*STARRED REVIEW For the first time in her young life, Jivan has her own cellphone, which she bought with money earned by working as a shopgirl, having left high school after barely passing her tenth-form exams. After witnessing a gruesome train-station attack during her 15-minute walk...
Despite living in glorious Paris, Juliette's daily life is mundane. Her real estate job isn't fulfilling, her closest friend is flighty coworker Chloe, and her love life currently nonexistent. The day's highlight is her Métro commute, when she can commune with books – both the...
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and translated by Jamie Chang Cho’s narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry. She opens with “August, 2015,” immediately divulging the fragile mental state of her titular Kim Jiyoung, who now as a wife and mother has...
In her provocative, intense debut novel, The Royal Abduls, Ramiza Shamoun Koya introduces the extended members of a fractured family four years after the horrors of 9/11. Each is attempting to deal with ongoing anti-Muslim challenges, from microaggressions to outright civil rights abuses. Despite a shared...
*STARRED REVIEW Corinne Manning’s author statement couldn’t be clearer. “I had no idea how to write authentically until the day when I typed the sentence ‘Oh, f*ck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction.’” That declaration became “Gay Tale,” one of 11 stories in this collection, her first,...
After a decade together, Oscar and Mina married, but on their wedding night, Mina downed all the pills she could find, yet somehow lived. Six months later, she’s walking across George Washington Bridge. She’s already sent one of her purple flip-flops into the dark below...
Ivansk Street, Number 1933, in Kirovka, Ukraine, seems be an exact address, but the town council's clerk insists "that building does not exist." Constructed last year, "someone seemed to have forgotten to connect it to the district furnace," but plenty of people already live there....
*STARRED REVIEW Earth’s destruction, space inhabitation, time travel – none of that is unfamiliar. Rampant capitalism, workaholic isolation, and family bonds too can be pedestrian themes. Yet Simon Jimenez’s debut, which includes all of the above, is a remarkably fresh, electrifying story that, at its core,...
Two years after the original 1968 publication in Japan of Life for Sale, which opens immediately with a young man's failed attempt to die, Yukio Mishima (Star) led an unsuccessful military coup d'etat that ended with his highly publicized, gruesomely violent ritual suicide. Just 45...
Prolifically published in his native Farsi, Amir Ahmadi Arian makes his English-language debut with Then the Fish Swallowed Him, a disturbingly irresistible novel exposing the invalidity of truth and lies under a despotic regime. Growing up in a volatile, politically fractured society and losing both parents...
*STARRED REVIEW How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? In her third novel exquisitely translated by award-winning Geoffrey Strachan, Mauritius-born journalist and translator Nathacha Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018) presents the beginning and dissolution of a boy, Moïse, and all the people...
“The invisibility of the women, in particular of my community, fueled this desire to write the Dominican experience, the Latinx experience, the immigrant experience, the New York experience,” reveals Angie Cruz in an interview accessible only if you choose audio. Making her narrator debut, fellow...
Filling a Lack of Voices from Inside Việt Nam: Talking with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai Thousands of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s devoted readers should have been meeting her live over these next few weeks to hear about The Mountains Sing, her first novel in English. But an unprecedented...
*STARRED REVIEW “I did not live with intent, I only lived. But that’s all over now.” Kazu is dead, but his spirit can’t rest. As he wanders through Tokyo’s Imperial Gift Park – where he last lived as a homeless wanderer – memories, visions, and hauntings...
*STARRED REVIEW “I am not well read, nor am I a craftswoman of language,” the Mumbai-based journalist/educator Shubhangi Swarup insists in an author’s note to her editor. And yet her debut novel will certainly be one of the most wondrous literary achievements to hit the shelves...
*STARRED REVIEW The U.S.’s April, 1975, withdrawal from Vietnam enabled the so-called Vietnam War to spread into Laos and Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime stormed Phnom Penh and dispersed its inhabitants – mostly to brutal labor camps – eliminating 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians....
Chen Hang is facedown in the bathtub when his wife, Jia Jia, discovers his naked corpse. Married for four years, their intended “lifelong partnership” didn’t include love, at least not for each other. After vomiting her “insuppressible resentment and disgust,” Jia Jia finds a pencil...
*STARRED REVIEW Ishmael Beah, who recounted his brutal experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in his bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone (2007), understands all too well the horrors that can befall children. Here his fictional “little family” numbers five, the two oldest still...
*STARRED REVIEW As former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul, U.S.-Hong Kong-South Korea-raised and Brooklyn-domiciled Frances Cha writes exactingly of what she knows in her first novel. With unblinking focus, she confronts some of the darkest consequences of contemporary gender inequity by targeting the...
Beijing-born, globally-trotted, San Francisco-domiciled C. Pam Zhang “is still looking for home,” her author bio shouts. That search for home – uncertain, elusive, just-out-of-reach – looms throughout Zhang’s mesmerizing debut novel in which a family of four (which should have been five) never quite arrives....
