*STARRED REVIEW Tanya Dubois, as she's initially introduced, is not the woman her husband believed her to be. He's dead – she didn't do it – but Tanya runs anyway, shedding her name and recent past yet again and taking on another identity. In another town, another...
Four siblings gather in their childhood home to determine its future. The oldest is the most distant, unsure she'll even stay the full three weeks they've planned to be there. The middle sister arrives with two children, complaining about her missing husband. The youngest sister...
China's infamous one-child policy lasted just 35 years. Forced sterilizations, gruesome late-term abortions, an overseas adoption boom, and baby trafficking emerged as by-products of the draconian law. What was touted as a "necessary step in [China's] Herculean efforts to lift the population…from abject poverty" resulted in...
“No one said this global journey would be smooth,” writes Baz Dreisinger with controlled understatement. Covering two years and nine countries in her pilgrimage to prisons worldwide, Dreisinger – a self-described “white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies,” as well as prison educator and criminal justice...
Beloved NPR host Diane Rehm’s latest memoir begins with her husband John's end – depleted by Parkinson's disease, unable to "stand walk, eat, bathe, or in any way care for himself on his own, he was now ready to die." After 54 years of marriage –...
*STARRED REVIEW For the rest of his life, Ajie would be known as the last person to have seen Paul, the family’s exemplary, exceptional firstborn. On a Monday afternoon during Nigeria’s 1995 rainy season, 17-year-old Paul announces he’s visiting a friend in the next compound; he...
*STARRED REVIEW To bring Adam Johnson’s six stories – which together won the 2015 National Book Award for fiction – to waiting ears takes a village of seasoned narrators. In “Nirvana,” Jonathan McClain deftly voices a desperate husband who uses technology to soothe his ill wife. Dominic Hoffman –...
Journalist Rod Nordland’s debut title began as a series of popular 2014 New York Times articles that introduced Ali and Zakia as Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet. At the time of the book’s publication, the young lovers were alive and living together, though facing a dangerously...
"Nothing seemed amiss that first Sunday in December 1945." In California, 21-year-old Harry questions why his white employer is sending him home. His comment that he had nothing to do with Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor gets him promptly fired. In Hiroshima, 4,000 miles away, 17-year-old...
Divided into three sections – Homeless, Homeward, and Home –that converge in the titular "High Mountains of Portugal," three men epitomize the concepts after which the sections are named. Part 1's Tomás, grieving the loss of his lover and son, takes his uncle's automobile – one...
*STARRED REVIEW At 28, Sara Lindqvist has more literary friends than real. She arrives in Iowa from Sweden, expecting to spend a few weeks with Amy Harris, an older woman with whom she's exchanged three years of intimate letters and books. Alas, she's arrived too late:...
*STARRED REVIEW Richard Chapman – husband, father, businessman – hosts a bachelor party in his Westchester, NY, home for his younger brother. Two strippers are hired to provide the expected entertainment, until the debauchery ends abruptly when the girls murder their bodyguards and flee. Richard must...
Four decades have passed since Amaterasu Takahashi lost her daughter and grandson in Nagasaki's atomic destruction. Now an octogenarian widow living in Philadelphia, she's shocked by the arrival of a disfigured stranger claiming to be that grandson. He brings letters from the past, as well as...
*STARRED REVIEW In his sublime "foreword [that] might be better thought of as an afterword," physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese reveals that he came to know Paul Kalanithi "most intimately when he'd ceased to be." That, too, is true of every listener here. Neurosurgeon Kalanithi died in...
*STARRED REVIEW Many years earlier, Lucy Barton spent two months in a hospital after a routine appendectomy; no one ever figured out what was wrong. She wakes one morning to find her mother sitting on her bed, arrived in Manhattan from their rural Illinois hometown. Too many...
*STARRED REVIEW On an afternoon in November 1999, the 50,000-strong disruption of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle imploded with tear gas and violence. Sunil Yapa’s debut pivots around teenage runaway Victor, whose initial plans to sell marijuana for profit morphs into tenacious participation with...
*STARRED REVIEW "This, reader, is a mother-daughter story," the American writer-who-is-also-the-mother insists in the latest from Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase). The mother-writer has battled debilitating bouts of depression but she's survived thus far, until her daughter's stillborn birth spirals her into silent withdrawal. In an...
*STARRED REVIEW "I was taught to avoid showing off," Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson (writing, Columbia University; On Michael Jackson) begins. "But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?" That hesitation permeates throughout, the restraint perfectly mimicked in Robin Miles's elegant recitation. This work is a...
Sam, Samir, and Nina met in law school in Paris. Sam and Nina were lovers. While Sam was briefly away, Samir shared Nina's bed, after which Sam attempted suicide and won Nina back. Fast-forward almost two decades: Sam and Nina are poor and desperate but still...
Linda Wallheim, who debuted in YA author Mette Ivie Harrison’s first adult title, The Bishop's Wife, returns to solve her second murder. For Linda, being a devout Mormon isn't a barrier to speaking her mind and demanding justice in the men-centric community in which being...
