*STARRED REVIEW In a Manhattan hospital, two women are each pregnant – one obviously, the other not yet visibly. Lore arrives with no partner, no friends, and no support, but she is armed with a several-page birth plan with which she expects to control the...
In a tiny Indian village, Anil and Leena are constant childhood companions in spite of their vastly different backgrounds. Anil, a member of the farming community's most important family, is destined for a prestigious medical residency in Dallas. Leena, the only daughter of a modest...
Although he was a 1999 national writing-competition winner at 17 and runaway bestselling novelist a year later, Shanghai-based Han couldn’t finish high school. His subsequent rants against the education system, standardized testing, and corrupt bureaucracy earned him widespread acclaim. At 34, he has added rally-car racing...
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...
Inspired by his grandparents' love story, meticulously recorded in his grandfather's extant letters (his grandmother's replies were sunk), Chris Cleave’s latest feels like his gentlest – in spite of the backdrop of World War II. At the novel's core is privileged, headstrong Mary North, who signs...
*STARRED REVIEW Two hundred fifty years ago in what is modern-day Ghana, two half-sisters are each given a special stone by their mother. Effia marries an Englishman and lives in the ignominiously named Castle, the center of the African Gold Coast slavery trade. Esi is temporarily...
The Hogarth Shakespeare series—“Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers” – continues with three additional releases in 2016: Jacobson’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Anne Tyler’s reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew in June’s Vinegar Girl, and Margaret...
Descended from a noble samurai family, 12-year-old Yuriko Ishikawa enjoys a privileged life in Hiroshima, Japan. While World War II rages on multiple continents, for now the seventh-grader exists in relative peace. Even when she's at school, with U.S. B-29s flying overhead, her legs wobbling...
*STARRED REVIEW "The first thing you're going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?" Keep wondering: Riley Cavanaugh isn't answering. Riley is gender-fluid, information only Riley's psychiatrist is privy to, while Riley's conservative congressman father and teacher mother...
*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 British-born of Welsh and Chinese parentage, Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl, 2007) has lived stateside since 1992, but this is his first U.S.-set title. In it he explores the history of his adopted home in four sections. In “Gold,” he links the completion of...
*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...
