* STARRED REVIEW After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as...
* STARRED REVIEW As in Ru Freeman’s absorbing 2009 debut, A Disobedient Girl, the intricate lives of young children also take center stage in this latest work. In 1979, the titular Sal Mal Lane is a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s largest city and former...
When you Google journalist Anna Badkhen, the one repeating line you’ll encounter is this: “Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis.” To do so, she’s “spent [her] adult life in motion of one sort or another in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, Africa.” Badkhen...
Perhaps I just need to stay away from award-winning bestsellers. But sometimes, my curiosity over all those stickers, prizes, and multiplying sales just can't be contained ...
With his eyes and body still “bleary from post-windsurfing and traveling,” Don Lee nonetheless graciously agrees to be grilled yet again – we’re going on a decade-plus of various interviews through four books! He’s tired, he’s rambling, but he’s always entertaining … and once more...
Here's another tiny-world overlap that convinces me that some higher power is directing my reading choices: first-time author Christa Parravani is married to Gulf War veteran author Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) – 'Tony' in Her – who appeared in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was directed by...
When Don Lee’s first book debuted in April 2001, he probably didn’t know that he was the forerunner of a colorful trend – literally. His collection, Yellow, had the shortest of subtitles, simply Stories. Three months later, in July, another yellow-tinted cover appeared: Yell-Oh Girls!: Emerging...
Jenny Wingfield seems to be a bit of serial first-hit wonder. That's actually not a judgment but an observation: her first film she wrote, The Man in the Moon, was glorified by the late Roger Ebert, gave Reese Witherspoon her screen debut, and was the last...
Tana French has a method to her mysteries: While all four of her titles are standalone thrillers, you'll get more out of each if you read them in chronological order because each book's protagonist is connected to the next. Rob opens the Dublin Murder Squad series with In the...
So we've arrived at the penultimate volume of one of the most hair-raising manga series I've ever read – because a resemblance to reality is always more disturbing that any dystopic sci-fi for sure! Bullying, domestic abuse, high school caste systems, the careless power of popularity...
Hisham Matar's second novel (following his much-lauded, substantially-awarded debut, In the Country of Men) reads like a fast-moving dream, events jarringly, jaggedly forced together, and yet somehow managing to maintain a clear, thoughtful narrative. Narrator Steve West's methodically-paced, calmly-controlled voice imbues Matar's haunting story with dignity...
To put a word so violent as Executioner next to a muzak-soundtrack-inducing subtitle like Love Stories, on a cover sporting a cutesy, heart-shaped tiger's tail is exactly the sort of unsettling experience you can expect from Rajesh Parameswaran's uniquely original debut story collection. Animals take control of their narratives...
In the second installment of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, Cassie Maddox hasn't quite recovered from Operation Vestal of In the Woods, the series' debut. While she gained a caring, supportive, all-around good guy lover, she lost her partner who was also her very...
Who needs films when writers like Nadeem Aslam can create such eloquent canvases that no celluloid could ever hope to project? Blind Man's Garden takes you deep into the tragic 'war on terror' and shows you the very lives of the individuals who must live...
You might choose to read Ruth Ozeki's latest novel as another engrossing, original story – because it clearly is. And if you decide to stick the novel in your ears, you'll be thrilled and grateful to know that Ozeki herself reads to you – her...
To get to know our time-traveling bather, start with Volume I. When in Thermae Romae, you need to do as this Roman does and find out how he journeys back and forth between far-spanning centuries and cultures with one thing in common – an obsession with the...
Allow me to start with the simple end: Ru Freeman's On Sal Mal Lane is stupendous. I'll even embellish that verdict and add that it is actually fan-huththa-tastic...
Award-winning Japanese crime fiction writer Natsuo Kirino (Out; Grotesque) contributes to the latest installment of the "The Myths" series, originally published by Britain's Canongate, in which contemporary writers retell myths. Previous volumes have included Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and...
I refer to myself as a 'recovering Catholic,' and yet I can't stay out of churches for long. I enter as a tourist – admiration for architecture seems to be genetically coded into our extended family – but I linger to breathe deeply, clear the mind temporarily,...
Although I haven't read any actual reviews, I know from seeing this title included in so many Best-of-2012 lists that the lauded reactions have reflected both quantity and quality. Leave it to me to take a somewhat contrary position: while I went through the whole gamut of...
