In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...
*STARRED REVIEW The cover calls this a novel, but the autobiographical overlaps are many: a gay Vietnamese American poet, an October birth outside Saigon, an other-side-of-the-world escape, a biracial single mother, a Hartford, CT, upbringing, a New York City education. In his prose debut, T.S. Eliot-prized,...
If the middle-grade Filipino American market had an audio representative, Amielynn Abellera would be the reigning voice. She’s already narrated two of Newbery Medal-winning Filipino American Erin Entrada Kelly’s three MG titles, and she’s quite the energetic cipher for debut novelist Marie Miranda Cruz’s feisty...
Loss – by disappearance, destruction, or death – looms throughout Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s award-winning debut collection. Priya Ayyar’s shared Indian heritage with both Bhuvaneswar and many of her characters adds a comfortable fluency, as Ayyar gives distinct characterizations to parents and children, siblings and lovers, friends and...
Whom to save, whom to let perish? The rescuers of refugees washing up on the Italian island of Lampedusa face an impossible choice, as memoirist and playwright Davide Enia describes in Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope “Calculate. It’s all you can...
Mr. K is one of those remarkable teachers who is memorable for what he's not: "He doesn't act like it's his job to shape [students] into considerate and well-behaved individuals who'll fit harmoniously with the rest of society." His final assignment for his middle-school music...
The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See Known for her Chinese and Chinese American sagas, mega-bestselling author Lisa See (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017) travels across the Yellow Sea to the tiny southern Korean island of Jeju to create a stupendous multi-generational family saga...
Sita Kaur Shergill is dying of cancer. She has “had enough of this ghastly life,” but before she goes, she leaves epistolary final wishes that her three British-born daughters journey together to India “on [her] behalf.” Her detailed itinerary is exacting, from serving others to...
Steely and controlled, narrator Gabra Zackman embodies a young woman’s harrowing crisis, ensuring not a single moment of the brief production can be ignored. At 15, Jo’s unremarkable life as just another teen in her suburban Maryland town is forever shattered when she kills her best friend...
“It is always funny to me when I show up to readings and people expect me to be my characters”: Q&A with Carrianne Leung She arrived in Toronto at age 6, when her family immigrated from Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. At 7, they moved to...
*STARRED REVIEW Neither Green brother is untouched by fame. The elder is that John Green. Hank, famous already as half of YouTube’s multimillion-subscribed “Vlogbrothers,” ascends the bestsellers’ platform with this novel debut, in which he inarguably writes what he knows: social-media-fueled fame. Audio seems an ideal format for Green’s media-savvy...
*STARRED REVIEW “That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie,” one character admonishes another in Susan Choi’s fifth, and finest, novel. Returning to the multi-layered teacher-student power struggles seared into My Education (2013), Choi’s Trust Exercise should immediately put readers on alert: it will appear...
*STARRED REVIEW “It begins, as so many stories do, with a dead girl” promises a new serialized podcast, created and hosted by New York journalist West McCray. Pursuing the discovery of a 13-year-old’s corpse, McCray produces the eight-part “The Girls,” “about family, about sisters, and the...
*STARRED REVIEW Elliot Ackerman’s (2017 National Book Award finalist for Dark at the Crossing) latest might be just three-and-a-half hours long, but the dramatic effects will surely last longer. MacLeod Andrews – his voice slightly growly, controlled enough as if control is necessary – narrates from...
"After twenty-five years of living illegally in a county that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." When Pulitzer Prize-winning Jose Antonio Vargas declared his undocumented status in 2011, Bill O'Reilly labeled him "the...
Sixteen-year-old loner Darius Kellner is an easy target at his Portland, Oregon, high school. He’s clinically depressed, a diagnosis he shares with his “Teutonic Übermensch” father. His nurturing comes mostly from his Iranian immigrant mother, and he’s close to his 8-year-old sister. For all that,...
Undoubtedly, Bahni Turpin is one of few narrators able to convincingly crisscross the gender spectrum with consistent agility. Here she begins as untethered Kollie, a Liberian immigrant teen in 2008, alternately dismissed and provoked by both white and African American peers at his Minnesota high school, until rage, violence,...
Of Dangarembga’s award-winning, semi-autobiographical Tambudzai Sigauke trilogy, only this finale gets an audio adaptation. Tambu struggled to be educated amid Zimbabwe’s decades-long civil war in Nervous Conditions (winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and survived a convent education in The Book of Not (2006). Here, Tambu is a not-so-young...
Writer Huda Al-Marashi and narrator Jeed Saddy make their respective debuts in a captivating memoir about a marriage that’s not so much arranged but destined. Al-Marashi is 6 when she meets Hadi, the son of family friends. She’s 9 as she watches him pretend-wed her 4-year-old...
Twenty years since its original French publication, Edmond Baudoin’s autobiographical homage to his older brother, Piero, and their shared childhood makes its English-language debut, admiringly translated by cartoonist Matt Madden. Growing up between Nice, where their father worked, and Villars-sur-Var (“our Mom’s village, our village”),...
