*STARRED REVIEW Mary, Caroline, and Katie are three very different generations in the same family; finding themselves unexpectedly under the same roof forces them to confront a complicated past that has kept them estranged for decades. Mary is the grandmother, newly widowed, fighting the dementia that...
*STARRED REVIEW "We are all migrants through time," observes Man Booker Prize short-lister Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The impulses driving such movement, especially when rooted in violent conflict, is at the core of Hamid's exceptional fourth novel. In an unnamed city (not unlike the author's native...
*STARRED REVIEW The collective elder mothers of Upper Room Chapel open with a Greek chorus-esque recitation about happenings affecting their congregation. At the center of the chatter is Nadia, 17, who had "earned a wild reputation" since her mother committed suicide six months earlier; the Upper Room...
Having survived too many violently nightmarish years in foster care, Mallory knows how lucky she is to finally have two unconditionally loving parents. After years of intensive therapy, she's ready to try something most teens expect to experience: her senior year of high school. Mallory's...
Still reeling from her mother's sudden death, Wylie – already fighting debilitating anxiety – has become even more self-isolating. When her former best friend's mother shows up desperately seeking her daughter Cassie, Wylie doesn't confess that the two have barely seen each other since Cassie...
River Dean, 17, is not a bad kid: he's got warm relationships with his family (except his runaway dad), does well at school, and has good friends. But when Penny, the love of his life, dumps him, River starts making awful decisions, starting with stumbling...
*STARRED REVIEW A mother, Soledad, flees Cuba, abandoning her revolutionary husband Uxmal and absconding with their 12-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel. She bypasses Miami for Hartford, CT, finding work as a court stenographer, making her the transcriber of other people's words. Although Uxmal’s presence never seems to...
*STARRED REVIEW A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Min Jin Lee’s follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared...
*STARRED REVIEW August, an Ivy League-pedigreed, peripatetic anthropologist who studies death in the farthest reaches of the world, returns home to Brooklyn to bury her father. A chance subway meeting with a childhood friend plunges August back into memories of another Brooklyn of the 1970s, when...
*STARRED REVIEW "There's magic in this world. And miracles." In his second translated work to hit stateside (after The Investigation), bestselling Korean author J.M. Lee – again linguistically enabled by gifted translator Chi-Young Kim – will make you believe. Lee's silent protagonist sits in a New York...
*STARRED REVIEW Although publishing 10 months after Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview, Nguyen credits his 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with...
*STARRED REVIEW Although separated from philandering husband Christopher for six months, a London woman agrees to continue to postpone "the process…of telling people." Almost a month has passed since she last talked to Christopher, rendering her unable to answer his mother Isabella's unexpected request for his...
The Recovered & The Unrestored Let me begin with a reader’s confession: Without a doubt, Shobha Rao’s debut, An Unrestored Woman, is the best short fiction collection I’ve read this year. These dozen stories are savage and empathetic, brutal and lyrical, mournful and celebratory as well. At...
In a remote mountain village, the survival of an Akha tribe, one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, depends on tea. Rigid traditions prohibit Li-yan from keeping her newborn. She saves her daughter by leaving her in a nearby town, wrapped in blankets with a tea...
Mele, single mother of Ellie, joined the San Francisco Mother's Club (SFMC) to be matched with the perfect playgroup, something that never happened. Two years later, she's part of a rogue, "laughing, sh*t-talking, texting, even talking on the phone" fivesome that came together organically at...
*STARRED REVIEW Yan Lianke's latest translated-into-English title offers multiple rewarding options. As straightforward narrative, it follows the astounding transformation of Explosion, a rural mountain village, into a "megalopolis" through the entangled lives of the Kong family's four sons – a teacher, a politician, a soldier, and...
Mao Dun Award–winning novelist Liu Zhenyun (The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015) adroitly confronts Very Big Topics – family, education, work, bureaucracy, the military, history – in his first translated-into-English story collection. “Tofu” exposes the numbing tribulations of being a poor family...
An ephemeral, atmospheric painting, Elegy, is at the core of Wendy Lee’s third and most ambitious novel (Happy Family, 2008; Across a Green Ocean, 2015). An unknown, 30-year-sojourning Chinese artist is paid a pittance to recreate a missing canvas. A desperate New York gallery owner...
As explosive growth transforms 1970s South Korea into an international powerhouse, sociopolitical upheaval becomes unavoidable in daily life. Into the maelstrom of such spectacular change, first-novelist Grace Yoojin Wuertz – Seoul-born, U.S.-raised, Yale- and NYU-degreed – drops two women onto the elite campus of Seoul...
Lucas and Katya spend a year in love as boarding school seniors and have a baby. Their parting leaves Lucas estranged throughout daughter Vera’s childhood; he eventually graduates to being a weekend dad. At 16, Vera goes to a party she shouldn’t have, which ends with...
