*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...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Kimberly Garza skillfully links brilliantly crafted episodes to create an unforgettable community in Galveston, TX. The novel’s core belongs to Carly Castillo, abandoned by her father and Filipina immigrant mother and raised by grandmother Magdalena, who claims Texas’ vanished indigenous Karankawas as...
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...
*STARRED REVIEW Egyptian artist and writer Deena Mohamed deservedly won the Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival for Shubeik Lubeik, the title explained as “a fairy tale rhyme that means ‘your wish is my command’ in Arabic.” Mohamed herself...
Debut Canadian author Sadé Smith and illustrator Ken Daley celebrate their shared Caribbean heritage in the vibrant Granny's Kitchen. "Shelly-Ann lived on the beautiful island of Jamaica" with her Granny, who is quite the chef. Whenever Shelly-Ann asks Granny for something to eat, Granny replies with...
Diasporican by Illyanna Maisonet, the country's first Puerto Rican food columnist for a major newspaper (San Francisco Chronicle), is an exquisite collection of recipes for a host of mouthwatering dishes. Despite its subtitle, Maisonet insists "this is not a Puerto Rican cookbook. This book is for...
*STARRED REVIEW Eduardo Halfon (Mourning; Monastery) has published a dozen books in Spanish; four are currently available in English translations. Seeming to challenge his substantial output, Halfon explained in a 2015 comment to Shelf Awareness, "I'm only writing one book, and everything I publish along the way is just...
Get ready for more delectable death. After the "rather dark places" both Mia P. Manansala and her protagonist, Lila Macapagal, endured in Homicide and Halo-Halo – the second novel in the Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery series – Manansala (Arsenic and Adobo) opens Blackmail and Bibingka with reassurance, writing...
*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...
Emmy-nominated Navajo/Diné filmmaker Ramona Emerson jumps genres with her fiction debut, a chilling mystery starring Rita Todacheene (who just might be getting a bookish series of her own). Charley Flyte, with a similar Native/Indigenous background (Oglala Lakota and Mohawk), empathically ciphers a considerable cast –...
Nigerian Canadian author Deborah Falaye’s Yoruban mythology-inspired debut (introducing a planned duology) presents Nagea, a nation brutalized by the genocidal Lucis. Only her grandfather has managed to keep 15-year-old Sloane safe, until she’s drafted into the army. Being a Scion – “a descendent of the...
“Middle school. Is there a scarier place on the planet?” 11-year-old Winnie laments. “In books and movies, everything bad happens in middle school.” She’s not wrong, alas. Plenty of scary and worse are about to happen in sixth grade, but good will conquer a lot. Hoping...
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 A sigh of relief is almost immediate as Kurt Kanazawa effortlessly pronounces “ryū” – with exacting attention to that diacritical – then “Hiroshima” just so. The Julliard-trained actor displays his Japanese fluency, adroitly enhancing Emi Watanabe Cohen’s poignant first novel in which dragons –...
British actor Seema Bowri makes her narrating debut, her crisp, youthful voice an ideal match for 11-year-old Tamarind, a Bristol, England-raised girl meeting her late mother’s family for the first time. Her father, recently remarried and on his way to his honeymoon, arranges to leave...
In her fifth adult title, Gabrielle Zevin (Young Jane Young, 2017) impressively interweaves multiple threads that twist and tangle around what is essentially a decades-long love story. Jennifer Kim ciphers most of the narration, deftly distinguishing the main three players, with a brief interlude voiced...
In the short opening paragraph introducing a young man watching his mother approach the LAX curb in her new Prius, debut novelist Ryan Lee Wong manages to pack in generation gaps, climate change, brutal colonialism, and “let[ting] go of that ancestral sh*t sooner or later.” Columbia...
Cicatrix, or scar, encompasses multilayered meanings in queer, Manila-based artist Elle’s U.S. debut. They begin with “a firm bump … just below [their] left ear, about the diameter of a five-peso coin” – and a confession that “every time I get sick, I always think...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Belinda Huijuan Tang's immigrant father is a gregarious storyteller, especially about his rural Chinese upbringing, but he has one story he's never been able to finish, about his lost father. Tang empathically transforms that incomplete memory into her exquisite novel, A Map for...
Narrator Malik Rashad isn’t quite Kwame Onwuachi, who ideally narrated his original 2019 memoir – but here, that’s not necessarily a liability for younger audiences who might need a smidge more animation. Rashad affectingly channels Onwuachi, the self-described “black kid from the Bronx ...
