Two friends return to Watersend, SC, to the childhood vacation house their families once shared. Bonny Blankenship, an ER doctor forced to take a break, needs to face her bitter marriage and stalled career. She’s hoping her teenage daughter Piper, who’s just failed her first...
Just as the audiobook of Fiona Barton’s hair-raising debut, The Widow, got the full-cast treatment, so, too, does her equally unnerving sophomore effort. Mandy Williams returns as Kate Waters, the tenacious newspaper reporter introduced in Widow, who again won’t stop sleuthing until she has all...
*STARRED REVIEW Against a tumultuous backdrop of political, military, and economic turmoil in modern Nigeria comes a portrait of a marriage that begins with idealistic devotion and ardent promise. For Yejide and Akin, love should have been enough, but after four years without children, “even love...
Kanae Minato is two for two for twisted psychological Japanese noir. What she did with deadly milk cartons in Confessions made quite the debut splash. She goes back to school in Penance (expertly rendered into English by lauded translator Philip Gabriel) in which 10-year-old Emily is raped...
Imogen Church is three-for-three as Ruth Ware’s anointed narrator. With her convincing range of accents, modulations, and control, Church adroitly voices multiple viewpoints, proving to be more effective than many full-cast recordings. Like her previous bestsellers, The Woman in Cabin 10 and In a Dark,...
*STARRED REVIEW Arimah's debut collection comprises a dozen surprising, affecting stories. Narrator Adjoa Andoh sublimely intensifies the author's already breathtaking prose into an irresistible, spectacular performance, as she effortlessly modulates her distinctive voice, picking up genders and generations, cadences and accents, and just as easily discards...
*STARRED REVIEW Emma Gregory, with her impressive range of Anglophone accents – differentiated by age, region, country – is the ideal conduit for the 10 nuanced, exquisite stories in Tessa Hadley's (The Past) latest collection. Loss of innocence looms large in many of the pieces, from a...
Gabra Zackman narrates with intense intimacy, as if fully aware what she's reading is more than mere words on the page. This electrifying love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man continues to inspire global headlines – it's earned author Dorit Rabinyan (Persian...
"We didn't want to edit this book," married Jewish authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman confess. "We didn't want to write or even think…about Israel and Palestine, about the nature and meaning of occupation." But Waldman's 2014 visit to her birthplace forced both to "pay...
*STARRED REVIEW The five "narrative parts" of this work, designated only with Roman numerals, comprise five styles: short story; first-person, faux memoir; folktale of sorts; 10-parts-plus-epilogue novella; and no-punctuation vignette. The connections require attention, with results well worth the reader's intriguing participation. An Indian American professor's tragedy-ensuing...
Columbia undergrads Lucy and Gabe meet in a Shakespeare seminar – on 9/11. Their class – including the professor who glibly asks if the pilot was drunk when his TA announces the first tower crash – is as yet unaware of the devastating reverberations to...
*STARRED REVIEW Samantha Schweblin, who is Buenos Aires-born and now lives in Berlin, makes her English-language novel debut, thanks to McDowell's crisp translation. Worms, migrating souls, unseen toxins, and deformed children punctuate a mysterious dialog between Amanda, a dying woman in an emergency clinic, and David,...
*STARRED REVIEW Internationally lauded for historical novels (Girl with a Pearl Earring), Tracy Chevalier takes a surprising narrative path as she returns over the Pond to her capital birth-city (she’s been British-domiciled for decades) with the Bard in tow: Chevalier’s privileged fifth graders play out Othello...
*STARRED REVIEW Vikas Adam’s remarkable chameleonic range proves ideal for Samrat Upadhyay’s (Arresting God in Kathmandu) latest superb collection, set mostly in Nepal. Exceptionally gifted with accents, Adam could easily be mistaken for a multi-person cast; he's effortlessly convincing as a disappointed father, a female inmate,...
Helen receives a call from her "Uncle Geoff" (although she's unsure of how they're related) that her 29-year-old adoptive brother has killed himself. Both Helen and her brother were adopted as babies from Korea by a white – some might add willfully culturally illiterate –...
Six Four, the first available-in-English-translation novel from Japanese phenomenon Hideo Yokoyama, requires serious commitments of time and memory space. It runs over 24 audible hours, with so many pertinent players that the print version includes a densely-populated “Cast of Characters.” Dead and missing daughters populate this exquisitely...
Collin, the titular “chalk artist,” waits tables since twice dropping out of college. Nina’s a high school English teacher with a degree from Harvard; she’s also the only child of the legendary founder of the phenomenal video game company Arkadia. Opposites attract; romance happens. Thinking she’s...
Kym’s first violin was a paper cutout copied from an encyclopedia; her first actual instrument was a “harsh, factory-made thing” on which she immediately taught herself “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” By her first or second lesson, Kym knew playing the violin "was not simply for...
In sleepy Pine Valley, MN, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman – beloved daughter, excellent student, best friend, adored girlfriend, talented actress – lies dead. Solving her gruesome murder is up to local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend who watched Hattie grow up. Her English teacher Peter Lund...
The mega-success of The Girl on the Train guaranteed Paula Hawkins’s sophomore title would be an instant bestseller. And, again, Hawkins provides another head-spinning mystery from which she slyly (mis)leads readers toward startling revelations. Nel Abbot is dead. Weeks earlier, Nel’s daughter Lena’s best friend Katie...
