Relative newbie Mimi Chang and seasoned Josh Hurley prove well-paired narrating two 12-year-old seventh-graders in 1980s Sacramento who initially seem to share little more than loneliness – and the specter of missing fathers. Ro’s father is dead, killed by a drunk driver. She hasn’t moved houses,...
Bahni Turpin opens and ends Pochoda’s thriller with electrifying energy as Feelia, the sole survivor of a serial killer who claimed 13 victims 15 years ago. All – including Feelia – had their throats slit, their heads covered in plastic bags, their bodies dumped. All...
Before partition, the bloody 1947 cleaving that established India and Pakistan, Deepa was a happy teen in Delhi, loved by two parents who ran a medical clinic serving all in need. But hatred, politics, and fire destroyed her life. She left India, seemingly if not...
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami offers a collection of imaginative short stories with skewed elements that his many fans are sure to applaud. The announcement of a new Haruki Murakami title inspires gleeful anticipation: Will there be music (classical, jazz, Beatles – yes), baseball (certainly), local watering...
Ma likes to think her family is like Job’s, so much so that she and Dad named their daughters accordingly: Jemima Genesis, Keziah Leah, Keren Happuch. Generations on both sides have known tortuous tragedy, but no one is prepared when Kezi – a YouTube activist...
*STARRED REVIEW The late Shigeru Mizuki's most recent posthumous import, Tono Monogatari – in English, Tales of Tono – is as multi-layered as the eminent manga creator himself. Venerated for his magnificently detailed histories – Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, for example – and cherished for his charming supernatural...
To portray Jesus Christ in fiction is not new – some would agree he was always a novel creation. From Nikos Kazantzakis's classic The Last Temptation of Christ to the ongoing bestselling manga series Saint Young Men, Jesus moves copies. Prolific writer Amélie Nothomb (Tokyo Fiancée; Pétronille), who's...
*STARRED REVIEW Elizabeth Miki Brina claims her voice with resounding clarity in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa. As the daughter of a U.S. soldier with Jamestown ancestry and an Okinawan immigrant mother, Brina's identity was always a negotiation of race, class, privilege. By opening her stupendous book...
*STARRED REVIEW Marin Ireland has a mere couple dozen audio credits – the majority of them in the last few years – yet she’s undoubtedly one of the industry’s most versatile, consistently stupendous narrators. Returning for her third Fredrick Backman pairing, Ireland superbly brings to life...
Gabriela Garcia turns her MFA thesis for Purdue University (where she studied with the revered Roxane Gay) into her widely buzzed first novel. Presented in 12 chapters that read more like interlinked stories, Garcia channels her Miami-based Cuban-Mexican American heritage into five generations of a...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Louis Chude-Sokei's parents were known as "the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra," a former West African nation "that had disappeared or been 'killed.'" Half a century later, Chude-Sokei examines what it meant to be "the first son of the...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Deesha Philyaw’s 2020 National Book Award finalist in fiction gets an almost (we can just ignore those minor, clumsy production glitches) flawless performance from prolific, expert Janina Edwards. Throughout the nine consistently superb stories, Edwards adapts effortlessly between mothers and daughters, friends...
Véronique Tadjo (Far from My Father) could not have known how prescient her novel, originally published in France in 2017, would be just a few years later when it was translated for English readers. In the Company of Men gives polyphonic voice to those affected by...
Murder is never funny, except when it is. In Jesse Q. Sutanto’s rollicking debut, which she describes in a “Dear reader” foreword as “a love letter to my family – a ridiculously large bunch with a long history of immigration,” a fatal accident begets family...
Best known for the 1991 Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, Nigerian author Ben Okri has maintained a prolific output of lauded fiction, poetry, and essays. His provocative collection, Prayer for the Living, presents 24 stories and a single poem that include previously published pieces from...
International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as “the rape capital of the world,” spurring award-winning journalist Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to “find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India.” She finds...
*STARRED REVIEW Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning Canadian Japanese novelist/poet Hiromi Goto (Half World, 2010) makes her stupendous graphic debut, in splendid artistic synchronization with Ignatz-nominated Ann Xu. “It never felt right here,” Kumiko thinks as she sneaks out of an assisted-living facility her daughters thought would be the...
Proceed with Caution is the title of this collection as well as one of the stories in it. Readers might also take the phrase as warning: nothing is quite what it seems in Argentinian Patricia Ratto's fascinating English-language debut. Translated by retired Spanish professor and...
Back in 1977, “Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire.” In Washington, DC-native Morowa Yejidé’s (Time of the Locust, 2014) moody, bleak sophomore title, boundaries between the living and the dead are indiscernible. Once upon a time, Nephthys and Osiris...
*STARRED REVIEW Penn State University Press, already a publisher of award-winning graphic titles, launches a new imprint, Graphic Mundi, showcasing comics intent on “drawing our worlds together.” Among its inaugural line-up is French comics artist Espé’s spectacular, autobiographically inspired homage to a childhood haunted by mental...
