*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Aidan Kelly persuasively transforms Claire Keegan’s brilliantly polished story into a gorgeous treasure. Adapting the lilting rhythms of Keegan’s Irish-accented English, Kelly utterly embodies local coal man Bill Furlong making his delivery rounds as the Christmas holiday approaches. A devoted husband and father of...
Multi-disciplinary artist and writer Vivek Shraya (The Subtweet, 2020) continues her thoughtful, deliberate self-narrations. Her latest essay collection centers change: “If I were to have anything resembling a higher purpose, I’d now say that it’s to evolve and to model evolution. To demonstrate the beauty...
Gerda Saunders, who wrote Memory’s Last Breath (2017), an exquisitely bittersweet record chronicling her experiences with dementia, is one of my most beloved friends. We have books in common, in that we find great solace and escape in the (well-)written word. Inspired by our last visit...
*STARRED REVIEW Delight sparkles throughout Sang-Keun Kim's Star Fishing, a picture book import from South Korea smoothly translated by Ginger Ly. A bunny-suit-clad child, wide awake in a shadowy bedroom, reveals, "It's the kind of night when you just can't fall asleep. You feel as though everyone...
Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with gruesome death: "Dying hurts like f*ck-all everything." The description comes from "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina,...
*STARRED REVIEW Dave Eggers’ voice-of-choice Dion Graham again convincingly ciphers the author’s newest white-woman protagonist, Delaney Wells, an employee of The Circle’s (2013) Mae Holland. Here the Circle has exploded into the Every, the world’s most ubiquitous conglomerate, which continues to develop manipulative mechanisms to subtly...
*STARRED REVIEW Mention of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club sets this novel in 1999, when Oh San turns 23 that summer. She left her childhood village years ago, haunted by the memory of a best friendship’s wrenching cleaving. After being repeatedly abandoned by her mother,...
Award-winning Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio made her English-language debut with the lauded A Girl Returned, deftly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (revered for her elegant Elena Ferrante translations). Author and translator return to the characters from their earlier collaboration with A Sister’s Story, another...
*STARRED REVIEW French graphic creator Fabien Toulmé opens the second of three volumes featuring Syrian refugee Hakim and his extended family with a clever recap of the first entry, facilitated by Toulmé’s young daughter, who asks to accompany him for the next interview: Toulmé lays out...
*STARRED REVIEW Lisa Yee, author of the charming and award-winning Millicent Min, Girl Genius trilogy, combines neglected U.S. history and multi-generational family legends with a thoroughly contemporary story to create the delightful and enlightening Maizy Chen's Last Chance. Three years have passed since 11-year-old Maizy saw her...
The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian María Gainza’s latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Thomas Bunstead, who also English-enabled her award-winning Optic Nerve (2019). Gainza’s narrator warns early on, “Any person reading this ought not to expect names, numbers,...
Cozy mystery label aside, Mia P. Manansala's enticing second installment of her toothsome Tita Rosie's Kitchen series opens with a warning: "I wrote Homicide and Halo-Halo while both me and my protagonist, Lila, were in rather dark places in our lives." Introduced – and nearly...
*STARRED REVIEW Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf is a crystalline collection by defiant Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf (Wounds of the Soul and the Body), who died in 2006 at 37. Moustadraf's piercing 14 stories here, which challenge patriarchal expectations of gender and sexuality,...
Polyglot Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, introduced an ursine character named Knut in Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) and opens her newest import with a same-named protagonist. Whether or not the two are related seems unlikely, yet in Tawada’s fascinating tale,...
“I assure you, this country is a paradise for women,” a covered figure insists, her arms raised in a victorious V. But this is Iran, and her declaration doesn’t quite resonate with the local population. Two journalists – a couple publishing under the collective pseudonym...
Quake, by Icelandic Literary Prize-winning author Auður Jónsdóttir (The People in the Basement), is an engrossing, multi-layered mystery in which memories – imagined, erased and recovered – determine the future of a fractured family. Jónsdóttir introduces the protagonist in various scenarios in the novel's opening...
*STARRED REVIEW In addition to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s standalone Marina (2015), Daniel Weyman previously narrated The Labyrinth of the Spirits, considered the finale to the internationally bestselling Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Weyman – his continuity is especially affecting – returns for Ruiz Zafón’s posthumous collection of...
Her boss calls Veracity “a personal investments advisory firm,” but to Claudia Lin, “a month into the job, it’s obvious to me that our clients think of us as a detective agency.” What she’s hired to do is verify details for clients who don’t quite...
*STARRED REVIEW In Thank You, Mr. Nixon, her second irresistible collection of short fiction, Gish Jen (The Resisters) showcases 11 intricately linked stories spanning the East and West over a half-century. The titular opening story is a letter recalling the U.S. president's 1972 visit to China that...
June Hur's self-described "obsessing over books about Joseon Korea" has made her a critically acclaimed author of historical Korean fiction. She follows The Silence of Bones and The Forest of Stolen Girls with another riveting thriller, The Red Palace, which transports readers to 1758 Hanyang (now Seoul), when murder...
