Elinor Hanson, her name not quite matching her mixed-race visage, has 10 days to prove herself worthy of an assignment for the prestigious Standard magazine. At 42, she’s struggling to establish her journalism career after long years in modeling. Her grad-school mentor Richard (and former...
Ava Simon’s life might seem, well ...
*STARRED REVIEW Kat Somerville will never win any mother-of-the-year awards. She shows up at the principal’s office black-eyed after her 7-year-old daughter, Sybil, bloodied another kid’s nose; rather than any admonishments, Kat brings Sybil a Stephen King novel. The rebellious pair abandon not only the school but...
Pulitzer Prize-winning polyglot Jhumpa Lahiri’s second title in Italian arrives in her own translation, narrated by Italian American Susan Vinciotti Bonito. Despite Bonito’s fluency in their shared language, her noticeably youthful timbre isn’t initially convincing as Lahiri’s unnamed, 40-something protagonist. And yet Lahiri’s unadorned, sharply...
From the cover alone, it’s clear Theo Ellsworth’s visuals are unique, striking, and surreal. A sense of witnessing something unrecognizable resonates throughout, with bizarrely stylized images of people, beasts, and scenes surrounded by intricate backgrounds that might induce trypophobia in some. And yet, self-taught artist...
*STARRED REVIEW Harmony Becker, who brilliantly created the artwork for George Takei’s Eisner-winning They Called Us Enemy (2019), makes her stupendous solo debut in what will prove to one of the best graphic titles of the year. The narrative might initially seem simple: a mixed-race U.S. teen...
For always, Kalki – with his matching blue skin – has been told he’s a god, the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu. His godliness supports the family’s Tamil Nadu ashram, where he lives with his controlling father, loving mother, uncle and his wife, and...
Just as only Akwaeke Emezi could have narrated their Freshwater debut, no other voice could have manifested their first nonfiction title. Presented as an epistolary mosaic addressed to family, friends, lovers, betrayers, and heroes, Emezi’s raw voice lays bare their unadorned writing. Although the vulnerability, arrogance, and...
In the “big city” of Seoul, love isn’t easy to find – even tougher to secure is love that lasts. Young and Jaehee are best friends from university, bonded in their “boundless energy of [being] poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds.” Young is a gay man, Jaehee a straight...
In 1993, 3-year-old Ly Tran arrived in Queens with her parents and three older brothers from South Vietnam. Their new apartment was not the nhà là – “a house made of sticks and dried leaves” – that had been their former home; stability, however, was...
That Jo Koy has created a sold-out, standing-ovation-earning stand-up career making people laugh while mining intimate family stories means no one else could possibly narrate his memoir. His hard-earned superstardom translates seamlessly into an audiobook, giving him a double-debut credit as author and narrator, presenting...
*STARRED REVIEW Thanks to veteran narrator JD Jackson and newbie Ronald Peet, Mott’s fourth novel is also a “hell of an audiobook.” An unnamed writer (impeccably embodied by Jackson) embarks on his inaugural book tour because he’s written Hell of a Book. He’s been coached, trained,...
Once upon a time, Wu Shih-sheng had a happy home with his wife and daughter. But then his daughter ran away and he fell heavily into debt after an accident; lost their home; took to sporadically driving a taxi; forced his wife, Kuo Hsiang-ying, into...
Kong Deok-geun is an “average administrative worker,” a position for which he surpassed 137 applicants for “a job that has no work.” His boredom, so severe that he’s named it “I-would-rather-eat-dog-treats-than-suffer-this-boredom,” sends him to the fourth floor, where he discovers Cabinet 13, then spends an...
*STARRED REVIEW Titles about lonely survivors with just the right balance of lightening humor and lasting gravitas make for an undeniably popular genre. Think international sensation A Man Called Ove, whose global mega-success probably fueled the popularity of acerbic-but-redeemable-left-behinds-who-get-happy-endings sort of books. Steven Rowley’s latest is a prime example, superbly improved...
An octogenarian shoplifter doesn’t quite seem like a likely hero, but British actor Siobhan Waring will certainly make you believe otherwise. Kleptomaniacal Irish matriarch Millie is caught yet again at the village shop and this time her son Kevin (energetically embodied by Irish-born Gary Furlong)...
Oscar Alvarado is a multi-generational Angeleno Mexican American; his wife Keila was a high-school exchange student from Mexico City. They lovingly raised three daughters. Thirty-nine years later, their three-year-old twin granddaughters almost drown in their neglected pool. The accident fuels Keila’s marital discontent and emboldens...
As in her lauded debut short story collection, A House Is a Body (2020), Shruti Swamy examines women’s ownership of their very selves in her first novel, which is set in a disappeared Bombay. Swamy divides Vidya’s young life into five distinct sections, focusing on pivotal...
Korean Canadian June Hur’s enthralling debut, The Silence of Bones, vividly captured 19th-century fatal court intrigue during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. Her follow-up is another tautly plotted thriller, set in 15th-century Joseon, and helmed by relative audiobook newbie Sue Jean Kim, who adroitly controls a sprawling...
*STARRED REVIEW The Western publishing world has taken a quarter-century to deliver one of Korea’s most lauded writers to English-reading audiences. Publishing and prize-winning since 1996, Yeo-sun Kwon is deftly translated by award-winning Korean Canadian Janet Hong. At 18, high-school senior Kim Hae-on “was perfection, bliss...
