Oscar-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita makes her fiction debut with a celluloid-ready thriller that opens with body parts – a hand and foot that wash up on Point Mettier shores. Inspired by remote Whittier, Alaska, former military outpost Point Mettier has 205 full-time residents who all...
*STARRED REVIEW On the opening page, debut author Erin E. Adams affectingly invokes Alice Walker – the Black writer of a banned book exposing racist hate – although here, this Alice is just a girl playing in the woods of 1985 Johnstown, Pennsylvania ...
*STARRED REVIEW Tania Rodrigues and Kamila Shamsie prove themselves the best of audiobook companions with their fifth memorable pairing. Rodrigues, “with roots in India, Portugal and Britain,” according to her website bio, is an ideally cosmopolitan choice to follow two teens who come of age in...
*STARRED REVIEW An outstanding trio delivers another fabulous performance. This is international-prize-winning Chilean poet/writer Alejandro Zambra’s 2006 debut novel, English-enabled by lauded Megan McDowell and distinctly embodied by actor Gisela Chípe (who also narrated Zambra’s 2022 novel, Chilean Poet). With a mere 1:16 runtime, a single listen...
Billie was the outlier in 1979 when she was recruited by the Museum to become one of four elite Sphinxes: hired assassins who do good. Now as newly retired sexagenarians, she, Helen, Natalie, and Mary Alice board a luxury cruise, a thank-you-for-your-service gift that turns...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Kimberly Garza skillfully links brilliantly crafted episodes to create an unforgettable community in Galveston, TX. The novel’s core belongs to Carly Castillo, abandoned by her father and Filipina immigrant mother and raised by grandmother Magdalena, who claims Texas’ vanished indigenous Karankawas as...
In 1947, as Britain withdrew from India, it left in its wake a trail of vicious slaughter. British Iranian debut novelist Melody Razak introduces the (mostly) Brahmin residents of Delhi’s Pushp Vihar – “the House of Flowers” – whose lives become the tragic microcosm of...
*STARRED REVIEW After voicing Velvet Was the Night (2021), Gisela Chípe returns to read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “loosely inspired” adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. In Yaxaktun, a remote late-19th-century ranch in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, French expat Dr. Moreau lives with his 14-year-old daughter,...
A thought-to-be-missing piano prodigy recalls an old friend who “used to quote [Oscar Wilde] a lot. He said to live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people only exist.” In An Yu’s follow-up to her lauded debut, Braised Pork (2020), also an atmospheric study in...
Four strangers – Taburo, Pii-tan, Baracchi, Maruso – gather for the first time and embark on their “journey to paradise”: “We met on the suicide site Black Paradox, and now we’re each other’s final companions.” The quartet’s reasons for seeking death suggest strange parallels: “So the...
Edmund White, arguably the godfather of gay literature, has published dozens of lauded titles over the last half-century. His autobiographical trilogy of gay identity – A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997) – remains a classic. With this volume, the...
Reminiscent of Groundhog Day-like repetition, each chapter duplicates the same opening paragraphs, ending with the same “gross love language” (but watch for that perspective shift). The intriguing premise is that an unnamed university junior in Kyoto reveals how he “accomplished absolutely nothing” in his first two years....
*STARRED REVIEW Town was once a fish-farm village, but it’s now internationally known for the corporation that aggressively expanded it into a bustling city-state. Here, class stratification is impermeable. Su is a Citizen. Do-kyung is a Saha, an inconsequential resident of the crumbling Saha Estates who...
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 A faux pastor with a costume-shop collar and his not-yet wife; a mermaid with a silver guitar; a pill-popping, weak-hearted FBI agent who withstands gruesome torture; Sidney Poitier signing autographs for Russian soldiers ...
*STARRED REVIEW That this story starts with “CHAPTER 20” will likely make readers pause to wonder if an earlier volume might have been missed. But worry not, and read on. A half-dozen pages later shows “CHAPTER 19,” revealing the narrative is moving in reverse. For 37 years,...
Jennifer J. Chow inaugurates her L.A. Night Market Mysteries (after the Winston Wong and Sassy Cat/Mimi Lee series), which turns two cousins into unlikely sleuths. Yale Yee is still mourning her mother’s death. She quit her family’s dim sum restaurant and found solace in a...
*STARRED REVIEW Yeong-shin Ma’s dazzling 2020 English debut, Moms, won the 2021 Harvey Award for Best International Book and has recently been picked up for a TV series. Fortuitously paired again with award-winning Korean Canadian translator Janet Hong, Ma’s spectacular latest import arrives in brilliant full...
Melbourne author Jamie Marina Lau was the same age as her 24-year-old protagonist when Gunk Baby, her second novel, was published in Australia in 2021. Following the success of Lau's 2018 debut, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, which was shortlisted for Australia's Stella Prize, Gunk Baby arrives Stateside...
*STARRED REVIEW Not a smidge of disrespect is intended toward the printed page, but with such an electrifying full-cast production available, audio readers are guaranteed an enthralling delight here. With a flair for the unexpected, Margarita Montimore’s (Oona Out of Order, 2020) latest provides compelling content...
