Helen Hoang transfers a minor character from her popular 2018 debut, The Kiss Quotient, into the spotlight in her engaging follow-up. Initially introduced as the younger brother of Quotient’s protagonist’s best friend, Khai assumes leading man status here – he’s single, movie-star handsome, successful. He’s...
Fractured families populate Nancy Au’s provocative 17-story debut collection, highlighting disappearing parents – whether by choice or by death – and the children left to endure and survive. Au draws on her Chinese heritage in her narratives. Some of her characters are deeply affected by...
In April 2017, 41-year-old Park died of stomach cancer. His sophomore title was published 17 months later, aided by a close friend for over two decades, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, who played a significant role in deciphering Park’s final handwritten notes in order to get...
*STARRED REVIEW In early 1940s wartime Berlin, an official letter arrives for Otto and Anna Quangel with the unbearable news that their only son is dead. Anna immediately rejects “‘those common lies ...
This is the first of a two-part series. Part II will publish on Friday, August 30, 2019. Before I can name even a single author or title, I must express my constantly regenerating, overflowing gratitude to translators who enable readers anywhere and everywhere to literally experience the...
Once upon a time, Mario Cardoso was "a god beneath the spotlight, a counterculture sex symbol, archetype of the ideal man, Dionysus reborn." With no lack of youthful passion, he quits his architecture studies to join the chorus of a raucous production of Hair and...
By the time Brandon Shimoda’s grandfather died in 1996, he had been living with Alzheimer's for almost 20 years. Shimoda was then a college freshman, which meant he had had little opportunity to know the man without the disease. Reacting to "the loss – the...
Canadian artist Ariane Dénommé opens with, “Thanks Dad, for the stories about Uranium City,” a dedication suggesting some semblance of veracity about the many challenges endured by mining employees in a remote 1970s northern Canada town. The sense of entrapment over 100-day shifts in darkness...
In April 1975, the U.S. implemented Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation of children from South Việt Nam. As the country imploded, 12-year-old Hằng – who looked 8 – and her 5-year-old brother, Linh – who passed for 3 – presented themselves at the airport as...
Septuagenarian Stanley Huang declares he’ll start a foundation to give his name the longevity his body can’t. His second wife Mary has made his comfort her top priority. His first wife Linda Liang left him financially sound, obscuring his inadequacies in exchange for her freedom. Harvard...
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder Without names, these people, this island, could be anyone, anywhere. As fantastical as the premise of her latest anglophoned novel seems, Yoko Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor, 2009) intends exactly that universality. Initially, small things disappeared...
The miracles were many: “born poor and blind in Vietnam on the losing side of a bloody civil war,” Julie Yip-Williams survived her grandmother’s demand to have her killed, escaped on a leaky boat with her family to Hong Kong, arrived as a refugee in...
*STARRED REVIEW Growing up in 1980s suburban Utah, Tunde, his younger brother and their immigrant Nigerian parents hardly resemble the local Mormon majority. Tunde's father blames his accented English for his inability – despite his U.S. engineering degree – to find meaningful employment, eventually attempting a...
*STARRED REVIEW He began life in 1850 as Patricio to his Greek mother, immigrating at two from the island of Lefcada to the Emerald Isle, his father’s birthplace, where he became Patrick. By 19, he landed in New York, made his way to Cincinnati, and married...
Soneela Nankani instills a just-under-the-surface rage in Kat, a biracial Oakland teen who barely escaped being raped by another student, and whose mother sends her to Boston to finish junior year home-schooled by a family friend’s great-aunt. For Robin Thornton, who’s struggling with his transracial...
*STARRED REVIEW A broken-down car on a rural Argentinian road brings together two unlikely father-and-teen pairs. Reverend Pearson should have listened to daughter Leni's warnings about their overused jalopy, but its failure lands them in the garage of El Gringo Brauer and his assistant, Tapioca. Pearson...
The unnamed narrator is 13, raised by two affectionate parents in a comfortable city home where she has her own room. School, swim and dance lessons, a nearby best friend, the sea a short walk away are the life she's known. And then, one August...
The original Japanese title, 春の夢 [Haru no yume], visible in blue on the cover, translates to “spring dream.” “Cherry blossom petals” opens Teru Miyamoto’s latest novel translated into English, which ends (penultimately) with “spring light.” In between, a year goes by that is part dream,...
In Milani’s graphic biography of the iconic Marie Curie, soon-to-be Nobel winner Ernest Rutherford explains the theory of transmutation in less than a dozen panels to Marie Curie’s “interested in science” daughter, Irène – so young, she calls it “tramputation.” That transparent accessibility repeats throughout,...
Happy final Friday of Pride Month. Wow . . . that went by quickly! I have 25 (no lie!) more books on, under, next to, and all around my desk that I will not be covering here, which is actually a good thing, because that’s proof that...
