Enigma? Wormhole? Mere coincidence? Once upon a time, writer Christophe and actor Magdalena shared a life together. Their relationship falls prey to art – “I had believed I had to decide between her and my writing” – and then Christophe pens a successful novel inspired...
Perhaps because her single mother was an adamantly independent, relentlessly peripatetic news photographer, Nina Hill prefers to stay still. Mostly raised in L.A. by a wonderful nanny, by high school she was better read than all of her teachers. She finished a UCLA Art History...
Born on the same day during a freak September blizzard in Tennessee, Eric and Morgan – and their families – "became friends for life." The shared birthday anchors them through life's most dramatic changes: Morgan's mother dies and Morgan's father shuts down, while Eric's once-perfect...
Success nearly killed Perumal Murugan. Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, his cult novel, One Part Woman, was viciously condemned and publicly burnt in his native India for revealing the culture of his remote village to the outside world. Murugan declared...
Grace was unaware of her sister’s existence until their mother’s death revealed the family’s three-decades-plus secret. Grace returns to her native Madras from America, where she’s been living since college, working in customer service and watching her marriage implode over progeny disagreements. She’s jet-lagged but...
“Bringing these diverse books to life” is why Priya Ayyar does what she does. She narrates the books she didn’t have when she was growing up – books that resonate with her experiences as a California-born Indian American. “To think that someone who’s Muslim American...
When Simi’s habitual klutziness leads (surprise!) to the unlikely pairing of her recently single cousin with the furniture store owner’s lawyer-to-be son, her mother and masi – mother’s sister – have irrefutable proof that Simi’s inherited the family talent: matchmaking. For three generations, the women...
“Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism,” Lale assures his lover Gita. The pair are both Slovakian Jews, trapped in the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the death camp’s Tätowierer – the tattooist who scars prisoners with everlasting numbers – Lale...
*STARRED REVIEW The son of a Yorkshire pig farmer, Maurice Swift is his family’s black sheep, and will do whatever it takes to succeed. That “whatever” means escaping rural England for West Berlin where he meets visiting writer Erich Ackermann, who provides Maurice his first authorial...
*STARRED REVIEW Tom Hanks couldn’t be a more affable, ‘let’s-enjoy-this-together’ narrator for Ann Patchett’s (Commonwealth) marvelous latest. From the title all the way through to the ending credits, Hanks never ever falters, always performing his charming, ever-so-likable self: “Chapter threeee” lilts up to mimic ‘wheeeeee!; you...
YouTube star Alex Bertie readily admits “that as far as trans people go, I’m very privileged. I’m a white educated male with family support, a roof over my head, and a job.” Being British also guaranteed access to a national health system that paid for...
*STARRED REVIEW Adroitly adapting her deep, mellifluous voice across continents, decades, ages, and genders, Mozhan Marnò flawlessly embodies Marjan Kamali’s (Together Tea, 2013) stupendous sophomore title about young lovers torn apart by class, politics, and history during the violent tumult of 1950s Iran. A Tehran stationery...
“I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman: looping into myself, interrupting,” announces Catherine Chung’s protagonist Katherine. “Things have never seemed straightforward to me; the path has never been clear.” As the child of a WWII veteran father and...
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women gets a diverse contemporary makeover in Hena Khan’s (Amina’s Voice) latest middle-grade novel, relocated to Atlanta, featuring the Muslim Pakistani American Mirza family’s four daughters – Maryam, Jameela, Bisma, and Aleeza – with their father working in Abu Dhabi, and...
*STARRED REVIEW Few historical tragedies compare to the hell-on-earth endured by the Japanese military’s so-called “comfort women,” a grossly abused term for mostly young girls kidnapped during WWII into sexual slavery. For Lee Ok-sun, one of Korea’s few survivors, her “service” included 30–40 men daily in...
The retired-detective-turned-Santería-priest Padrino gets a second chance to play savior in Teresa Dovalpage's continuing Havana Mystery series. She mines familiar territory from book one, Death Comes in Through the Kitchen (2018), using another bathroom murder to intertwine the lives of U.S. visitors with Cuban locals. Two decades...
Best known for his brainy death-and-destruction mystery series featuring Detective Galileo and Detective Kaga, who have successfully arrived Stateside from Japan, Keigo Higashino reveals a softer side to his prolific imagination here. The Namiya General Store has been closed for decades, but three delinquent young men...
Eka Kurniawan, the first Man Booker International Prize-nominated Indonesian writer (he was long-listed in 2016 for Man Tiger), makes his collection-in-English debut, with the majority of the 16 stories translated by Annie Tucker, his PEN/Heim Translation Fund-awarded Beauty Is a Wound translator; three of the...
*STARRED REVIEW It’s 1989 and AIDS is a death warrant, but first love knows no limits. Despite a teeny little blip when Lauren Ambrose mispronounces “Audre Lorde,” the cast of Abdi Nazemian’s latest presents in near-perfect pitch. Ambrose is fashion-forward creative genius Judy (named after Garland),...
Forced expulsions have long been part of man’s history, motivated by politics, prejudice, geography, human-made disasters, and natural forces. Virtually unknown is the full-scale eviction of the Chagossians, a Creole-speaking native ethnic group with African and Asian ancestry, from Diego Garcia, the largest island in...
