Best friends can't always be on their best behavior, and, sometimes, even the best days can turn bad in seconds. Prolific author Marilyn Singer (Every Month Is a New Year) captures that push-and-pull in her energetic picture book Best Day Ever!, illustrated by debut artist Leah...
Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...
Mexican poet, writer, and essayist José Emilio Pacheco's novella Battles in the Desert returns in a glorious 40th-anniversary edition, re-translated by Katherine Silver from her own decades-old original. Award-winning author Fernanda Melchor appends an illuminating afterword that contextualizes the coming-of-age classic in the Mexican canon. Carlos, still...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
Sujata Massey introduced feisty Perveen Mistry, India's first female solicitor, in the Agatha Award-winning The Widows of Malabar Hill in 2018. In the meticulously researched and entertainingly executed The Bombay Prince, Massey continues to mine details from the lives of two groundbreaking Indian women – Cornelia Sorabji and...
Renowned for his international travelogues – Pyongyang; Shenzhen; Jerusalem – Guy Delisle now mines his adolescence for a magnetic Factory Summers. Before he became an award-winning graphic auteur, Delisle at 16 worked in a Quebec City pulp and paper mill where his father was an...
China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...
*STARRED REVIEW The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing...
*STARRED REVIEW Women alone populate the extraordinary seven stories in Shoko's Smile by bestselling Korean author Choi Eunyoung, who makes her English-language debut, smoothly translated by Sung Ryu. From daughters to grandmothers, Choi's narrators remain in motion, not only physically but chronologically, each assessing significant past events...
Mettie Ivie Harrison is no stranger to highlighting the complicated intricacies of the Utah Mormon communities in which she lives. Her bestselling Linda Wallheim mystery series unmasked domestic abuse in The Bishop's Wife; anti-LGBTQIA doctrines in His Right Hand; polygamous patriarchy in For Time and All Eternities; immigration...
BonHyung Jeong: Different Countries, Different Cultures, All Human Beings BonHyung Jeong makes her graphic novel debut with Kyle's Little Sister, from JY/Yen Press (June 22, 2021). Jeong's energetic title is a delightful middle-grade story that highlights the universal challenges of growing up, navigating friendships and overcoming a bit...
BonHyung Jeong, a Korea-born, internationally raised and U.S.-educated artist, astutely channels the universal experience of growing up – and sometimes growing away – in her delightfully boisterous middle-grade graphic novel debut, Kyle's Little Sister. For her entire life, Grace Bailey has "not once...
*STARRED REVIEW "Brutal" doesn't convey enough of the utter horror of Mieko Kawakami's sophomore import, Heaven. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, who enabled the stupendous success of Kawakami's English debut novel, Breasts and Eggs, Heaven further confirms Kawakami's superb literary ability to expose and...
Nikita Lalwani's alternating narrators in her remarkable third novel, You People, seemingly have little in common beyond a shared place of employment: a London pizzeria with predominantly undocumented staff. Nia, a 19-year-old Welsh transplant escaping an abusive home life, was asked to leave Oxford University, where...
Yvon Roy's autobiographical Little Victories opens with what must be one of the most charming visual depictions of conception. Mark (Roy's alter-ego) and Chloe's union proves "magnificent": their relationship is joyous, their newborn son the wished-for "mini-me." But 18 months later, Oliver "still hasn't said a...
Small and little do not mean the same thing. Ask the spunky protagonist of debut author Maya Myers's Not Little. Sure, she'll admit, "I am the smallest person in my family." And add, "Even my name is small: Dot." But whether at rest or play,...
Seven stimulating short stories, plus a pithy "reflection" on breasts, comprise Kim Bo-Young's collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, translated from the Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell. Lauded as one of Korea's most prominent science fiction writers, Kim insists her...
*STARRED REVIEW Beyond familial bonds, is a relationship between an almost-14-year-old girl and a 54-year-old man possible? Intriguing Spanish writer Sara Mesa – who presented all manner of inappropriate relationships in Four by Four – continues to explore highly charged power dynamics in Among the Hedges, translated by...
Silvia Moreno-Garcia: On Publishing, Racism, and a "Real Horror Story" Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a literary chameleon, successfully writing across genres, including speculative short fiction (This Strange Way of Dying), historical fantasy (The Beautiful Ones), magical realism (Gods of Jade and Snow) and horror (Mexican Gothic). She's also edited several anthologies, is the publisher of micro-indie...
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexican Gothic) opens Velvet Was the Night with an epigraph quoting a June 1971 U.S. Department of State telegram about the Hawks, a murderous Mexican government-trained "shock group" supported by the CIA. She ends with this final sentence in her afterword: "My novel is noir,...
