Following her spectacularly lauded, bestselling historical and ancestral debut, Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi turns to the contemporary, tracing the dissolution of a Ghanaian immigrant family. By the time Gifty leaves Alabama for Harvard, she’s resolved to “build a new Gifty from scratch” by shedding the...
*STARRED REVIEW What you might miss if you opt for the audiobook is a rather unexpected table of contents page, on which every chapter title is a (western) literary classic, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Iliad. Books, indeed, guide debut author Phuc Tran’s life, especially as...
His name was chosen to bring good fortune. So far, it isn’t working. Lysley Tenorio’s novel The Son of Good Fortune explores the sorely tested bonds of a Filipino mother and her son living in the shadows in America. Eight years have passed since award-winning writer and...
For Meredith Talusan, transformation looks like this: "Sun Child," "Harvard Man," "Lady Wedgwood." In the nimbly titled Fairest, award-winning journalist Talusan shares an unflinching exploration of identity. "Mirrors were not just mirrors to me," she writes in her prologue, "but bridges made of light to fantastic...
*STARRED REVIEW Making both her print and audio debut, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a double powerhouse. As a writer, she gifts readers her “creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read.” She’s anything but hard to...
*STARRED REVIEW How fitting that what might be Isabel Allende’s best work gets aurally elevated by one of audio’s most gifted narrators. For nearly 10 hours, Edoardo Ballerini embodies the extended Dalmau family, flowing through six decades, multiple countries, two continents, recounting the Spanish Civil War...
“The invisibility of the women, in particular of my community, fueled this desire to write the Dominican experience, the Latinx experience, the immigrant experience, the New York experience,” reveals Angie Cruz in an interview accessible only if you choose audio. Making her narrator debut, fellow...
Beijing-born, globally-trotted, San Francisco-domiciled C. Pam Zhang “is still looking for home,” her author bio shouts. That search for home – uncertain, elusive, just-out-of-reach – looms throughout Zhang’s mesmerizing debut novel in which a family of four (which should have been five) never quite arrives....
“We have to learn from history and stop repeating its mistakes” As the child of two Chinese refugees, Helen Zia can personally speak to the effects of displacement, separation, adaptation, and reinvention. In her memorable career as activist/journalist/writer/Asian American icon, Zia turns inward for the first time in...
For Allie Abraham, "hiding is easy: reddish-blond hair, pale skin, hazel eyes," in other words – white. That she looks "textbook Circassian…from the Caucasus region. (Hey, they don't call it Caucasian for nothing)," is her ethnic inheritance from her immigrant Circassian Jordanian history professor father....
The title originates in poet Jamila Osman's essay, "A Map of Lost Things": "A map is only one story," writes the Canadian-born daughter of Somali immigrants who now lives in Portland, Ore. "It is not the most important story. The most important story is the...
Frank Li witnessed his older sister be perfect: she got into Harvard, then Harvard Law, then graduated into an enviably lucrative career. For their Korean immigrant parents, Hanna could do no wrong – until she did: She fell in love with a non-Korean ...
Laura Ruby’s (Bone Gap, 2015) narrator – her name eventually revealed as Pearl – is dead. Pearl’s primary object of attention is not: Frankie, who’s 14 in 1941, is a “half orphan” relegated to a Chicago orphanage with her siblings by their living Italian immigrant father,...
Already an internationally recognized, award-winning art historian and filmmaker, Nana Oforiatta Ayim makes her literary debut with The God Child, a compelling and ambitious novel. Through narrative jumps in time and place, as well as jarring disruptions in multiple languages (most notably, untranslated Twi and...
Afaf Rahman, the principal of suburban Chicago’s Nurrideen School for Girls, takes a few minutes alone for prayers, until gunshots shatter her peace. Palestinian American Sahar Mustafah’s first novel opens with the terror of a school shooter and concludes with Afaf’s eventual return to her...
*STARRED REVIEW In under 200 pages, Canadian poet Souvankham Thammavongsa showcases 14 spectacular stories in her fiction debut. Born to Lao parents in a Thai refugee camp and raised and educated in Toronto, Thammavongsa parses her own culturally amalgamated heritage through most of her narratives here,...
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom opens with definitions of two seemingly unrelated, yet brilliantly paired, words: palimpsest, “a very old text or document in which writing has been removed and covered or replaced by new writing,” and adoption, “the act of legally taking a child to be taken...
*STARRED REVIEW Title aside, nothing is minor about Cathy Park Hong’s taut, sharp collection. The award-winning poet’s prose debut will elicit comparisons to contemporary race-conscious luminaries – think Claudine Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay – but Hong’s singular voice expresses both reclamation and declaration: “For...
Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon Traversing countries and continents during a half-century, Paul Yoon’s (The Mountain, 2017) second novel unfolds decades of unrelenting loss and meaningless brutality, balanced – somehow – by exquisite kindness and unbreakable bonds. In war-torn Laos, a country brutalized by...
Just before Grandma died in Amsterdam, Sylvie temporarily rejoined the Tan family to say goodbye. Grandma had been living with the Tans: Ma’s cousin Helena, husband Willem, their son Lukas – for decades. For her first nine years, Sylvie, too, had been the Tans’ responsibility,...
