*STARRED REVIEW Tania Rodrigues and Kamila Shamsie prove themselves the best of audiobook companions with their fifth memorable pairing. Rodrigues, “with roots in India, Portugal and Britain,” according to her website bio, is an ideally cosmopolitan choice to follow two teens who come of age in...
In 1947, as Britain withdrew from India, it left in its wake a trail of vicious slaughter. British Iranian debut novelist Melody Razak introduces the (mostly) Brahmin residents of Delhi’s Pushp Vihar – “the House of Flowers” – whose lives become the tragic microcosm of...
Egyptian American actor Amin El Gamal and Palestinian American actor/writer/director Lameece Issaq reunite here as hopeful lovers: 15-year-old Subhi, a prodigious mechanic, and 13-year-old village girl Shams. Palestinian writer/architect Suad Amiry, acclaimed for her memoirs and other nonfiction, debuts her first novel, inspired by the...
*STARRED REVIEW After voicing Velvet Was the Night (2021), Gisela Chípe returns to read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “loosely inspired” adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. In Yaxaktun, a remote late-19th-century ranch in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, French expat Dr. Moreau lives with his 14-year-old daughter,...
"Prodigy" comes to mind when examining Rin Usami's brief (thus far) but astounding literary trajectory. Her 2019 debut novel, Kaka, made her the youngest recipient of the prestigious Yukio Mishima Prize. Her intriguing follow-up, Idol, Burning, published in 2020 when Usami was just 21, garnered the...
*STARRED REVIEW Winter in Sokcho, the extraordinary first novel, gorgeously translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, by French Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The two reunite for The Pachinko Parlor, in which Dusapin's remarkably intricate and lean prose reveals...
E.M. Tran's author's note about the provenance of her absorbing debut novel begins with her mother's beauty pageant trophy, which always graced the top of the family piano. "How did it get there, through the chaos and danger of Saigon's collapse?" Tran asks. For refugees...
*STARRED REVIEW Considered one of Korea’s greatest novelists, Pak Kyongni (1926-2008) is revered for her multi-volume epic Toji (The Land, 1969-1994), designated among the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. She began publishing autobiographical short stories, inspired by tragic post-Korean War experiences, exposing the high cost of survival,...
*STARRED REVIEW A solemn drumbeat welcomes listeners to discover the Kapaemahu, four ancient Tahitian healers of Hawaii. Neither male nor female, “they were mahu—a mixture of both in mind, heart, and spirit.” The people built a monument in gratitude, but the “four great boulders” were eventually...
*STARRED REVIEW Novelist Reema Patel and narrator Lavanya Gandhi prove ideally paired, symbiotically making their debuts. Patel, a Toronto lawyer with experience in Mumbai’s human-rights legal sector, draws on her experiences to create Rakhi, a 23-year-old office assistant at Justice for All. Rakhi caught the attention of...
Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo Provocative and pointed literary criticism in How to Read Now: Essays challenges people to become better, smarter readers. Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo’s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now, an incandescent collection of essays...
Daniel Nieh, a former international model and Chinese-English translator, introduced his protagonist Victor Li in the gripping Beijing Payback, published in 2019. Nieh's sophomore thriller, Take No Names, heightens the gasp-inducing wild ride of Victor's debut. Although both titles are easily consumable as stand-alone novels – Nieh...
In Tahiti, Tenaho is one of those “quartiers nobody ever hears about,” but what happened to that family “with too many kids ...
Family Album, from award-winning author Gabriela Alemán, is a shrewd, beguiling collection. In eight genre-defying stories, the Brazil-born, Ecuador-based Alemán deftly confronts push-button topics like colonialism, identity, and religion. Dick Cluster, who translated Alemán's novel Poso Wells (2018), returns here with Mary Ellen Fieweger to provide...
*STARRED REVIEW Kapaemahu began as an animated short film that garnered international recognition. The award-winning production team of Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, and Joe Wilson now sets their script onto the page, resulting in a spectacular picture book featuring stills from animation director Daniel Sousa's moving images....
Few titles need official CIA permission to be published, but Sophia Glock's perceptive graphic novel memoir, Passport, had to go through the "daunting and complicated task" of obtaining the CIA's Publication Review Board approval. Glock's parents were "intelligence officers," an admission they disclosed when they...
*STARRED REVIEW Covering most of the 20th century across the Korean peninsula, Juhea Kim’s debut novel wondrously reveals broken families and surprising alliances created by uncontrollable circumstances. Kim links multiple narrative prongs, effortlessly navigating overlaps and disconnects. Korea remains under Japan’s ruthless occupation in 1917, which lasts...
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...
*STARRED REVIEW Imbolo Mbue’s PEN/Faulkner-winning Behold the Dreamers unveiled immigrants chasing the American Dream; her searing sophomore title exposes U.S. destruction beyond its borders. In an unnamed African nation, oil giant Pexton has been poisoning the farming village of Kosawa – water, land, air, and people....
Sujata Massey introduced feisty Perveen Mistry, India's first female solicitor, in the Agatha Award-winning The Widows of Malabar Hill in 2018. In the meticulously researched and entertainingly executed The Bombay Prince, Massey continues to mine details from the lives of two groundbreaking Indian women – Cornelia Sorabji and...
