In 1947, as Britain withdrew from India, it left in its wake a trail of vicious slaughter. British Iranian debut novelist Melody Razak introduces the (mostly) Brahmin residents of Delhi’s Pushp Vihar – “the House of Flowers” – whose lives become the tragic microcosm of...
Egyptian American actor Amin El Gamal and Palestinian American actor/writer/director Lameece Issaq reunite here as hopeful lovers: 15-year-old Subhi, a prodigious mechanic, and 13-year-old village girl Shams. Palestinian writer/architect Suad Amiry, acclaimed for her memoirs and other nonfiction, debuts her first novel, inspired by the...
*STARRED REVIEW Egyptian artist and writer Deena Mohamed deservedly won the Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival for Shubeik Lubeik, the title explained as “a fairy tale rhyme that means ‘your wish is my command’ in Arabic.” Mohamed herself...
*STARRED REVIEW Sarayu (just Sara at her English university) has a scholarship so tight that she dreams of telling her benefactor how “an extra hundred pounds would make not the tiniest difference to his life but would transform [hers].” She finds comfort – not to mention...
*STARRED REVIEW Eduardo Halfon (Mourning; Monastery) has published a dozen books in Spanish; four are currently available in English translations. Seeming to challenge his substantial output, Halfon explained in a 2015 comment to Shelf Awareness, "I'm only writing one book, and everything I publish along the way is just...
Naz Kutub commingles the preposterous and poignant, heightened with myths of lost love. Shawn K. Jain is a sensitive cipher, opening with Kutub’s author’s note that includes content warnings about abuse and expulsion, both of which happen to Sy, the 17-year-old Muslim Indian gay son...
Palestinian American Lameece Issaq expertly ciphers debut-novelist Peter C. Baker’s quartet with equal conviction beyond geographies, genders, and backgrounds. In Rome, Amira – born Maria, now a convert to Islam – works in a shop and returns to an empty apartment because her immigrant husband...
*STARRED REVIEW Award-winning Noah Van Sciver shares in his author’s note he was born into an LDS family descended from a husband of Brigham Young’s daughter, Elizabeth. After his parents’ divorce when he was 12, he began to learn “about Joseph Smith and everything that [his]...
“I wanted to write a history book in disguise,” journalist and professor Sandy Tolan announces, “and to make it feel, throughout, like a good novel. Even though the story is true.” Tolan voiced his original; here Rami Medina makes his audiobook debut: his rich, youthful...
History alchemized through the Neal Bascomb lens – Russian battleship Potemkin, WWI prison camp, Nazi Germany – is a guaranteed thrill-ride; his latest takes readers into the speediest cars of the 1930s. Adapting Faster for younger audiences, Bascomb details a prominent Nazi upset played out...
Three boys – Youssef, Iseul, Dayo – are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers – from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria – are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys’ adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi...
*STARRED REVIEW Sneha Mathan returns for her third outstanding collaboration with Thrity Umrigar, their shared Indian heritage again enhancing their author/narrator symbiosis. Accents, genders, ages, backgrounds, and emotions abound, but Mathan embraces diverse characterizations with effortless ease. In a remote Indian village, a young Hindu widow has...
Family Album, from award-winning author Gabriela Alemán, is a shrewd, beguiling collection. In eight genre-defying stories, the Brazil-born, Ecuador-based Alemán deftly confronts push-button topics like colonialism, identity, and religion. Dick Cluster, who translated Alemán's novel Poso Wells (2018), returns here with Mary Ellen Fieweger to provide...
Canadian artist Jessica Campbell (XTC69) introduces Rave with a provocative epigraph from controversial televangelist Pat Robertson that condemns feminism as "anti-family ...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Aidan Kelly persuasively transforms Claire Keegan’s brilliantly polished story into a gorgeous treasure. Adapting the lilting rhythms of Keegan’s Irish-accented English, Kelly utterly embodies local coal man Bill Furlong making his delivery rounds as the Christmas holiday approaches. A devoted husband and father of...
The second of Veera Hiranandani’s novels with geneses in the award-winning author’s Indian Jewish family history is ideally paired with versatile Priya Ayyar. For Hiranandani’s The Night Diary, Ayyar persuasively drew on her own South Asian heritage. Here Ayyar ciphers Hiranandani’s maternally-inspired latest, channeling her...
Photographer/psychologist/author Mikołaj Grynberg is best known in his native Poland for his documentary nonfiction featuring his generation of Polish Jews, born after the Holocaust and raised by survivors. Grynberg turns to fiction for the first time with I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One...
Graphic titles about Quakers aren't exactly a hot topic – or are they? This season brings two Quaker-related comics in quick succession: David Lester's Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay and this, Dash Shaw's Discipline, a haunting fictionalization of a teenage Quaker Civil War soldier. Quakers...
No one knows what happened to the Ark of the Covenant, the legendary vessel holding Moses' engraved Ten Commandments, but "archeologists, mystics, and adventurers still seek for it in vain," explains Eisner-winning comics creator Rutu Modan in an introductory note to her intriguing graphic title...
*STARRED REVIEW Benjamin Lay, small in stature with dwarfism, was a monumental historical figure almost lost until historian Marcus Rediker published The Fearless Benjamin Lay (2017), which returned Lay to prominence as "the first revolutionary abolitionist." Canadian artist David Lester energetically distills Rediker's biography into a...
