Ma likes to think her family is like Job’s, so much so that she and Dad named their daughters accordingly: Jemima Genesis, Keziah Leah, Keren Happuch. Generations on both sides have known tortuous tragedy, but no one is prepared when Kezi – a YouTube activist...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Louis Chude-Sokei's parents were known as "the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra," a former West African nation "that had disappeared or been 'killed.'" Half a century later, Chude-Sokei examines what it meant to be "the first son of the...
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...
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...
Back in 1977, “Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire.” In Washington, DC-native Morowa Yejidé’s (Time of the Locust, 2014) moody, bleak sophomore title, boundaries between the living and the dead are indiscernible. Once upon a time, Nephthys and Osiris...
Six years since his first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Carnegie Medal and the Pulitzer Prize, Việt Thanh Nguyễn is back with the much-anticipated second installment in a planned trilogy. Here, the same unreliable narrator adds another few hundred pages to the already 367-page confession he...
Sherlock Holmes’ archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, appeared in only six of Arthur Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, but popular manga-maker Ryosuke Takeuchi – with energetically animated art by Hikaru Miyoshi – continues to indulge his own empathy for villains in the second volume of many more to come. Here, the...
*STARRED REVIEW "Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction," writes Nana-Ama Danquah (Willow Weep for Me), Ghanaian American editor of this volume for Akashic Book's long-running Noir series. Hardly an endorsement for tourism, this spine-chilling 13-story collection offers an opportunity to "consider the context, beware...
*STARRED REVIEW A dead woman opens Catherine Adel West’s startling, haunting debut. Two fathers, two daughters, and the building that is Chicago’s Calvary Hope Christian Church will unravel her unfortunate murder, revealing generations of secrets and violence that culminate in young Ruby King cradling her mother...
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, his Sherlock Holmes legacy comprised four novels and 56 stories. Sherlock has since become an unstoppable literary institution, proliferating across mediums; although his archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, only appeared in six of Doyle’s original works, his own...
Jenny Torres Sanchez’s latest doesn’t let up – beatings, rape, murder, and still more violence looms. Marisa Blake may be a relative newbie narrator, but her thoroughly bilingual ability ensures a fluent, heart-thumping listen following three teens on the run from their gang-controlled Guatemalan village...
Both Susan Dalian and Jay Aaseng are relatively new narrators, but theirs is no novice performance of historical romance novelist Alyssa Cole’s first thriller. The pair alternates bearing witness to the aggressive gentrification erasing a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood by wealthy white families and investors. Dalian’s...
*STARRED REVIEW Spare and devastating, At Night All Blood Is Black by French Senegalese author David Diop is a bone-chilling anti-war treatise. He chooses as backdrop a little-known chapter of World War I annals, when the French government drafted some 200,000 soldiers from its colonies, including Senegal....
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Junja was a “real” mermaid, a Korean haenyeo – one of the world-renowned freediving women who gather sea life – of Jeju Island. By 2001, she’s spent most of her life as “a pillar of the Korean American community in...
*STARRED REVIEW Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey makes both her prose and narrating debut with a startling memoir that alchemizes neverending trauma into an exquisite memorial. On June 5, 1985, Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was murdered by former stepfather Joel Grimmett on Atlanta’s Memorial...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, the Galvin family seemed perfect. Father Don's work with the Air Force brought the family to (coincidentally, presciently named) Hidden Valley Road in Colorado. There, mother Mary oversaw the raising and nurturing of their dozen children – 10 boys and...
Hideo Yokoyama (Seventeen) might not yet have a following in the U.S. like some of his compatriot mystery writers – Keigo Higashino and Natsuo Kirino, for example – but the acclaim he's earned in his native Japan will likely spread to English-language readers. With Jonathan...
The genre-hopping, award-winning Mexican writer, poet, musician, and teacher Julián Herbert made his English-language debut with Tomb Song, an autobiographical novel focused on his relationship with his late mother, a prostitute dying of leukemia. His nonfiction The House of the Pain of Others is a hybrid...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut collections rarely prove even in quality and efficacy, which makes Jenny Bhatt's 15 compelling stories in Each of Us Killers even more memorable. Peripatetically spread across continents, Bhatt's characters are often caught between expectations, desires, and boundaries. Bhatt opens with a bang – literally. In...
Akutagawa Prize-winning Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman, 2018), with her lauded, chosen translator Ginny Tapley Takemori – two short stories and now two novels thus far – returns for more societally defiant, shockingly disconnected, disturbingly satisfying fiction. At 11, Natsuki is already aware she doesn’t fit...
