PEN/Faulkner finalist Matthew Salesses, a transracial Korean adoptee, again distills his own experiences with race and (e)masculinity for laudable literary inspiration in The Sense of Wonder. His intricate novel spotlights three basketball players at different points of their careers – starting out, at the pinnacle,...
*STARRED REVIEW Eleanor Brown’s (The Weird Sisters) latest is certainly good, focusing on a “Very Special Family” of four siblings and their three sets of adoptive parents committed to keeping the children together through Sunday dinners, holidays, and now an all-family, two-week vacation. And here’s where...
Author Emiko Jean transfers the effusive charm of her YA novels (Tokyo Ever After; Tokyo Dreaming) into her first adult fiction, Mika in Real Life. At age 35, Japanese American Mika is once again jobless. Her career's been inarguably erratic, serially fired from a donut shop, nannying, writing ...
Terry Hong, Booklist Contributing Reviewer and chair of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence selection committee, had questions for Tom Lin, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Here is their conversation: So as a debut novelist in your...
Three boys – Youssef, Iseul, Dayo – are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers – from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria – are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys’ adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Chesil commemorated the end of her 20s by writing a novel based on her childhood experiences. The result, The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart, is a literary triumph that's both outstanding storytelling and searing societal commentary. "High school was...
*STARRED REVIEW Bill and Suelynn Evans of Conroe, Texas, can’t have kids. Their experience at their wealthy friends’ son’s birthday party inspires a search for a proxy of their own. In this not-too-distant reality, “the smartest men on the planet” are consumed with “makin’ phony kids”...
David Guterson (Ed King; Snow Falling on Cedars) returns to the courtroom with The Final Case. His opening note outlines the real-life 2011 trial of parents in Skagit County, Wash., charged with the death of their adopted daughter from Ethiopia. The author "attended the trial, and conducted...
Since Hara Wilson and Choi Yujun didn't quite get their happily-ever-after in Heart & Seoul, author Jen Frederick – a transracial Korean adoptee – returns with its addictive sequel, Seoulmates. In the first book, Korea-born, Iowa-raised adoptee Hara's loss of her estranged father prompted a...
Tam’s marriage to Tony is finally weaving back together as they prepare for the adoption of their son from China. After their lunchtime phone call suddenly disconnects, Tam learns that Tony and his cousin Mia were killed. The unraveling is immediate. Tony wasn’t supposed to...
*STARRED REVIEW In her fifth self-narration, acclaimed Indigenous author Louise Erdrich’s latest is delightfully enhanced with personal meta-references, insightfully balancing the narrative’s heavier events. Louise, the owner of Minneapolis’ Birchbark Books (as is the author herself), goes on a just-before-pandemic-shutdown book tour – clearly a nod...
Sonali Dev continues to channel Jane Austen via the Raje family with her third in the series, familiarly, gratefully voiced by Indian American favorite Soneela Nankani. Dev opens with a literal bang: California gubernatorial candidate Yash Raje is shot during a rally. His physical recovery...
*STARRED REVIEW Covering most of the 20th century across the Korean peninsula, Juhea Kim’s debut novel wondrously reveals broken families and surprising alliances created by uncontrollable circumstances. Kim links multiple narrative prongs, effortlessly navigating overlaps and disconnects. Korea remains under Japan’s ruthless occupation in 1917, which lasts...
For always, Kalki – with his matching blue skin – has been told he’s a god, the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu. His godliness supports the family’s Tamil Nadu ashram, where he lives with his controlling father, loving mother, uncle and his wife, and...
Mesha Maren: 'Fear and Unease Can Be a Writer's Best Friend' Mesha Maren's 2019 debut, Sugar Run, took almost a decade to hit shelves. In the meantime, she published short stories in various prestigious journals (the Oxford American, the Southern Review) and won numerous prizes and fellowships (2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize,...
To compress Mesha Maren's exhilarating second novel, Perpetual West, into a quick description would be an injustice to her intricately plotted, unsettling narrative about two 21-year-olds unsure of who they really are. Whereas her debut, Sugar Run, had its characters return to Maren's home landscape of rural...
An octogenarian shoplifter doesn’t quite seem like a likely hero, but British actor Siobhan Waring will certainly make you believe otherwise. Kleptomaniacal Irish matriarch Millie is caught yet again at the village shop and this time her son Kevin (energetically embodied by Irish-born Gary Furlong)...
Shifting back and forth between present-day San Francisco and a private orphanage in Sri Lanka in 2002, Jayatissa’s debut thriller takes every opportunity to lead readers astray. Paloma Evans was adopted at 12 by wealthy white parents. At 30, she’s living in a grim apartment,...
In 2007, the New Yorker published "Sweetheart Sorrow," which became the first chapter of David Hoon Kim's enigmatic debut, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost. The duration of the novel's opening 30ish pages is the only time Fumiko – a Japanese student in Paris who...
Samira Sedira's first English-language title, translated by Sara Vergnaud, is clearly marked "a novel" on its cover, and yet so much of the story is true. People Like Them is a fascinating amalgam of gruesome headlines – French newspapers in 2003 reported that an entire family...
