In 1981, Frank is about to fall victim to a deadly worldwide flu pandemic. In exchange for Frank’s recovery, girlfriend Polly time-travels 12 years into the future and commits to 32 months of bonded servitude. Their 1993 reunion plan goes awry when Polly lands in...
Farid Abu Shaar, a young man earnestly convinced of his own (unproven) literary genius, seeks a publisher for his red-notebook manuscript, The Book to Come. His publication attempts with Beirut’s publishing houses prove futile: “No one reads,” one publisher insists. Although his Karam Brothers Press...
Jon Lee Anderson’s Che: A Revolutionary Life (1997) is superbly realized in graphic form by Mexican artist José Hernández, who distills Anderson’s lauded, 812-page original into just more than 400 pages of spectacularly illustrated narrative. Since his 1967 death at 39, Che “has become the most...
The fourth of Mette Ivie Harrison’s 11 planned books for her Linda Wallheim mystery series takes the outspoken Mormon-bishop’s wife from her comfortable Draper, Utah, home into the Spanish community, a few miles in distance but a world away culturally, ethnically, and socioeconomically. Linda accompanies her...
'Killing Commendatore' is the latest evasive, magical, utterly unique novel by Murakami A famous painter succumbing to dementia living out his final days in a posh care facility. A wealthy, middle-aged white-haired man who lives alone in a mountainside white mansion. A motherless schoolgirl whose father...
*STARRED REVIEW "Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames, which meant it was also a family of disguises," 14-year-old Nathaniel, aka Stitch, reveals early in Michael Ondaatje's newest fiction. Narrator Steve West – London-born like Ondaatje's protagonist – confidently takes Nathaniel from bewildered teenager...
Essayist/poet Melissa Broder voiced her previous audiobooks So Sad Today and Last Sext, and she's the natural choice to narrate her first novel. She reads here with firm, measured precision, determined to keep moving forward steadily, as if she knows she's got a page-turner listeners...
I got to get this started for The Booklist Reader ...
Time manipulation – obsession with, desire for, and attempts at – is a timeless conundrum and, thus far, an elusive temptation. Our ever-waxing fascination is evident in classic stories and sci-fi favorites. Contemporary pop culture continues to feed the frenzy, from Harry Potter and the Prisoner...
“I sound like the hayseed I am and the smoker I was and the drinker that I expect I’ll continue to be,” Lorena Hickok describes herself. With her raspy, no-nonsense delivery, Tonya Cornelisse embodies “Hick,” the real-life lover, confidante, and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt....
“Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet,” writes New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma. In his mid-20s in 1975, the Dutch-born Buruma, who is half English and half German Jew, arrived in Tokyo to study film at Nihon University College of...
With a superb blend of historical, cultural, socioeconomic reportage, and plenty of engaging real-life stories, The Economist’s Cuba correspondent Roseann Lake alchemizes her five years in Beijing into a lively first book about the fate and future of China’s accomplished, independent, powerful – and unmarried – women. Over the last...
*STARRED REVIEW “[B]eing able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories” could be goals for any community – but the words are especially resonant for debut novelist Tommy Orange’s sprawling Native American cast: “the world is...
*STARRED REVIEW Cats may have nine lives, but Maggie O’Farrell, who won the Costa Book Award for The Hand That First Held Mine, has had 17, as revealed in this stupendous collection of essays named for various body parts that have caused her near demise. Her...
Meet the Allbrights: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-afflicted Vietnam War returnee Ernt, his perennially in-denial wife Cora, and mature-beyond-her-years teenager Leni. Bequeathed a remote homestead in 1974 by a fallen army buddy, Ernt relocates his family to wild, remote Alaska, chasing dreams of self-sufficiency and simple...
Tom Hazard has a condition that's not in any official medical journal. Referred to in the 1890s as "anageria with a soft g," Tom – who was born in March 1581! – is still very much alive, currently working as a London schoolteacher, and appears...
Blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, Vassar English professor/journalist Amitava Kumar’s (Husband of a Fanatic) second novel is a hybrid text that moves seamlessly between his partially autobiographically-inspired Indian immigrant graduate student Kailash and numerous real-life figures and events. Kailash arrived in New York as...
In Perfume Bay, a luxurious oasis just outside Los Angeles, pregnant Chinese women are pampered through the U.S. birth of precious progeny who will provide their parents with “a foothold in America.” Among the guests is factory-manager Scarlett Chen, sent to the U.S. to bear...
*STARRED REVIEW Man Asian Literary Prize-winning Kyung-sook Shin (The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, 2015) alchemizes a brief mention in a French diplomat’s book about his turn-of-the-century Korean tenure into a gorgeous epic that seamlessly combines history and fiction to create a hybrid masterpiece. In 1888, France’s first...
'What We Were Promised' depicts post-Mao China in a deft debut novel set in Shanghai Beyond divisions of class, culture, and background, a single African ivory bracelet connects a Chinese American ex-pat family, their staff who enable their (over)privileged lives, and their left-behind Chinese families in...
