Missing children loom in Yiyun Li’s latest novel, her second since her teenage son’s tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur “genius” Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her...
Indonesian-born, Singaporean-domiciled Clarissa Goenawan (Rainbirds) takes her sophomore title back to a death in remote Japan. This time, death arrives via suicide, claiming the titular Miwako, an enigmatic university sophomore who disappears without notice, and is found only after death. Desperate to comprehend her fatal...
After a decade together, Oscar and Mina married, but on their wedding night, Mina downed all the pills she could find, yet somehow lived. Six months later, she’s walking across George Washington Bridge. She’s already sent one of her purple flip-flops into the dark below...
Two years after the original 1968 publication in Japan of Life for Sale, which opens immediately with a young man's failed attempt to die, Yukio Mishima (Star) led an unsuccessful military coup d'etat that ended with his highly publicized, gruesomely violent ritual suicide. Just 45...
Chen Hang is facedown in the bathtub when his wife, Jia Jia, discovers his naked corpse. Married for four years, their intended “lifelong partnership” didn’t include love, at least not for each other. After vomiting her “insuppressible resentment and disgust,” Jia Jia finds a pencil...
Yes, it's almost two inches thick and more than 400 pages, but that shouldn't deter readers from procuring this book promptly. Chan Ho-Kei's second thriller available in the U.S., Second Sister, is virtually irresistible, with twisty-turny, didn't-see-that-coming manipulations guaranteed to keep readers wide awake into...
Originally from Somalia, Mugdi and Gacalo have now spent the majority of their lives in Norway, where they’ve been productive citizens, raising two children. Their quiet, middle-aged calm is shattered when their son Dhaqaneh commits a suicide bombing in Somalia. Gacalo’s only way forward after the...
Boratin is "back at zero" since his unsuccessful suicide has landed him in a hospital bed instead of Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait. He's broken a rib but lost his memory. Strangers – even though they aren't – assure him he's "a brilliant singer and songwriter" for...
“Elsa Weiss left no testimony behind” when she jumped to her death some 30 years ago. She remains a recorded name, one of the 1,684 Jews on the infamous Kastner train that left Budapest, Hungary, in June 1944; she was among the 1,670 passengers to...
This English-language debut from French writer/filmmaker Valérie Mréjen opens with a nameless suicide: a man “decides he’s old enough” and replaces the disco ball with rope. The story, however, begins with a divorced father who determines that his children are lacking suitable New Year’s Eve...
Sometimes, pushing "stop" before a book's end might be the best course of action. Seasoned reader Sneha Mathan provides her usual nuanced, affecting narration throughout the 14 hours here, yet even her resonating performance can't prevent the frustration of a stupendous story that veers fatally...
This is the second of a two-part series. Click here for Part I. Last week, we shared a baker’s dozen of titles by Asian women writers, made accessible by dedicated, invaluable translators who continuously, miraculously enable anglophone readers in discovering, enjoying, and sharing books from around...
“It is always funny to me when I show up to readings and people expect me to be my characters”: Q&A with Carrianne Leung She arrived in Toronto at age 6, when her family immigrated from Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. At 7, they moved to...
*STARRED REVIEW Toronto’s suburban Scarborough becomes home to diverse families ready to build a neighborhood together. Initially, everyone invited everyone else to “planned things like fireworks and barbecues,” observes 11-year-old June – the only daughter of Hong Kong Chinese immigrants – until “people decided who their...
*STARRED REVIEW “My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent,” Yiyun Li’s son introduces her to his kindergarten class. “Thank you my dear,” she responds, “but I still make a living by writing in English.” Despite significant literary accolades, hers is not...
Hillary Huber takes on human and canine characters with mindful, measured narration. The woman – an unnamed writing professor – lost her best friend and mentor to suicide. When she's summoned postmortem by Wife Three (Wife One is a friend, Wife Two not at all,...
*STARRED REVIEW Leigh and best friend Axel "figure out what the other person's feeling" by asking "'What color?’": "carbazole violet" for silence, "burnt orange" for anger, "Prussian blue" for hurt. Their unexpected first kiss sets off a "whole goddamn spectrum" of feelings Leigh doesn't have time...
Jule West Williams is "the kind of woman it would be a great mistake to underestimate." Her background might be imagined, but the self-assessment is exact. Her invented 10-year "highly unusual education" – not unlike the epic journeys of white hetero heroes, which she both...
Helen receives a call from her "Uncle Geoff" (although she's unsure of how they're related) that her 29-year-old adoptive brother has killed himself. Both Helen and her brother were adopted as babies from Korea by a white – some might add willfully culturally illiterate –...
'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...
