With echoes of themes in his internationally lauded Never Let Me Go (2005) – that life can be manufactured, bartered, bought – Booker-ed, Nobel-ed, and knighted Kazuo Ishiguro presents a bittersweet fable about the human heart as “[s]omething that makes each of us special and...
*STARRED REVIEW Mira Sethi showcases her literary lineage as the daughter of internationally renowned, award-winning journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, and the younger sister of lauded author and musician Ali Sethi. Already an established actor and journalist, Sethi makes her fiction debut with six partially...
The I-narrator of the opening prologue, presented rather like an author’s note, sets up a revealing frame for the love story to come even as he inserts, then immediately elides himself. “If I were absolutely faithful to the truth, I myself would have to make...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Deesha Philyaw’s 2020 National Book Award finalist in fiction gets an almost (we can just ignore those minor, clumsy production glitches) flawless performance from prolific, expert Janina Edwards. Throughout the nine consistently superb stories, Edwards adapts effortlessly between mothers and daughters, friends...
Murder is never funny, except when it is. In Jesse Q. Sutanto’s rollicking debut, which she describes in a “Dear reader” foreword as “a love letter to my family – a ridiculously large bunch with a long history of immigration,” a fatal accident begets family...
Teens and young adult women populate the majority of Girls of a Certain Age, an intriguing first collection by Maria Adelmann. At least eight of these 13 stories were previously published as early as 2014, many in prestigious literary journals. As with many debuts, Girls proves...
International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as “the rape capital of the world,” spurring award-winning journalist Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to “find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India.” She finds...
*STARRED REVIEW Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning Canadian Japanese novelist/poet Hiromi Goto (Half World, 2010) makes her stupendous graphic debut, in splendid artistic synchronization with Ignatz-nominated Ann Xu. “It never felt right here,” Kumiko thinks as she sneaks out of an assisted-living facility her daughters thought would be the...
Nicole Krauss hasn’t audiobooked since joining an all-star cast for the aural adaptation of Etgar Keret’s collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012). She is clearly an ideal choice for narrating her own writing in this, her full aural debut, with her collection examining and...
Proceed with Caution is the title of this collection as well as one of the stories in it. Readers might also take the phrase as warning: nothing is quite what it seems in Argentinian Patricia Ratto's fascinating English-language debut. Translated by retired Spanish professor and...
Before Jayci Lee’s latest even hit shelves, Lost/Hawaii Five-0 heartthrob Daniel Dae Kim optioned the rom-com as producer and star. Before Kim goes celluloid, narrator Natalie Naudus whets your appetite with this delectably sweet happily-ever-after affair. With his borrowed car broken down in tiny Weldon, California, celebrity food critic...
*STARRED REVIEW Not until the last of this ingenious seven-story collection do readers get the most intimate glimpse of Don Henrik, and even then, only through the lens of his not-quite stepson. Henrik, however, is the single connecting character in Rodrigo Fuentes's U.S. debut, Trout, Belly...
That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...
Spare in pages, Elvira Navarro’s collection of 11 short stories proves dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized. Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro’s tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes. In “Rabbit Island,” a non-inventor...
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...
Youthful romance has made Mary H.K. Choi (Permanent Record; Emergency Contact) a bestselling #OwnVoices author. In Yolk, she effectively pivots toward the familial, focusing the most significant of the book's relationships on two Seoul-born, San Antonio-raised sisters. Devoted audiences need not worry here about missing a love...
Emiko Jean: Searching for Belonging When Emiko Jean isn't writing, she's reading. Before she became a writer, she was an entomologist, a candlemaker, a florist, and most recently, a teacher. She is the author of Empress of All Seasons and We'll Never Be Apart. In her third novel, Tokyo Ever After (Flatiron...
While Asha Lemmie's debut – about the tribulations of an illegitimate, mixed-race granddaughter of a cousin to the royal Japanese family – might not be perfect, she certainly deserves better than this lazy aural travesty. Floundering, misrepresentative audiobook adaptations have been rerecorded and rereleased –...
Tony-nominated Broadway star Megan Hilty proves to be an ideal narrator, effortlessly assuming (almost-)always-in-control Dannie and her free-spirited best friend, Bella. In the evening after a near-perfect day – accepting the perfectly orchestrated marriage proposal after wowing her interviewers for her ideal job – Dannie...
*STARRED REVIEW Seasoned narrator Barrie Kreinik showcases her prowess as a dialect coach as she embodies Charlotte McConaghy’s vast cast around the world from Australia to Ireland to Greenland, traversing quickly emptying terrains and oceans. Making her adult fiction debut, McConaghy introduces Franny Stone, an untethered...
