Even before Naomi Benaron's debut novel hit shelves last year, it earned a substantial literary gold sticker as the winner of the biennial 2010 Bellwether Prize – the largest monetary award for unpublished fiction in North America, which was rebranded in 2011 as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially...
Although she "knew many things when [she] was eight," what Olemaun didn't know was "how to read the outsiders' books. It was not enough to hear them from my older sister, Rosie. I longed to read them for myself." Against her father's wishes – "[h]e knew things...
Oooh, am I sucker for novels in verse, even though I'm embarrassingly inept with poetry. Who knows why ...
The top of this debut volume proclaims, auf Deutsch, "Poesie des Widerstandes," or 'Poetry of the Resistors.' Poetry is certainly visible in the alpine landscapes and the swirling energy of the constant movement; most pronounced, however, is the tragedy of what happens across the panels...
*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's (The Interpreter of Maladies) unparalleled ability to transform the smallest moments into whole lives pinnacles in this extraordinary story of two brothers – so close that one is "the other side" of the other – coming of age in the political...
Emma is hardly the typical Canadian teenager. At 16, she's lived all over the world, thanks to her career diplomat mother, who Emma currently blames for all the latest terrible events in her life: she's in yet another new country – this time Pakistan with some...
Magic happens when narrator George Guidall says "and yet ...
Boutique press Satya House Publications continues their around-the-world cultural tour in their bilingual I See the Sun series with a first Latin American stop. Young Luis excitedly prepares to join his Papa on the tourist excursion boat on which his father works as the cook. On his way to...
Arthur Flowers, a "blues-based" performance poet, musician, and professor, introduces himself as "Rickydoc Trickmaster," to render the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. into a biography for younger readers, as traditional Patua Indian scroll painter Manu Chitrakar brings Flowers' recitation to vibrant life. Their combined...
Winner of China's National Children's Literature Award, Black Flame is an engrossing, often heartstring-pulling adventure told from the point of view of a majestic, lion-like, blue-black Tibetan Mastiff. Two things kept going through my head as the pages turned swiftly: 1. the novel reads like an older...
What began as gorgeous elegiac memory about misplaced courage and final hope as World War II comes to an end in the Pacific, devolves into a middle-aged man's tedious reflections about his search for meaningful connections, especially with women, as he recalls his privileged life...
"When Kenta heard the warning siren, he ran to school ...
When I recently caught up with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, she was in one of her rare lull periods at home in Houston, Texas, having finished almost three solid months of book touring for her latest novel, Oleander Girl. Like her latest protagonist, Korobi Roy, a...
Alas, this was the last Maggie O'Farrell I had left. Ever since discovering The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (my first and still favorite, I admit), I've moved her books to the top of the top of the To-Be-Read piles with regularity. Now that I've...
On a summer afternoon in mid-1950s rural England on the border between Devon and Cornwall, journalist Innes Kent, already 34, happens upon angry Alexandra Sinclair, not yet 22. During their brief exchange in her parents' yard after he hits car trouble, he manages to inadvertently...
In order to fully enjoy this manga, you first need to read its prequel, Princess Knight (in two volumes in English translation). Come back when you're finished ...
Best known for her penultimate novel – the bestselling 2006 Booker longlisted The Emperor's Children – Claire Messud takes on about-to-be-middle-aged regret with a raw vengeance in this, her fifth and latest title. That her protagonist Nora Eldridge shares the same first name as the discontented heroine in Henrik Ibsen's A...
So I've been mulling over this book for a month-plus, and still remain rather conflicted. The one solid conclusion I can offer is this – if I were to rank Susan Choi's titles, my list would read thusly: American Woman, based loosely on the Patty Hearst...
Without intending any disrespect to narrator Robertson Dean (in fact, his deep, rich voice makes for a memorable listen), this is a book you must see on the page. If you only go audible, you'll miss you too much from the very first sentence onward:...
