Denny died at the Lucky 8 restaurant after his high school formal, his “Most Likely to Succeed”-sash still tucked into his borrowed suit. In 1996 small-town Cabramatta, populated by children of Southeast Asian refugees coming of age amidst drug-related violence, Denny was that perfect kid:...
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...
Shashi Bhat's dedication for her potent second novel, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, speaks volumes: "For the girls who stay quiet." Turn the page to an epigraph from Sophocles: "Silence is a woman's best garment." Bhat's protagonist – a Canadian of Indian background like herself...
*STARRED REVIEW During a rare non-work outing, a colleague asks, “tell me something about you,” but the protagonist “couldn’t think of a single thing ...
Even at 400-plus pages, by book's end, readers will miss the Ghorami and Sangster clans of Monica Ali's addictively readable, shrewdly insightful, subversively humorous novel Love Marriage. Yasmin Ghorami and Joe Sangster are in love, engaged to be married in the months ahead. They're both physicians,...
*STARRED REVIEW Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed "suburbia of the south." She...
Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with gruesome death: "Dying hurts like f*ck-all everything." The description comes from "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina,...
Award-winning Canadian cartoonist Philippe Girard (Obituary Man) admirably condenses seven decades into a concise 120 pages in Leonard Cohen: On a Wire. It's a valuable introduction to the tumultuous life of the iconic singer/songwriter/poet perhaps best remembered for his classic "Hallelujah," eventually covered by some...
*STARRED REVIEW Lauded illustrator R. Kikuo Johnson's potent, career-making debut, Night Fisher – which won the prestigious Russ Manning Newcomer Award at the 2006 Eisner Awards – returns in a handsome hardcover edition. Originally published in 2005, Night Fisher was Johnson's antidote to Hollywood's Hawaii, "the backdrop for...
To compress Mesha Maren's exhilarating second novel, Perpetual West, into a quick description would be an injustice to her intricately plotted, unsettling narrative about two 21-year-olds unsure of who they really are. Whereas her debut, Sugar Run, had its characters return to Maren's home landscape of rural...
*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...
China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...
*STARRED REVIEW A stellar #OwnVoices all-Indigenous cast gathers to heighten Brandon Hobson’s luminous follow-up to the 2018 National Book Award finalist Where the Dead Sit Walking. During the 15 years since Ray-Ray was wrongly, fatally shot by a white police officer, his surviving family has fractured....
Before the story even begins, the recording opens with a content warning for sexual abuse, rape, assault, child abuse, kidnapping, and opioid addiction. Tiffany D. Jackson’s (Let Me Hear a Rhyme) latest has all that and worse: the gruesome opening chapter introduces 17-year-old Enchanted Jones...
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...
That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...
Six years since his first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Carnegie Medal and the Pulitzer Prize, Việt Thanh Nguyễn is back with the much-anticipated second installment in a planned trilogy. Here, the same unreliable narrator adds another few hundred pages to the already 367-page confession he...
In her extraordinary fiction debut, The Opium Prince, Afghan Swedish academic and communications expert Jasmine Aimaq, who lives in Canada, combines elements of literary thriller, sociopolitical exposé, and historical witnessing. The Afghan people lived in relative – albeit tense – balance between the 1973 coup d'etat...
*STARRED REVIEW A dead woman opens Catherine Adel West’s startling, haunting debut. Two fathers, two daughters, and the building that is Chicago’s Calvary Hope Christian Church will unravel her unfortunate murder, revealing generations of secrets and violence that culminate in young Ruby King cradling her mother...
In a story of “they said, she heard, he believed, she can’t remember,” whom do you trust? Even the title misleads – True Story: A Novel – while the final words confirm little: “But I’m trusting you to see this is true ...
