*STARRED REVIEW On the opening page, debut author Erin E. Adams affectingly invokes Alice Walker – the Black writer of a banned book exposing racist hate – although here, this Alice is just a girl playing in the woods of 1985 Johnstown, Pennsylvania ...
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 Opinionated, peanut gallery-esque ghosts soothsay from Maple Street Cemetery in Evanston, New Hampshire. Former professor Clive’s feline hallucinations had him permanently removed from his classroom in the middle of a term; these days, Clive spends most of this time with (dead) Ernest Harold Baynes...
Escaping the Dominican Republic’s murderous Trujillo regime is how Julian Randall’s own family arrived in the United States two generations ago. His debut novel seamlessly combines that history – political and personal – with Dominican mythology for his Pilar Ramirez duology (book two publishes February...
Widower, widow. Uxoricide. Orphan. Patricide. Infanticide. And yet missing from that harrowing vocabulary is a word for “parents who lose children. Who don’t murder them, but lose them.” Irina becomes that kind of grieving parent when her 6-year-old daughters vanish. She’s recently separated from husband Mathias,...
Catriona Ward’s latest is quite the creepfest addition to psychological thrillers in which houses or buildings star as characters. Veteran Christopher Ragland sounds so appropriately trusting, even as listeners should be well aware: believe no one. The book’s characters couldn’t be more different, but Ragland proves...
Korean Canadian June Hur’s enthralling debut, The Silence of Bones, vividly captured 19th-century fatal court intrigue during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. Her follow-up is another tautly plotted thriller, set in 15th-century Joseon, and helmed by relative audiobook newbie Sue Jean Kim, who adroitly controls a sprawling...
Silvia Moreno-Garcia: On Publishing, Racism, and a "Real Horror Story" Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a literary chameleon, successfully writing across genres, including speculative short fiction (This Strange Way of Dying), historical fantasy (The Beautiful Ones), magical realism (Gods of Jade and Snow) and horror (Mexican Gothic). She's also edited several anthologies, is the publisher of micro-indie...
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexican Gothic) opens Velvet Was the Night with an epigraph quoting a June 1971 U.S. Department of State telegram about the Hawks, a murderous Mexican government-trained "shock group" supported by the CIA. She ends with this final sentence in her afterword: "My novel is noir,...
Here’s where veteran narrator Lisa Flanagan excels: unflaggingly individualizing myriad varied characters. Here’s where she disappoints: stumbling over non-English words and using a grating French accent. Quibbles aside, Flanagan consistently, remarkably maintains distinct voices for the peripatetic Preston family in Liese O'Halloran Schwarz’s (The Possible...
Claire Lou is restarting her life in Portland, Oregon, where she’s managed to find a new apartment (never mind the money she still owes on the security deposit) and she’s even gotten herself hired as the Portland Post’s photographer. Her mother is just two hours...
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...
Following the success of her lauded “We Set the Dark on Fire” duology, Tehlor Kay Mejia makes her middle grade debut, proving mothers are always right, ghosts exist, and La Llorona is legit. From 12 to eternal, desperate parent to dismissive cop, madwoman to murderer,...
Once upon a 1960s screentime, Japan’s NHK broadcast serial dramas in the mornings, a genre called “renzoku terebi shōsetsu,” literally “continuing TV novel,” shortened to “asadora,” meaning “morning drama.” Legendary Naoki Urasawa ingeniously riffs on the bygone genre, replacing “terebi” with “manga” to create Renzoku manga shōsetsu...
SIXTY-EIGHT narrators get credited with creating the aural spectacle of Neil Gaiman’s legendary graphic epic. Debuting officially in 1989, the original comic series concluded in 1996, although reprints, compilations, adaptations, and spin-offs have as never ceased. Among the vast cast – quite possibly the largest...
*STARRED REVIEW It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house” – Kay Manman Mwen...
"We know what you did," an ominous warning, proves pivotal in Ameera Patel's electrifying debut novel, Outside the Lines. In a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, the threatening phrase inextricably links five disparate characters. "You took the money from the vase," the drug-addicted,...
Life in India’s basti (slums) has rules all its own – about toilets, water, hierarchies, privileges. The police either ignore the inhabitants, making crime reporting meaningless, or threaten to raze their ramshackle homes. Meanwhile, some 180 children go missing in India every day, reports British-based...
In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...
Venus Black gets straight As, has never gotten drunk, smoked pot, or skipped a class. She’s also a 13-year-old murderer, sent to juvenile lock-up for shooting her stepfather. Within days, her younger half-brother Leo – “[he] has what [their mother] Inez calls ‘developmental issues’” –...
