Gina María Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances, an imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history.
This is a compendium you can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading, feeling freshly enlightened each time.
Elizabeth Strout’s longtime fans will be delighted by the return of beloved characters in Tell Me Everything, but these very human characters are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.
Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel, Small Rain, follows a poet’s terrifying stay in the ICU, and explores the need for empathy in a fragile world.
Misinterpretation is a compassionate debut, following an interpreter in New York City who struggles to maintain boundaries with her translation clients, including a Kosovar torture survivor named Alfred.
Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.
Bright I Burn is strongly inspired by Ireland’s first condemned witch, whose 13th-century life author Molly Aitkin imbues with a complex and heartbreaking grit.
Black Butterflies follows an artist’s life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, in a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror.
In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
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