Laila Lalami’s stupendous fourth title showcases a chorus of nine Rashomon-esque characters dealing with the hit-and-run death of a Moroccan immigrant diner owner in a California Mojave Desert town. That the novel gets a nine-member full cast (with who’s-who credits at recording’s end!), including some...
Brown lives get overlooked, trampled, dismissed, and destroyed in Matt Mendez’s searing YA debut, set in his El Paso, Texas hometown. Timothy Andrés Pabon – his voice aptly mimicking a teen who’s not quite fully mature – opens in “Chapter Juan” as should-be high school...
Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker – both masterful epistolary novelists – couldn’t have imagined how today’s virtual communication would become an ideal medium to tell a story about ...
What should have been a serendipitous event – a lavish birthday celebration for three generations in 1973 – turns horrific, leaving 17 family and friends dead. Decades after the tragedy, The Aosawa Murders might be a closed case, but award-winning Japanese novelist Riku Onda has plenty...
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar Although the page facing the title of Azar’s first novel to be translated into English clearly states, “Translated from the Farsi,” the linguistic enabler remains anonymous; the publisher’s official line is, “the translator of this book has asked...
Author Devi S. Laskar knows what it’s like to have a police gun pointed at her. In 2010, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided her home when her professor husband was wrongly accused of misusing university funds. They confiscated her laptop, on which was stored...
During summer 2005, when “the American war was sort of dozing,” 12-year-old Marwand, his brother, and mother arrived in Logar, Afghanistan to visit extended family. The six years since Marwand’s last visit from the U.S. isn’t enough for Budabash – more wolf than dog –...
Life in India’s basti (slums) has rules all its own – about toilets, water, hierarchies, privileges. The police either ignore the inhabitants, making crime reporting meaningless, or threaten to raze their ramshackle homes. Meanwhile, some 180 children go missing in India every day, reports British-based...
With the right posh British accent, even lying, cheating, and all sorts of promiscuity somehow don’t seem as unforgivable. Life, death, and plenty of bed-swapping happen in Tessa Hadley’s latest, elucidated by English actor Abigail Thaw, who reads with such perfect enunciation and elegant control...
In Fiona Barton’s third “Kate Waters” full-audio-cast thriller, Susan Duerden assumes tenacious journalist Kate Waters from Mandy Williams who previously voiced Kate in The Widow and The Child. This time the mystery gets personal – and far-flung. Two British teens traveling in Thailand turn up as victims in...
Cycles of violence dominate the graphic novel Two Dead – whether at home or on so-called enemy territory. Traumatized by a World War II friendly-fire fatality, Sergeant Gideon Kemp returns stateside, eschews his law degree, and begins his police career in 1946 in his hometown...
He’s been called “Twitter Monk” and “mega-Monk” for his million-plus followers. That his Berkeley/Harvard Divinity Master’s/Princeton PhD-pedigree plus seven years professor-ing at Hampshire College led him to become a world-famous Buddhist monk seems an unlikely path. Yet his success only spreads with Imperfect, his follow-up to...
Originally from Somalia, Mugdi and Gacalo have now spent the majority of their lives in Norway, where they’ve been productive citizens, raising two children. Their quiet, middle-aged calm is shattered when their son Dhaqaneh commits a suicide bombing in Somalia. Gacalo’s only way forward after the...
Boratin is "back at zero" since his unsuccessful suicide has landed him in a hospital bed instead of Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait. He's broken a rib but lost his memory. Strangers – even though they aren't – assure him he's "a brilliant singer and songwriter" for...
In his mid-60s, Myshkin is finally about to understand what he’s been yearning to know almost his entire life. Since age 9, he’s been “known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman,” never mind that he is actually German. Except for...
“In the aging port city of an island nation near the start of the new millennium,” Idra Novey (Ways to Disappear) introduces her taut, haunting novel, giving it a foreboding sense of taking place anywhere close, anytime near. Student activist Maria P. has been dead...
Readers have an easy choice here: to read this resonating six-chapter collection as an entertaining, albeit sobering, manga about the middle-aged life of a seeming slacker, or approach it as a prominent, pivotal example of 20th-century graphic literary history. Originally published as a magazine serial...
*STARRED REVIEW Valeria Luiselli’s spectacular latest – her first fiction in English – also marks her co-narrator debut. The Mexican-born Luiselli is the dominant voice here; her accent slight, her enunciation careful. Only her collaboration could have enabled the affecting print-to-audio metamorphosis, choosing how photos, drawings,...
*STARRED REVIEW Two star-crossed seniors just want to dance together at prom. Emma lives with her grandmother since her parents rejected her when she came out, but the bullying at school has never stopped. She and student council president Alyssa are in love, but Alyssa’s fear of...
One of Thailand’s most prominent writers, Pimjai Juklin – who publishes as Duanwad Pimwana – presents 13 resonating stories featuring the everyday lives of Thai citizens of diverse backgrounds, each confronting entrapment physically, emotionally, and socially. In “The Attendant,” an elevator operator enclosed daily in a...
