JJ Bola opens with a shocking promise: “I quit my job; I am taking my life savings, $9,021, and when it runs out, I am going to kill myself.” Nigerian British actor Oseloka Obi commands immediate attention in his debut narration in a solo adult...
*STARRED REVIEW Following her extraordinary novel Little Gods (2020), Meng Jin presents a fascinating 10-story collection divided into four sections. One-line drawings of profiles interrupt, switching directions as if cleverly reminding readers to shift perspectives. Death haunts the first three titles. In “Philip Is Dead,” the narrator insistently...
*STARRED REVIEW Once more, internationally bestselling Sayaka Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in “A First-Rate Material,”...
Terry Hong, Booklist Contributing Reviewer and chair of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence selection committee, had questions for Tom Lin, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Here is their conversation: So as a debut novelist in your...
Three boys – Youssef, Iseul, Dayo – are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers – from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria – are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys’ adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi...
Sa-i-gu (Korean for 4-2-9 as in April 29, 1992) was a defining moment in Korean American history, when 2,300-plus Korean-owned businesses were destroyed in the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s brutal arresting officers. Actor John Cho makes his fiction debut with...
*STARRED REVIEW To best appreciate this volume, readers must go back to the first book. Pornsak Pichetshote’s exquisite narration is an intricate temporal puzzle, his scenes moving between past and present, revealing just enough partial (scintillating, shocking, shrewd) backstory each time with many threads that require careful...
Travis Dandro made his graphic title debut with award-winning King of King Court (2019), about his complicated 1980s youth. In this follow-up, he’s a Camaro-driving teenager in 1991 in his final year at home before art school. His heroin-addicted birth father has committed suicide and his...
*STARRED REVIEW The title 6,000 Miles to Freedom: Two Boys and Their Flight from the Taliban is an apt distillation of the stunning graphic odyssey it entails. Author/director Stéphane Marchetti adapts the striking narrative from his 2017 documentary with Thomas Dandois, Les enfants de la jungle, illuminating the...
New York Times journalist Sopan Deb wrote poignantly about family in his memoir, Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me. He turns to fiction in Keya Das's Second Act, further exploring how parents and children can become detached and, perhaps, discover new paths to lasting connections. As...
Murder is rarely something to laugh about, and yet prolific Percival Everett’s (Telephone, 2020) latest will inspire at least a smirk, if not an out-loud snort (or many) as narrator Bill Andrew Quinn deftly evokes characters living and dead. Welcome to Money, Mississippi, where corpses...
*STARRED REVIEW Actor Hannah Cabell’s stage training clearly gives her a stupendous boost in the recording studio; with a mere dozen credits, she’s already superb – and proves herself an ideal audio enabler for Toronto librarian Eva Jurczyk’s novel debut. Liesl Weiss’ boss, Christopher, is lying...
The recording begins with supposed-to-be-eerie tinkling notes. By the time they gratingly repeat 4.5 hours later, eyes might roll, ears could need clearing, and yet Mariko Tamaki’s dual-voiced thriller just might be immersive enough for listeners to overlook this uneven production. Katharine Chin opens as awkward...
Once upon a time, Hornclaw had a family...
Jaspreet Singh's third novel, Face, presents a mesmerizing narrative. "In this new epoch most stories rhyme with crime," Singh opens. (Indeed, two murders on two continents will happen by novel's end.) This clever beginning introduces strangers Lucia and Lila ("correct pronunciation: Leela"), who meet in...
Devi S. Laskar's sophomore novel, Circa, is an intense meditation on multigenerational grief and loss. Laskar (The Atlas of Reds and Blues) adopts an uncommon second-person narration for Heera, born in New York and raised in Raleigh, N.C., by Indian immigrant parents. She's American by birthright,...
Soon Wiley's searing debut, When We Fell Apart, deftly reveals in alternating chapters an abruptly truncated love story. Min Ford, a biracial Korean American, is a Samsung cultural specialist who has lived for three years in Seoul. Kim Yu-jin is in her final year at...
As the third narrator of Keigo Higashino’s internationally bestselling Detective Galileo series (four volumes available Stateside thus far), David Shih is also the first (finally!) to be facile with Japanese names and places. Although the Taiwanese American actor speaks only English, his conscientiously researched, accurate...
*STARRED REVIEW Jordan Crane (The Last Lonely Saturday) spent more than two decades creating Keeping Two, a magnificently multilayered graphic novel that empathically addresses the universal human fears of losing those most beloved. In the course of a single evening, the story introduces, challenges, and reconnects two...
*STARRED REVIEW Chameleonic writer Jabari Asim’s second novel after Only the Strong (2015) gets historical with a cast of enslaved Black characters – searingly called the Stolen, their white enslavers rightfully are Thieves – who attempt to survive the atrocities of the antebellum South. “All of...
