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FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Many voices, one story

Feature by Julie Hale

Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s powerful debut, focuses on eight teenage boxers—all women—who are contending for a title at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. Bullwinkel skillfully shifts points of view throughout this dramatic, often funny novel, developing a unique identity and personal history for each fighter, as she recounts their boxing bouts in wonderful detail. Against the backdrop of competitive sports, Bullwinkel probes the aspirations and inspirations of an unforgettable group of young women. Their differing motivations and struggles with self-determination will stimulate lively conversation among readers.

The Family Izquierdo by Rubén Degollado chronicles the lives of members of a close-knit Mexican American clan in McAllen, Texas. The novel follows the family across three generations as they contend with a curse they believe has caused the physical decline of Papa Tavo, the head of the family, and the marriage woes of Gonzalo, the eldest son. Narrated by different members of the Izquierdo clan, the novel examines family ties and traditions as well as life on the Texas-Mexico border. Degollado creates a rich chorus of voices in this moving, compassionate novel.

Intricate and enthralling, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning takes place in Kolkata, India, following a terrorist attack. Jivan, a Muslim woman, is implicated in the attack and jailed. Lovely, a trans actress, could clear Jivan’s name, but is reluctant to speak up. Jivan’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has been increasingly drawn toward right-wing politics, is also involved in the case. Each character provides a different take on the events at hand, and the result is a nuanced, multilayered tale. The tough questions it raises about justice make Majumdar’s novel a rewarding choice for book clubs.

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange continues the mesmerizing family saga that started with his acclaimed novel There There (2018). He resumes the stories of Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Bear Shield in modern-day Oakland, California, while also detailing the lives of their forebears, including Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Told from the viewpoints of multiple characters, the book weaves together varied voices to create a complex narrative tapestry. Throughout the novel, Orange explores long-standing family conflicts and the enduring legacies of American Indigenous history.

Book clubs will have plenty to debate with these multiperspective and polyvocal novels.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Too Soon

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Hope and laughter animate Betty Shamieh’s debut, Too Soon, which revolves around three generations impacted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a subject so weighty, the novel feels surprisingly effervescent thanks to the witty and resolute women who make up the three main characters—Zoya, Naya and the central protagonist, Arabella.

Stretching from 1948 to 2012, the story takes us from Jaffa to New York. We follow Zoya, a mother of nine, who is forced to abandon her seaside villa to start again as a refugee in Michigan; Naya, Zoya’s youngest daughter, who grows up in the changing Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s; and Arabella, Naya’s outspoken daughter, a Yale graduate who, at 35, has achieved a version of the American dream as a theater director in New York City. These three women, each shaped by their times, have more in common than they would like to admit.

Too Soon begins in New York in 2012 with Arabella, who has just been invited by the Royal Court Theatre of England to direct Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Arabella is lukewarm about the opportunity, but she decides to go for it after her grandmother Zoya sets her up with a boy named Aziz, who is volunteering as a medic on the Gaza border.

In her great-grandfather’s one-room house in Ramallah, Arabella confronts her family’s history and her place in it, while dating Aziz and directing her radical gender-swapped production of Hamlet. Dispersed among Arabella’s angsty chapters are chapters telling Zoya’s and Naya’s stories, recounting their memories of girlhood, lost love, marriage and motherhood. Together, they spin a resonating tale of hope’s potential to survive through terrible atrocity.

Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, and is a founder of The Semitic Root, an Arab and Jewish American theater collective. In her first novel, she has crafted a page-turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.

In her first novel, playwright Betty Shamieh has crafted a page turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

The English Problem

Review by Ember V. Tharpe

“This is how England claimed you—through its rain,” remarks Shiv Advani when he arrives in the country at London’s Victoria Station and finds “thin, fine icicles” pricking his skin. From these opening lines, Beena Kamlani introduces the primary conflict of her debut novel, The English Problem: the tension between the home we are from and the home we have chosen.

This detailed and informative work of historical fiction follows Shiv starting from his childhood in northern India in the 1920s. The doting son of political elites and later a semi-protege of Mahatma Gandhi himself, Shiv is staunchly dedicated to carrying out the wishes of his superiors. But once he arrives in England to study law and support Indian independence, he finds himself in settings where his ambition and his values clash. There lies the crux of Shiv’s journey. Through experiences in shame, violence, love and friendship, Shiv discovers his own moral compass. The direction it takes him in, however, is a departure from his intended path. From the halls of libraries to the quarters of lovers, readers see Shiv confront expectations, disappointment and new personal lessons against a backdrop of actual historical events.

Kamlani’s writing vividly brings us into Shiv’s experience through his senses. That said, the book may appeal more to readers who enjoy history and philosophy, due to its emphasis on both. In particular, conversations with historical figures, including the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster and Gandhi, give readers the opportunity to be immersed in some of the era’s ruling ideas.

The English Problem is a true bildungsroman, as Shiv feels out the lines between desire and obligation, and learns what it means to be at home. Readers will certainly enjoy its language and the subtle complexity of its themes.

Beena Kamlani’s detailed historical debut, The English Problem, follows an Indian man who journeys to England in the 1930s to study law and support Indian independence, but finds himself caught between his ambition, his heart and his values.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Mutual Interest

Review by Laura Sackton

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, is a high-drama romp through wealthy New York society in the early decades of the 1900s. With witty asides and tongue-in-cheek philosophical rambles, larger-than-life characters and vivid, melodramatic scenes, it reads a bit like a dishy soap opera.

Vivian Lesperance is determined to live life on her own terms—no easy task for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. She flees her provincial life in Utica, New York, for the big city, where she meets and marries Oscar Schmidt, a soap company manager in whom she sees a potential future. Vivian and Oscar join forces with Squire Clancey, heir to a fortune, and together they found Clancy & Schmidt, a personal care company that soon rises to astronomical success.

Protected by wealth, Clancey & Schmidt’s three founders form an unusual queer partnership that brings each of them a kind of freedom. Squire, whose eccentric interests and inability to adhere to social norms has left him at odds with his family, and Oscar, who has spent his life in a constant state of fear that his sexuality will be discovered, fall in love. Wrapped up in their newfound happiness, the men hardly notice Vivian, who runs Clancey & Schmidt like an empress while pursuing affairs with women all over the city.

Though we have access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings through Wolfgang-Smith’s omniscient narrator, the three leads remain at a distance. This choice serves the story well, as it’s not so much about individual people as it is about the building of a commercial empire. It’s about consequence and sacrifice, power and secrecy, and how personal choices so often spiral out of control, changing—or destroying—other lives in unexpected ways. 

Though it delves into the very real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Mutual Interest never takes itself too seriously. It’s an unconventional saga about the cost of ambition, the relentless American thirst for success, and the invisible, often strange truths that lurk behind the public facades of people with power. 

Though it delves into real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s witty sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, never takes itself too seriously.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Going Home

Review by Alice Cary

Téo Erskine is a Londoner in his 30s with an orderly, if somewhat aimless, life. As Tom Lamont writes in his smart, warm-hearted debut, Going Home: “He had been careful to arrange a life in which he could leave obligations at the door of his flat, next to the coins he saved for Ben’s poker nights and his shoes that were comfiest for driving.” Téo’s life is completely upended, however, during a weekend back home in his North London neighborhood. He offers to babysit the toddler son, Joel, of his childhood friend Lia, a single mom for whom he has longed for ages, in hopes that his chivalry might gain him favor. Instead, however, an unimaginable tragedy occurs, and Téo suddenly finds himself Joel’s reluctant, bewildered guardian.

The novel focuses on the ongoing question of Joel’s permanent guardianship while showing how the young boy changes the lives of those in his orbit. There’s Téo, of course, who blunders his way through car seat and nappy issues, wondering, “Was it water you did give small children or never gave them?” Téo’s father, Vic, whose life is now shrinking due to the advancing effects of Parkinson’s disease, quickly becomes smitten with Joel, especially since he himself grew up in an orphanage. Téo leans on his best friend, Ben, for support, but because of Ben’s wealth and self-centeredness, they don’t always see eye to eye—especially after Ben informs Téo that he had a brief fling with Lia. Rounding out this exceedingly well-drawn cast is rabbi Sibyl Challis, who is on probation with her congregation, and questioning her faith in the wake of Lia’s tragedy.

Comparisons to Nick Hornby’s About a Boy are inevitable and well deserved. Going Home overflows with heart, and its characters feel real with their multitude of dreams, fears, serious self-doubts and fierce loyalties. Over the course of a year, Lamont paces events with precision and humor, asking life’s big questions regarding family and friendship, duty and devotion. Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.

Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

The Three Lives of Cate Kay

Review by Stephenie Harrison

The conceit of using a memoir to frame a fictional narrative is not new, but it’s hard to think of an author who deploys the format as intriguingly as award-winning sports journalist Kate Fagan does in her entrancing debut novel, The Three Lives of Cate Kay.

In The Three Lives of Cate Kay’s foreword, readers are informed that the reclusive author of a bestselling trilogy has finally decided to come forward and claim her true identity by sharing her life’s story. While the world may now know her as Cate Kay, she reveals that she was actually born Anne Callahan (known as Annie to her best friend, Amanda), then later changed her name to Cass Ford, before finally adopting her pen name. She warns that the tale she is about to relate is filled with moments of which she’s not proud; nevertheless, she is finally ready to own her truth.

Fagan makes the ambitious choice to share Cate/Cass/Annie’s story as a multi-perspective memoir: Beginning when she was in the fourth grade, Cate’s life is recounted through not only Cate’s own voice, but also the impressions of various individuals whose lives intertwined with hers over the years. The way these independent storylines from disparate points in Cate’s life slowly begin to intersect with one another is magical, sometimes resolving lingering questions and at other times twisting the plot in a startling new direction.

In addition to whiplash-inducing twists, The Three Lives of Cate Kay also packs an emotional punch as Fagan thoughtfully explores complex topics including identity, sexuality, ambition and female friendships. Although the book’s eponymous heroine is a creation of Fagan’s imagination, she is depicted with the nuance and messiness of a real woman. Readers will find that her story is as relatable as it is riveting.

In addition to whiplash-inducing twists, Kate Fagan’s The Three Lives of Cate Kay also packs an emotional punch, and readers will find that Cate’s story is as relatable as it is riveting.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Homeseeking

Review by Thane Tierney

Zhang Suchi and Wang Haiwen, the protagonists of Karissa Chen’s epic debut novel, Homeseeking, have a star-crossed romance that waxes and wanes over decades and continents. Suchi and Haiwen’s story begins when they are children in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1930s; their relationship blossoms into romance in their teens, but is abruptly interrupted in 1947 when Haiwen enlists in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Suchi and her older sister are then sent to Hong Kong to escape the civil war, in which Mao Zedong’s Communists ultimately prevail. Separated by conflicts both internal and external, Suchi and Haiwen sacrifice their youthful dreams to build parallel, albeit occasionally intersecting, lives.

Homeseeking is primarily a love story, set against some of the most monumental events of modern Asian history. Its narrative hopscotches back and forth across seven decades, until the estranged sweethearts rekindle their relationship in the unlikely locale of a 99 Ranch Market produce section in Los Angeles. But it’s also a political story, tracing the diaspora of post-World War II mainland Chinese who never expected to wind up in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or America. Finally, it’s a family story, of the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”

Over a decade in the making, Homeseeking embodies the ambitious scope of James Michener’s historical novels or (while not nearly as long) Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Chen’s ability to navigate effortlessly across cultures and eras reflects not only the depth of her research, but also her natural gifts as a storyteller. 

There is one potential stumbling block for a more casual reader: Chen transliterates Chinese words differently under different circumstances. For instance, the character Suchi is also referred to as Suji at different points in the narrative. Chen addresses this in a forward, explaining that her choices reflect different regional pronunciations and romanization styles, and asking readers to empathize with the linguistic challenges her characters, and immigrants across the globe, must navigate. While it may take a few detours to Google to clarify the occasional word or phrase, the book settles into a compelling narrative that fills in most of the blanks contextually. It’s a small price to pay for admittance to such an auspicious debut.

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

Confessions

Review by Sydney Hankin

One abandoned schoolhouse, decades old, stands on the coast of Ireland. Shunned by neighbors, the focus of many a ghost story, and home base for a commune called “the Screamers,” it has also housed three generations of Dooley women, each of whose lives have been knowingly and unknowingly defined by the choices of the others.

The family saga opens with Cora, a 16-year-old left orphaned in New York City after her father is killed at the twin towers on 9/11. In her disorienting grief, with little left tethering her to the city, a letter from her mysterious aunt Róisín in Ireland comes as a surprising relief. Cora leaves all she’s ever known and hops on a plane to join her aunt in County Donegal. From here, author Catherine Airey jumps into Cora’s late mother Máire’s history, and the novel thereafter opens up into an expanse of alternating narratives that stretch back to Ro and Máire’s early childhood.

Airey’s technical ability in Confessions is thoroughly impressive. She writes one section completely in the second person and another solely in letters; she exquisitely captures the attitudes, atmospheres and language of communities spanning five decades and two coasts of the Atlantic; and she tackles mental health, rape, exploitation, abortion rights and political imprisonment with serious and heartfelt tact that never edges into preachiness. The range of what Airey takes on in Confessions is astonishing, and every element is carefully woven together.

Confessions recalls the structural uniqueness of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the generational intertwining of Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis, and the emotional complexity of Sally Rooney’s Normal People; it feels in some way reminiscent of each. This is a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.

Catherine Airey excavates the intertwining stories of three generations of Irish American women in Confessions, a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Definitely Better Now

Review by Maya Fleischmann

New Yorker Emma is 26 years old and has been sober for a year. With her sponsor’s restrictions on dating lifted, she might be ready to meet someone, and Ben, the sweet guy in her IT department, seems too good to be true. Though Emma believes her life is definitely better now, some things remain unchanged, like the way she hides her personality at work, and her mother’s relentless matchmaking. Emma is also hesitant to open up to those in her life about her sobriety, and continues to wrestle with lingering guilt and shame. This makes her workplace even harder to navigate leading up to the annual holiday party, especially because Emma’s been tapped for the planning team—and so has Ben. 

Emma’s quietly resilient and mostly optimistic response to her internal struggles make her a relatable and likable character. Author Ava Robinson astutely captures Emma’s growing awareness of how her alcoholism has affected not only her life but also her relationships with those around her, particularly in her interactions with her meddlesome mother and somewhat distant father, both of whom have been waiting to disclose their own news. 

Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Robinson’s debut may especially resonate with readers who enjoy titles like Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting by Clare Pooley or Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen. Definitely Better Now strikes a delicate balance between humor and gravity. The dynamics of Emma’s support group, with its rules, unspoken signals and understanding, feel authentic. Equally credible and effective is Emma’s adjustment to her newfound clarity, and how she navigates returning to the world of romance, amid gossip and miscommunication. Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself. 

Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
FictionShort StoriesDebut Fiction

The World With Its Mouth Open

Review by Eric A. Ponce

The everyday lives of people are filled with drama, no matter where they live. But in a place like the Kashmir region, wedged between the conflicting political and cultural influences of India, China and Pakistan, that everyday drama plays out under a different, more intense spotlight. In his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people illuminated by that spotlight. Readers will find these characters at various points of crisis, confronted with grief or gratitude, hope or hopelessness, and always the paralyzing freedom of choice.

Writing about drama doesn’t necessitate confessions of undying love or explosions. Rafiq chooses instead to tease out tension from brief, intimate interactions. In the opening story, the protagonist, Nusrat, runs into the brother of an old friend. She engages him in small talk and, as they walk the city streets, she is reminded of the life she lived as a young girl, a life filled with possibility and without the demands of womanhood and marriage. This brief exchange cracks Nusrat open, revealing a vast and paradoxical inner world. Meanwhile, in other stories, the narrators bare their hearts in unrelenting and unashamed grief: In “Flowers From a Dog,” the narrator visits the grave of an ex-lover who left to be with a wealthier man. Over the course of the visit, we experience the speaker’s loss in a poetic, existential lament.

Though politics is never directly discussed, the history and culture of Kashmir set the stage for these poignant tales. “Crows,” finds a young boy who hates studying being beaten by a tyrannical teacher. Knowing the poverty experienced by this boy and his family, and seeing their desperate hope for a better life for him, one can’t help but feel torn: Why should the boy suffer, being abused for not wanting to learn things he doesn’t care for? His naivete and pure longing for joy are heartbreaking. All these stories are, because people are.

Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people living in Kashmir in his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

I Made It Out of Clay

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In her debut novel for adults, I Made It Out of Clay, author and playwright Beth Kander delivers an imaginative and emotionally charged contemporary Jewish fairy tale that explores themes of grief, survival and self-discovery.

For the first time in her life, Eve Goodman isn’t looking forward to the impending holiday season. She’s mourning the recent loss of her father, worried about losing her job and—to add insult to injury—her younger sister’s Hanukkah-themed wedding is scheduled for Eve’s 40th birthday. A wedding to which terminally single Eve defiantly RSVP’d saying she’d be bringing a date. In short: Eve’s life is a giant mess.

Everything changes, however, when a disturbing incident reminds Eve of the old legends her bubbe used to share about golems, fierce protectors of Jewish people made from clay who will obey their creator’s every command. Following a drunken night out and a failed attempt at inviting her dreamy next-door neighbor to the wedding, Eve sculpts a golem of her very own. At first, it seems like Eve’s golem is the answer to her prayers, but she soon finds herself questioning whether she has created the perfect man—or the perfect monster.

Kander’s spirited writing is clever and funny, but despite the romantic elements, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex than a Jewish Bridget Jones’s Diary with a fantastical twist. The focus is on Eve’s grief at her father’s loss and resulting estrangement from her family, and Kander does not shy away from depicting antisemitism. The result is a provocative, multifaceted narrative that, while entertaining and ultimately uplifting, also unsettles at times, but is all the better for it.

Though entertaining in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex, following a Jewish woman grieving the loss of her father who creates a golem when she can’t secure a date for her sister’s wedding.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Libby Lost and Found

Review by Melissa Brown

We find out who we are through our favorite books, especially the ones we read as kids. Books can give us a place to hide or a place to be braver than we ever would be in real life. This is abundantly true for Stephanie Booth’s two like-minded protagonists in her debut novel, Libby Lost and Found, which takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, from New Jersey to Colorado and through a magical forest where the protagonists of a beloved children’s series are stuck. 

The Falling Children series, and the mystery surrounding the identity of the series’ author, have whipped the world into a frenzy akin to Pottermania. But the anonymous author, Libby Weeks, is in trouble. Libby’s fictional (and only) friends—her characters Benjamin, Huperzine and Everlee—have been trapped in a forest since the previous book, because Libby can’t seem to write the next installment. It’s not writer’s block, it’s dementia. 

To receive such a diagnosis at 40 has the reclusive Libby coming apart at the seams of her gray sweater. She’s desperate enough to finally answer emails from a passionate 11-year-old fan, Peanut Bixton, who promises she can help save the Falling Children from the evil Unstopping and finish the series. Peanut feels deeply connected to the world Libby created, where anagrams abound, Knock-knock birds tell terrible jokes and toys with damaged souls just need a little love to be redeemed. With the internet clamoring for her blood and threatening to unveil her identity if she doesn’t release the final book, Libby gets on a plane for the first time and flies to Peanut’s quaint hometown. In Peanut, Libby finds a version of her younger self, before her anxieties took over. In Libby, Peanut finds an adult who listens and isn’t keeping secrets from her—at least not on purpose. 

Stephanie Booth’s writing is fast-paced, funny and full of feeling. Readers who enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette will find a story that is equally madcap, implausible and inventive. Libby Lost and Found is a roller coaster ride that does leave the track at times, but Peanut’s dogged youthful enthusiasm carries the day and the plot. As Libby struggles to remember how to dial a phone or button her shirt, let alone what she was planning to write next, her fate, along with the fates of her Falling Children and of Peanut, grow magically, if occasionally predictably, intertwined until the end.

Libby Lost and Found takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, in a madcap, implausible and inventive roller coaster ride about an author and her 11-year-old fan.
FictionPopular FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins

Review by Arlene McKanic

Nayantara Roy’s stunning novel The Magnificent Ruins caused this reviewer to think of two things. The first was my admittedly American view of India as huge, colorful, crowded, astonishingly beautiful and astonishingly ugly, unbearably hot or tortured by monsoons, with bitterly contentious politics, mouthwatering cuisine, a deeply entrenched caste system and a patriarchy so oppressive that it’s often fatal to girls and women. In The Magnificent Ruins, all of this turns out to be true.

As the novel went on, the second thing I thought of was Eminem’s song “Kim,” where he fantasizes about murdering his wife and stashing her body in the trunk of his car. This is because the Lahiris, the family at the heart of the book, are nearly that unhinged in the way they treat one another.

The book is mostly narrated by one of the Lahiris, Lila De. An editor in New York City, she was born in Ballygunge, Kolkata, and raised in her family’s mansion, a relic from the time of the British Empire. The Lahiris are Brahmins, and though the women in the family work, the men of the older generations do not; it’s beneath them. They live, more or less, off a dwindling trust fund. When Lila’s beloved grandfather dies, he leaves the great pile of a house—the magnificent ruins—to her. This discombobulates her already fractious relatives. Lila is not only a woman, but a young woman from America. She’s technically not even a Lahiri. When faced with a crisis rite, in this case the elaborate wedding of Lila’s cousin Biddy, things go nuclear.

Yet these people love Lila, and she loves them, and, nearly miraculously, so does the reader. It is a testament to Roy’s discernment and empathy that we never break with any of the Lahiris even as they behave atrociously to each other. Many of us know families like this. Indeed, some of us come from families like this, where white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness. Lila, too, shares her family’s talent for cruelty toward loved ones, but she’s American enough to be in therapy. A deliciously long book, The Magnificent Ruins is riveting from its first page to its last.

Read our review of the audiobook of The Magnificent Ruins.

For the Lahiris, the family at the heart of Nayantara Roy’s deliciously long The Magnificent Ruins, white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness.

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