Making her American debut in translation, Korean writer Han presents a spare novel in two distinct parts seemingly set 15 years apart. Part 1 focuses on two children among 35 fifth-grade students as a new year begins in March 1998 (Korean schools restart in spring). Mia...
Once upon a time, Fern and Edgar were impoverished young rebels in love, proving their independence from the vast wealth of their respective families. Eventually, as their own children arrived, they settled into their roles as a "son and daughter of ease and plenty" in...
Two young white men from disparate, dysfunctional family backgrounds meet in college, bond over an obsessive devotion to black music, and create an in-demand production studio in Brooklyn. Their pièce de résistance is a clever hoax: an outdoor recording of a singer that’s remixed to...
Ever since she was a child, Janie Chang was steeped in family tales she inherited from her parents about the generations that came before. For decades, she remained the family’s repository until, at age 53, she presented the world with her debut novel, Three Souls,...
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...
Equal parts romance, fairy tale, horror, history, travelog, and treatise on the transformative power of storytelling, Indra Das’s debut combines a dual narrative about the developing relationship between two strangers with a fantastical tale set seemingly long ago. One December evening in Kolkata, Alok, a history...
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...
'Olive Witch' is the memoir of an outsider on a quest for belonging “bow echo,” the very first words of Abeer Y. Hoque’s raw, unblinking, urgent-in-these-times memoir, Olive Witch, is an easy-to-miss clue. Followed by a temperature (73°F) and what looks like a diary entry, the...
*STARRED REVIEW In rural North Dakota, Landreaux and Ravich are friends and neighbors, further bound by their wives who are half sisters. With a single gunshot, their lives change forever, when Landreaux aims at a buck at the edge of a field bordering both properties and...
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 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...
Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
Beloved novelist Gish Jen (World and Town, 2010) expands on the East-West cultural paradigm she applied to examining art and culture in her previous nonfiction work, Tiger Writing (2013), to see “what it can show us about the world.” As the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants,...
Well holy, moly! How did a dozen years fly by so quickly?! San Francisco indie press Immedium’s 12-part Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, written by founding publisher and author Oliver Chin, comes full circle with a final, rousing cock-a-doodle-dooooo!! Mama and Papa welcome Ray to their flock, earning his name...
From our northern neighbors comes the story of Irene Couchie Dupuis, co-author Dr. Jenny Kay Dupuis’s grandmother, who at 8 years old, was forcibly removed from her home by the Canadian government and sent to a faraway residential school with her two brothers. The strict nuns...
When Sofia’s bouncing ball knocks over her mother’s purse, what spills out is more than just the usual keys and wallet – she finds proof that her mother is a registered ALIEN, “¡una extraterrestre!” She’s even more surprised when her mother confirms that the card...
*STARRED REVIEW In the fourth – and most entertaining – of the updated-by-famous-contemporary-authors "Hogarth Shakespeare" series (which also includes Jeannette Winterson's The Gap of Time, Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name, and Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl), The Tempest gets reset to an Ontario theater festival and a correctional...
"I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural," bestselling author Marjorie Liu told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2015 interview. "I wanted to...
*STARRED REVIEW Walter Forrester, a self-described "stubborn old man" without living relatives, contacts Alaska museum curator Joshua Sloan with an offer to donate numerous effects of his great-uncle Lt. Col. Allen Forrester and Forrester's wife, Sophie. In 1885, Allen Forrester embarked on a formidable mission to chart...
