’ll be back in a bit,” 5-year-old Kampol’s father promises. Just a few days ago, “something went down at his house”: Kampol’s mother disappeared, and now his father and not-yet-1-year-old baby brother are leaving. Most of...
Pristine beaches, spectacular landscapes, cultural landmarks might have been the go-to tourist destinations once upon a time, but in Yun Ko-eun's sly, compelling novel, The Disaster Tourist, scenes of death and destruction are where the people really want to go. Global voyeurism is succeeding, with...
They’re baaaaaaak, with Soneela Nankani repeating her aural support for welcome consistency. Bestselling Sonali Dev continues her Austen-inspired series starring the Indian royalty-descended, Northern California-established Raje family. Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (2019) introduced the extended clan, matching neurosurgeon Trisha with chef DJ. In #2, Dev’s...
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History, W. Caleb McDaniel’s 2019 debut gets a 2020 aural adaptation, helmed by prolific Paul Heitsch, who adds solemn gravitas to an utterly compelling narrative. Born enslaved in 1818/1820 in Kentucky, Henrietta Wood was freed in 1848 and...
*STARRED REVIEW In their joint introduction, four The College of New Jersey colleagues – three African American women, one gay white man, all PhD-ed – declare, “Toni Morrison is our greatest living historian about love, race, nation, and just about everything else of consequence.” The Nobel...
His name was chosen to bring good fortune. So far, it isn’t working. Lysley Tenorio’s novel The Son of Good Fortune explores the sorely tested bonds of a Filipino mother and her son living in the shadows in America. Eight years have passed since award-winning writer and...
Cat mysteries are a (bestselling) thing: the late Lillian Jackson Braun’s 29-volume Cat Who ...
At under five hours, Anne Tyler’s latest is her shortest, but all her usual ingredients for a satisfying listen are here: familiar Baltimore setting, characters who evolve, family and friends with memorable sideline storylines. Fitting easily into Tyler’s pantheon of repeating narrators (Blair Brown, Kimberly Farr,...
Mexican Canadian Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an award-winning, genre-hopping literary chameleon, having successfully written fantasy, fairy tales, vampiric adventure, noir, short stories. Clearly channeling her inner H.P. Lovecraft in Mexican Gothic, she's created her own varietal of irresistible 1950s fungal horror. Socialite Noemí is summoned home early...
"You can't imagine how much the world can change in six months." Oh, but yes we can! With remarkable prescience, Lauren Beukes’ Afterland takes on an "unprecedented global pandemic" with chilling results – and surprising comic relief threaded throughout. Six years after the success of Broken...
For Meredith Talusan, transformation looks like this: "Sun Child," "Harvard Man," "Lady Wedgwood." In the nimbly titled Fairest, award-winning journalist Talusan shares an unflinching exploration of identity. "Mirrors were not just mirrors to me," she writes in her prologue, "but bridges made of light to fantastic...
*STARRED REVIEW How are Thomas and Rose faring? Did Patrice get her degree? How much has Archille grown? Did Millie make Zhaanat famous? So immersive are the 13.5 hours spent with Louise Erdrich’s (LaRose) latest community of families, friends, even strangers, that long after recording’s end,...
Multi-talented Terry McMillan has been narrating her titles for 15 years already! She’s aurally involved in various incarnations – abridgements, as part of a cast, and here as a solo narrator. She shares the same age, 68, with protagonist Loretha, whose beloved husband Carl, suddenly dies...
For Parisian nurse Valérie Villieu, the proverbial City of Lights is “filled with solitude, isolation, and confinement” – especially for the elderly. Villieu meets soon-to-be-84 Josephine, trapped in her tiny apartment with a stuffed dog and bear as her only constant companions. For months, Josephine...
The “demarcation” begins over a wardrobe malfunction: a 12-year-old girl, improperly, according to the local men, dressed in shorts, arrives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with her mother and uncle. Exchanging the forbidden shorts for her uncle’s “baggy trousers” gives her a...
Seemingly quotidian lives centered in Mumbai fill Jayant Kaikini’s second translated collection, the first book in translation to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. These 16 stories, written from 1986 to 2006, were selected and translated by the award-winning Tejaswini Niranjana, who in...
Missing children loom in Yiyun Li’s latest novel, her second since her teenage son’s tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur “genius” Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her...
*STARRED REVIEW To begin at the end seems most fitting: “If Jesus actually did have a wife ...
*STARRED REVIEW On a cloudy September 1969 afternoon, septuagenarian widower Sportcoat – less respectfully dubbed Deacon King Kong for his addiction to the local moonshine – shot 19-year-old drug dealer Deems, then saved Deems’ life with an unseemly version of the Heimlich maneuver when Deems nearly...
