In a tiny Indian village, Anil and Leena are constant childhood companions in spite of their vastly different backgrounds. Anil, a member of the farming community's most important family, is destined for a prestigious medical residency in Dallas. Leena, the only daughter of a modest...
Although he was a 1999 national writing-competition winner at 17 and runaway bestselling novelist a year later, Shanghai-based Han couldn’t finish high school. His subsequent rants against the education system, standardized testing, and corrupt bureaucracy earned him widespread acclaim. At 34, he has added rally-car racing...
While the titular widow is the character around which all others circle, she’s certainly not alone in holding secrets. Jean Taylor (read with unnerving control by Hannah Curtis) stood by her husband, Glen, through the heinous accusations leveled against him, until a week ago when...
Journalist Vanessa Hua’s debut in fiction is an intriguing collection of 10 stories with personal resonance from being the child of Chinese immigrants and a two-decade, continent-hopping career. Each of her protagonists is never quite grounded, caught between multiple cultures and countries. Each hides beneath layers...
Inspired by his grandparents' love story, meticulously recorded in his grandfather's extant letters (his grandmother's replies were sunk), Chris Cleave’s latest feels like his gentlest – in spite of the backdrop of World War II. At the novel's core is privileged, headstrong Mary North, who signs...
Out on a January walk in Berlin, the unnamed Korean narrator falls into a river. As she struggles to breathe, her experience gives way to both "conventional memories" of what has led her to this icy trap dovetailed with tenuous endeavors to comprehend and explicate...
*STARRED REVIEW Two hundred fifty years ago in what is modern-day Ghana, two half-sisters are each given a special stone by their mother. Effia marries an Englishman and lives in the ignominiously named Castle, the center of the African Gold Coast slavery trade. Esi is temporarily...
The Hogarth Shakespeare series—“Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers” – continues with three additional releases in 2016: Jacobson’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Anne Tyler’s reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew in June’s Vinegar Girl, and Margaret...
*STARRED REVIEW When Fen Danlin first landed in New York to join his wife, Yan Haili, she delivered him to a "seedy" Chinatown inn with $500 and instructions to stay – alone – within walking distance of an arranged restaurant job. She returned the next day...
Gifted artist Hannah was supposed to die of lung cancer, Congressman-for-sale David of brain cancer, has-been actor Connie of AIDS, and housewife and mother Linda trapped by immobility forever. Yet this quartet comprise the first SUBlife cases, and some of their brains – the parts...
