Hardworking Malia and Augie have plenty of love but can’t ever quite get ahead. In hopes of providing better opportunities for their three children, the pair relocate from Hawai'i to Oahu, but not before Augie insists the family share an adventure on a glassbottom boat...
Veteran voice actor Stacey Glembowski – already seasoned with substantial science fiction experience – immediately commands Diane Cook’s (Man v. Nature) timely novel debut in which 20 desperate men, women, children abandon their depleting City lives to become the inaugural Community in the Wilderness State....
For Naoki Urasawa newbies, his latest collection (another satisfying English translation by popular manga-specialist John Werry) is a beckoning introductory primer. For aficionados, these eight stories (none titled “Sneeze”), originally published between 1995-2018, are an affirming reminder of his irrefutable genius. Urasawa’s most memorable stories feature...
Vikas Adam is three for three (because he’s that good) in voicing Sandhya Menon’s bestselling rom-com series. Rematched with Soneela Nankani after the success of There’s Something about Sweetie (2019), the pair presents Menon's latest frothy confection. The eponymous Pinky is another of Menon's feisty heroines...
If reading various dialects on the page is at all challenging, allow Adjoa Andoh to immediately immerse you in the mellifluous Nigerian English patois Abi Daré infuses into her empowering debut novel. At 14, Adunni is denied the education she so longs for, and is...
*STARRED REVIEW Here’s what we might know – or agree on from limited historic documents and scholarly guessing research – about the Bard’s wife: she’s commonly named “Anne Hathaway” but her father referred to her as “Agnes” in his will; she was older than her still-teenage husband;...
*STARRED REVIEW With only a few audiobook credits each, Yetide Badaki and Chukwudi Iwuji might be considered audiobook newbies. Their extensive acting experience however – especially Iwuji with his substantial work on British stages – ensures that Nigerian-born, award-winning literary darling Akweke Emezi’s sophomore adult title...
Judge Gish Jen anointed Beauty, Christina Chiu’s first fiction since her award-winning 2001 collection, Troublemaker and Other Stories, for the Santa Fe Writers Project’s James Alan McPherson Award, enabling publication from 2040 Books. A simple summary reveals Amy Wong's trajectory from an unmoored Manhattan 16-year-old...
Hideo Yokoyama (Seventeen) might not yet have a following in the U.S. like some of his compatriot mystery writers – Keigo Higashino and Natsuo Kirino, for example – but the acclaim he's earned in his native Japan will likely spread to English-language readers. With Jonathan...
Welcome back to a new year at Riverdale Academy Day (RAD) School in Jerry Craft's entertaining follow-up to his 2020 Newbery Medal-winning debut, New Kid. Wannabe artist Jordan reunites with his closest friends: Liam, who arrives from his family's Riverdale mansion via chauffeur, and Drew, who...
Korean American experience resonates in The Prince of Mournful Thoughts The longing for connection, for belonging, is woven throughout a dozen short stories in Caroline Kim’s superlative debut collection. "There is so much I wish to make my daughter understand, but cannot,” an immigrant father muses...
*STARRED REVIEW “Begin at the end,” Emily St. John Mandel’s (Station Eleven, 2014) highly anticipated latest opens. Relative-newbie narrator Dylan Moore, a Julliard-trained actor, instantly becomes Vincent as she is “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s dark wildness.” She’s notably named by...
A young bear wakes from a long nap to be greeted with a surprise: "It was red as a berry and round like the moon with a long silver string drifting brightly in the breeze." What Matthew Burgess' adorable ursine hero does with the unexpected...
*STARRED REVIEW In Hiroko Oyamada's intriguing parable-like The Hole, a young childless couple, Asa and Muneaki, trade urban for rural when Muneaki is transferred for work. They end up living rent-free next door to his parents in a conveniently vacated rental house his parents own. While...
The genre-hopping, award-winning Mexican writer, poet, musician, and teacher Julián Herbert made his English-language debut with Tomb Song, an autobiographical novel focused on his relationship with his late mother, a prostitute dying of leukemia. His nonfiction The House of the Pain of Others is a hybrid...
Susie Yang's electrifying debut novel, White Ivy, has well earned its spot on the longlist for the Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize. Part immigrant story, part elitist takedown, part contemporary novel of wicked manners, White Ivy is an unpredictable spectacle. At 2, Ivy Lin...
Argentine writer José Hernández’s 1872 epic poem, Martín Fierro, became both an historical and literary classic for preserving and celebrating the gaucho, equal parts horseman, rebel, and legend. In Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest, shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, she transforms a few lines from...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut collections rarely prove even in quality and efficacy, which makes Jenny Bhatt's 15 compelling stories in Each of Us Killers even more memorable. Peripatetically spread across continents, Bhatt's characters are often caught between expectations, desires, and boundaries. Bhatt opens with a bang – literally. In...
*STARRED REVIEW Internationally bestselling author Eshkol Nevo and award-winning translator Sondra Silverston are five-for-five in enabling Anglophone readers seamless access to Nevo’s engrossing novels. Reminiscent of the retired judge in his last title, Three Floors Up (2017), who communicated with her dead husband via answering-machine messages,...
After last year’s The Matchmaker’s List, Sonya Lalli and Soneela Nankani return together for another cross-cultural dramedy about the challenges of balancing filial duties and modern relationships. Anu Desai was the perfect daughter for her immigrant Indian parents: she married the first (and only) boy she kissed,...
