In a Pennsylvania college dorm, five teens are trapped in a life-and-death situation. The quintet’s point of connection, allegedly dead, is a Korean American student, Jaesung, who was reported to have perished in a recent car fire in Seoul. Yoona, in whose room the terror plays...
*STARRED REVIEW As both the introductory note and epithet doubly insist, August Town, divided into two words, is a real town in Jamaica, made (in)famous for being the founding home of Bedwardism, a short-lived, early twentieth-century religion. Fast-forward to 1982 when teary Kaia comes home to his...
Arriving with her mother from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at Kennedy Airport, "holding hands for courage," 17-year-old Fabiola Toussaint, a U.S. citizen by birth, is ushered through Customs while immigration officials detain Manman. Fabiola is forced to leave her behind in New York, and lands alone in...
This may be Lisa McInerney’s debut novel, but the author has had plenty of practice chronicling daily life in her lauded blog, "Arse End of Ireland." Arriving stateside, already impressively awarded (2016 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction), Heresies melds wrenching reality with bitter comedy, taking...
Race, class, and identity all loom large in Marie NDiaye's (Three Strong Women) latest superb title as generations of mothers and daughters attempt to deny and reclaim one another with onerous consequences. The original Ladivine immigrates to France from an unnamed country, cleaning houses to...
After nearly a quarter-century spent in Minnesota, Teera returns to her native Cambodia, fulfilling her aunt's dying wish that part of her ashes be delivered home. Having witnessed, decades earlier, the decimation of the rest of her family, Teera is now completely alone. She seeks the...
*STARRED REVIEW With Han Kang’s The Vegetarian awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, her follow-up will garner extra scrutiny. Bottom line? This new work, again seamlessly translated by Deborah Smith, who also provides an indispensable contextual introduction, is even more stupendous. Han drops readers into a...
Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, MO. Lezley McSpadden didn't see her 18-year-old son die, "but as his mother, I do know one thing better than anyone, and that's how to tell my son's...
Accused of brutally murdering her husband, Zeba lands in jail. A mother of four, wife to Kamal, and obedient to Kamal's family, Zeba can't remember what happened. She remains silently resigned, realizing that in contemporary Afghanistan, just being a woman is enough to threaten not...
Warning first: This is NOT NOT NOT for kids. For us old folks, however ...
Already the star of an ongoing, bestselling series in Japan (on both page and screen), Det. Reiko Himekawa makes her English-translation debut, outsmarting her arrogant male colleagues by listening to the dead. At 29, Reiko is young to be a lieutenant in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's...
*STARRED REVIEW When a bomb explodes in a Delhi market in May 1996, the 11- and 13-year-old Khurana brothers, who were sent to pick up the family's repaired television, are killed, while their friend Mansoor Ahmed, 12, somehow survives. The senseless tragedy inextricably binds the two...
Kate has always been a liar – out of necessity rather than malice. She's smart and savvy and knows how to be a good friend. She's also the best scholarship student Manhattan's tony Waverly School has ever had. Olivia, by contrast, has grown up with every...
While the titular widow is the character around which all others circle, she’s certainly not alone in holding secrets. Jean Taylor (read with unnerving control by Hannah Curtis) stood by her husband, Glen, through the heinous accusations leveled against him, until a week ago when...
Gifted artist Hannah was supposed to die of lung cancer, Congressman-for-sale David of brain cancer, has-been actor Connie of AIDS, and housewife and mother Linda trapped by immobility forever. Yet this quartet comprise the first SUBlife cases, and some of their brains – the parts...
*STARRED REVIEW The 1937 school explosion in New London, TX, remains the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history. With that real-life tragedy as a starting point, Ashley Hope Pérez adds greater volatility with race, class, and family dysfunction, by introducing a love story between two teens from...
*STARRED REVIEW After the brutal murder of his father and the wrenching separation from his mother and sister, Yongju must survive a new life of deprivation after his privileged upbringing as the only son of one of North Korea’s power elite. Danny, a misfit immigrant teen...
The third installment of Keigo Higashino's Japan-set Detective Galileo series (after Salvation of a Saint) lands stateside, with plenty of didn't-see-that-coming surprises to keep listeners entranced straight to the end. Brilliant and eccentric physicist Manabu Yukawa – called Detective Galileo because of the sharp, unexpected...
*STARRED REVIEW Tanya Dubois, as she's initially introduced, is not the woman her husband believed her to be. He's dead – she didn't do it – but Tanya runs anyway, shedding her name and recent past yet again and taking on another identity. In another town, another...
