*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Xe Sands delivers this Book with control, even detachment: the almost languid tone chillingly amplifies the hideous near-future Yuknavitch exposes in her highly anticipated follow-up to The Small Backs of Children. At 49, Christine is in her “last year until ascension,” an anachronistic term that...
“This was a long time ago,” Jennifer Finney Boylan (She’s Not There) begins – August 1980, more specifically. “[N]one of us now are the people we were then.” Thirty-five years later, the college friends who trespassed into the boarded-up Eastern State Penitentiary are now “ghosts:...
Ten years ago, Lee was married to her college boyfriend, living in Berkeley, and working as the human resources director at a small company. On New Year’s Eve 2006, Lee suffered a stroke. She was 33. She would spend the better part of a decade...
*STARRED REVIEW Originally published in 1987, The Door is one of the few titles available in English by the late Magda Szabó (1917–2007), considered one of if not the most prominent Hungarian writer. The aural version makes its roundabout debut this year, after two Anglophone translations,...
The arrival of an unexpected package inspires Bea to begin writing her story, "in the hope that [she] could do it justice, and clear [her] conscience." Years earlier, she traveled to an unnamed Middle Eastern country (certainly inspired by Syria, where debut author Emily Robbins...
Think Marie Kondo (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up) on steroids: fellow Japanese lifestyle (albeit reluctant) guru Fumio Sasaki shed 95 percent of his stuff. "There's happiness in having less," his here's-why-and-how primer begins. "That's why it's time to say good-bye to all our extra things."...
Batuman makes her fiction debut already a literary darling: a New Yorker staff writer since 2010 and the author of a much-adored essay collection, The Possessed, about the pleasurable intricacies of reading Russian literature. The year is 1995, and Turkish American 18-year-old Selin enters Harvard. She...
Debut novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi's protagonist, like the author herself, is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and Israeli Jewish mother. Ahlam comes of age in the Arizona desert, physically safe from war but damaged by the bitter fighting between her parents that too...
Sheila Kohler’s crisp, clipped voice is ideal for her memoir, which begins with references to Nelson Mandela, Afrikaners, and various family members that all announce her South African heritage. Although she left her birth country at 17, Kohler (Cracks; Crossways) has retained her clear, concise...
*STARRED REVIEW At just three-and-a-half hours, Daniel Magariel's debut novel should be a quick listen – time-wise, that's obviously true – but be warned: this affecting, hypnotic tragedy will linger and haunt long after. Narrator Gibson Frazier – pitch-perfect in his characterization of the two abused brothers...
*STARRED REVIEW Experienced narrator Robin Miles is the ideal proxy for Gay's difficult women, many of whom are not so much difficult as living lives that have been made difficult, onerous, or tragic by others. Embodying various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, Miles refreshes and adapts her...
*STARRED REVIEW Now older than his 43-year-old father was when he died in a 1977 terrorist attack, Omar Saif Ghobash writes his Letters to his two young sons as a matter of permanent record. As the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Russia (Ghobash's father was Arab, his...
At 15 hours to find out whodunit (you'll probably guess early), howdunit (you'll need to wait for it), whydunit (well…? no spoilers!), we're talking commitment. A full cast (why don't producers reveal who's who?), including veterans Ari Fliakos and Edoardo Ballerini, with Scott Aiello, Michael...
*STARRED REVEIW Before Adichie became a mother herself, a childhood friend – the titular Ijeawele – asked Adichie to tell her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. She begins here with two "Feminist Tools": 1. "I matter equally. Full stop"; and 2. "Can you...
*STARRED REVIEW If anything about this sounds familiar, that might be because you may have already come across the TEDxEuston talk of the same name, presented by Adichie in December 2012 and widely circulated. Think of that as a highly successful test run, and consider investing...
*STARRED REVIEW Loss and longing cause the men and women in Yoon's (Once the Shore; Snow Hunters) second collection to move, and often keep moving, sometimes in search of sanctuary, other times seeking escape. A doctor returns from war to his childhood home where his mother died;...
*STARRED REVIEW The morning after Mia and daughter Pearl return the rental key in the Richardsons' mailbox, the youngest Richardson, Izzy, sets "little fires everywhere," destroying the family home. Following her magnificent debut, Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s spectacular sophomore work again manipulates time...
In thrice voicing Linda Wallheim, the Mormon bishop’s murder-solving wife, Kirsten Potter has settled comfortably into a quixotic emotional range that can move from stiff politeness to philosophical musing to overwrought shrillness without much warning. Confronted with a third dead body – “How does this always...
After spontaneously cutting off eight inches of hair, Wang's never-named narrator returns to her chemistry lab and smashes five beakers. She insists, "Beakers are cheap," yet the personal price is inestimable: the shattered vessels parallel an equal number of portentous changes involving her PhD program,...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Sartaj Garewal’s energy couldn’t be more rousingly infectious as he voices the unforgettable characters in Adiga’s (The White Tiger) latest. Raised in a Mumbai slum by a fiercely demanding father, the two Kumar brothers are destined to become cricket champions by the sheer...
