Even at 400-plus pages, by book's end, readers will miss the Ghorami and Sangster clans of Monica Ali's addictively readable, shrewdly insightful, subversively humorous novel Love Marriage. Yasmin Ghorami and Joe Sangster are in love, engaged to be married in the months ahead. They're both physicians,...
In Walk Me to the Corner, Swedish painter and comic artist Anneli Furmark explores the transformative joy and heartbreaking consequences of unexpectedly falling in love in middle age. "What would you choose?," a group of women friends discuss during dinner. "To be fine all the time...
More than a foot tall and nine inches wide, the exquisite The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky, by Korean author/illustrator Kim Jihyun, makes a magnificent first impression. The pages within showcase spectacular illustrations and, without a single word, gorgeously reveal a...
*STARRED REVIEW The monsters here are, of course, people, made terrifying by what Michelle de Kretser labels “three scary monsters – racism, misogyny, and ageism.” Subtitled “A Novel in Two Parts,” the notable Sri Lankan-born Australian de Kretser’s (The Life to Come, 2018) latest is indeed...
Debut author/illustrator Zahra Marwan's inviting, evocative picture book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky, presents her family's relocation from one desert to another on the opposite side of the world. Her poignant opening dedication, "To my parents, who should have never had to leave," immediately foreshadows...
Long before the first alarms are triggered here, renowned museums have been legal showcases for artful plunder: Nefertiti’s Bust in Berlin’s Neues Museum, the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, the Koh-i-Noor in the Tower of London. Grace D. Li’s fascinating albeit uneven debut zeros...
Artist Emma Fick’s illustrated travelogue combines intricate art and intimate observations – vibrantly colored and distinctly hand-lettered – of a Beijing-to-Moscow expedition on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In May 2015, while in Finland with her then-boyfriend-now-husband, the pair found a used book, Trans-Siberian Handbook, that had...
In her first historical novel, Vanessa Hua (A River of Stars, 2018) draws on 20-plus years of experience as a journalist covering Asia and the diaspora to reclaim a few of the “millions of impoverished women who have shaped China in their own ways yet...
In Diana Abu-Jaber's absorbing novel Fencing with the King, 31-year-old Amani is in "free-fall," her marriage over, her writing (which once garnered her a "big literary prize") stalled, and her teaching career threatened. She's even returned to living with her parents in Syracuse. Amani's Uncle Hafez invites...
The three novellas in Rouge Street, Shuang Xuetao's prodigious English-language debut, feature multilayered voices revealing intricate perspectives that result in gloriously gratifying rewards. Booker Prize finalist Madeleine Thien introduces Shuang's enigmatic work, contextualizing his fiction, which "teeter[s] on a fulcrum between past and future," between...
Short-story collections can be uneven, but readers will be consistently impressed by these extraordinary, resonant, and exhilarating debuts by a dozen diverse writers. Afterparties. By Anthony Veasna So. 2021. Ecco. So’s nine electrifying stories magnificently create an interconnected Cambodian American community. The most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in...
Amanda Pellegrino's Smile and Look Pretty might seem familiar, given its nods to The Devil Wears Prada, The Morning Show, and even She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement. But the New York City television writer and novelist's debut is a sizzling read that adroitly balances...
More and more, New York-based video editor Alice needs to return to California to manage her chain-smoking, hard-drinking stepfather, who is always referred to as the Father. His “handle on ADLs [activities of daily living] had already been slipping,” and he requires increased levels of...
Julie Doucet is a legendary alternative comics pioneer, especially in an arena dominated by men. Her fame was further elevated by her frustrated abandonment of the industry in 2006. Her semi-autobiographical Dirty Plotte (quite the double entendre: "plotte" is Québécois slang for the c-word) began as...
Fourteen voices (each embodying a specific poetic form!) – enlivened by 14 performers – take turns bearing witness in this novel in verse. Perspectives shift among the enslavers, the enablers to such inhumanity, their victims, and their descendants, revealing decades from capture to post-Civil War...
Exceptional narrator Dominic Hoffman adroitly assumes the internationally mega-bestselling, 2020 Prix Goncourt-winning, Anglophoned latest from prodigious French author Hervé Le Tellier. Hoffman begins as professional assassin Blake, then becomes frustrated author Victor, film editor Lucie, and David, who is about to be diagnosed with terminal...
Veteran narrator Hillary Huber (soon to hit 700 credits) seems exactly in her element in embodying Hannah Lillith Assadi’s (Sonora, 2017) elegiac second novel of devolving connections, recalled through the scattering memories of an aging woman facing dementia. Once upon a time, Elle was madly in...
*STARRED REVIEW Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed "suburbia of the south." She...
In Woman Running in the Mountains, the late great Japanese novelist Yūko Tsushima (1947-2016) unflinchingly confronts the judgmental challenges an unwed woman faces when she defiantly chooses single motherhood. Takiko Odaka is 21 and already an independent spirit. As she goes into labor, she leaves...
*STARRED REVIEW Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Don Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. “Truth was a collection of falsehoods,” Lee’s filmmaker...
