To get her four-eared infant to safety, Nouri Ahmad Mohammad ibn Mahsoud al-Morad's mother gave first her body, then her life. In 13th-century Persia, a child so different would require divine intervention to survive, and Nouri literally falls into the arms of a gentle, crippled...
One Monday in January, 63-year-old Britt-Marie enters an unemployment office, having last worked as a waitress in 1978. After decades of fastidious living – perfect cutlery drawers, coasters under every drink, dinner at six, beds disinfected with baking soda – Britt-Marie needs a job. She's left...
*STARRED REVIEW Originally published in 2003, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s groundbreaking memoir chronicling her transition from James to Jenny was updated in 2013: "Man, what you don't know could fill a book. I'm unique, however, in that the book filled with the things I don't know is...
'The Bones of Grace': Anam's ‘Bengal trilogy’ comes to a graceful close First, a warning: The Bones of Grace is the final installment in Bangladeshi-born, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam’s “Bengal trilogy.” If the trilogy’s publication history is any indication – A Golden Age in 2008, The Good...
*STARRED REVIEW Presenting her dozen stories in six interlinked pairs, Shobha Rao uses the savage 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as her narrative center, with reverberations moving outward beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations. A 13-year-old's would-be widowhood spent in a refugee camp is the best...
In 1995 at age 22, MariNaomi leaves her boyfriend of five years, her job, her San Francisco home and transplants herself 50 miles south in San Jose, where she almost immediately "move[s] into an idyllic, century-old one bedroom cottage that rested on a large plot of untamed...
"[A]s a reporter, I was spending my life telling other people's stories and ignoring my own family's incredible one," Dawn Anahid MacKeen realized at 35. Her 78-year-old Armenian mother was aging, and MacKeen could no longer ignore her calls to "come home." In 2006, MacKeen left...
From the age of 13, Vivien Thomas worked with his master carpenter father and began growing a bank account that might someday take him to college and eventually medical school. The stock market crash of 1928 wiped out Thomas' savings, but nothing could touch his determination...
Six days before eighth grade starts, Lily and Dunkin meet for the first time. Lily is still known mostly as Timothy, the boy name he was given at birth – but he's practicing being his true self: a girl named Lily. Dressed in her mother's dress and sandals,...
*STARRED REVIEW Tanya Dubois, as she's initially introduced, is not the woman her husband believed her to be. He's dead – she didn't do it – but Tanya runs anyway, shedding her name and recent past yet again and taking on another identity. In another town, another...
*STARRED REVIEW O. Henry Prize winner (2009) and first-time novelist Dinh drops four fictional characters into the tragic aftermath of the real-life January 2001 cataclysmic earthquake in Gujarat, India, as they travel from New York, London, and Delhi to attempt to save lives, including their own. The...
Four siblings gather in their childhood home to determine its future. The oldest is the most distant, unsure she'll even stay the full three weeks they've planned to be there. The middle sister arrives with two children, complaining about her missing husband. The youngest sister...
Wacky and weird, writing and literature professor Sequoia Nagamatsu’s fiction debut is a 12-piece collection that defies easy categorization as an amalgam of sci-fi/fantasy, horror, and black comedy overlaid with ancient-to-contemporary Japanese myth and culture. Nagamatsu’s atypical characters include the “Margaret Mead of the Kaiju [strange...
“Enemy aliens” is an all too familiar label, although just who gets thusly labeled seems to change with the political winds. With such an aggravated election year, these two words won’t be disappearing from the media anytime soon. Beyond our northern border, our Canadian neighbors did...
