Best friends can't always be on their best behavior, and, sometimes, even the best days can turn bad in seconds. Prolific author Marilyn Singer (Every Month Is a New Year) captures that push-and-pull in her energetic picture book Best Day Ever!, illustrated by debut artist Leah...
Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...
As if channeling the success of her debut, Ayesha at Last – a contemporary Muslim Pride and Prejudice – Jalaluddin’s new rom-com doesn’t stray far from Austenian independent women and their recalcitrant partners-to-be. Chasing broadcast dreams, titular Hana Khan interns at Radio Toronto and anonymously podcasts on her own, spurred...
Mexican poet, writer, and essayist José Emilio Pacheco's novella Battles in the Desert returns in a glorious 40th-anniversary edition, re-translated by Katherine Silver from her own decades-old original. Award-winning author Fernanda Melchor appends an illuminating afterword that contextualizes the coming-of-age classic in the Mexican canon. Carlos, still...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
At under two hours, Don DeLillo’s latest is easily a straight-through listen. What happens during that short time proves mind-bogglingly far-reaching: a worldwide technological shutdown. Jim and Tessa are in flight from Paris to Newark, with evening plans to watch Super Bowl 2022 at Max...
And so the intriguing layers – always characteristic of auteur Naoki Urasawa’s series – begin to multiply in volume 2 of his latest Stateside import, brought into English by frequent manga translator John Werry (who lent his talents to the first volume, and the continuity...
*STARRED REVIEW The titular phone booth is real: it stands at Bell Gardia in coastal Ōtsuchi, Japan, built in 2010 to communicate with a dead relative via an unconnected phone that carries conversations into the wind. Since the March 2011 Tōhoku disaster, 30,000 visitors have sought...
Sujata Massey introduced feisty Perveen Mistry, India's first female solicitor, in the Agatha Award-winning The Widows of Malabar Hill in 2018. In the meticulously researched and entertainingly executed The Bombay Prince, Massey continues to mine details from the lives of two groundbreaking Indian women – Cornelia Sorabji and...
Dhaka-born, Harvard PhD-ed, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam has won prestigious accolades for her Bengal trilogy into which she’s lyrically woven Bangladeshi history with personal inspiration. She turns utterly contemporary in her newest novel, which reads rather like an elevated, fictional version of Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley...
Get ready to cheer for this #OwnVoices victory with an author and narrator who are both Argentinian American, presented here in perfect synch. Sol Madariaga might be new to audiobooks, but her acting gigs across multiple continents have well-prepared her to fluently cipher Yamile Saied...
Renowned for his international travelogues – Pyongyang; Shenzhen; Jerusalem – Guy Delisle now mines his adolescence for a magnetic Factory Summers. Before he became an award-winning graphic auteur, Delisle at 16 worked in a Quebec City pulp and paper mill where his father was an...
China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...
*STARRED REVIEW The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing...
Three months after the Pearl Harbor bombings, rumors of racist mass eviction became reality when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, unlawfully condemning 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps across the western U.S. Following political leaders spouting conspiracy...
*STARRED REVIEW Bestselling Korean author Bora Chung is a genre-defying polyglot. She’s a Yale MA-ed, Indiana University PhD-ed translator of Russian and Polish modern literature into Korean who writes an amalgam of speculative, ghostly, literary horror fiction. Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur,...
Nothing is quite what it seems – of course – in prodigious Helen Oyeyemi’s latest. The “starry-eyed young couple,” Otto and Xavier Shin, have committed to sharing the same last name without marrying. They’re embarking on a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” on a train trip gifted by...
In China, notes Yan Lianke’s Anglophone enabler-of-choice Carlos Rojas, there exists “a literary subgenre known as ‘revolution plus love,’ which was popular ...
*STARRED REVIEW Women alone populate the extraordinary seven stories in Shoko's Smile by bestselling Korean author Choi Eunyoung, who makes her English-language debut, smoothly translated by Sung Ryu. From daughters to grandmothers, Choi's narrators remain in motion, not only physically but chronologically, each assessing significant past events...
When Lila Macapagal moves back to her small hometown, she has no idea she’ll have to solve a murder mystery in order to save her aunt’s restaurant. "Cozy mysteries," already a niche subgenre of crime fiction, contain yet another level of specialty: culinary cozy mysteries. For...
