At the core of Shobha Rao’s magnificent and heart-wrenching debut novel is a unique friendship forged between two young women from a small Indian village. Poornima and Savitha’s bond sustains them despite insurmountable odds; their first obstacle is simply being born into a community that celebrates the births of sons but considers daughters as objects to be married off as soon as possible.

After 15-year-old Poornima’s mother dies and the traditional year of mourning has passed, her father contacts the local matchmaker to find her a suitable husband. At the same time, Poornima meets Savitha, who is a year older than Poornima and from an even poorer family. With three younger sisters, a chronically ill father and a mother who cleans houses, Savitha is forced to scour the garbage dumps daily for food, or perhaps something to sell.

Poornima’s father, a sari weaver, is looking for someone to sit at his dead wife’s loom to help increase his output, so Savitha fills that position and becomes Poornima’s close friend. Despite her dire circumstances, Savitha is full of joy and hope—feelings that Poornima has all but forgotten.

When a probable match for Poornima is found in a distant village, the girls plan ways to stay in touch after the marriage. But suddenly Savitha becomes the victim of a horrific crime, and she disappears—without telling Poornima where she is going.

Rao fills the second half of her captivating novel with the devastating circumstances that engulf these young women over the next several years. From extreme cruelty to kidnapping and entrapment in a sexual slavery ring, each traumatic experience keeps them separated by thousands of miles, and finding a way to meet again seems impossible.

Girls Burn Brighter focuses an enlightening lens on contemporary headlines that often seem abstract. Readers of Rao’s vital, vibrant novel will not soon forget these two strong, driven young women.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Shobha Rao on Girls Burn Brighter.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In their debut novel, Akwaeke Emezi offers a haunting yet stunning exploration of mental illness grounded in traditional Nigerian spirituality. This semi-autobiographical work centers on Ada, a Nigerian girl of Igbo ethnicity whose nature is both human and divine. She was born with multiple selves, each under the domain of a different ogbanje, dark spirits of the Igbo belief system.

Though claiming dominion over Ada’s body and soul, the ogbanje lay relatively dormant until she moves from Nigeria to a small town in Virginia for college. While there, a violent sexual encounter with an Eritrean-Danish romantic partner unleashes Asughara, the mischievous, hypersexual and most dominant of the ogbanje. Controlling Ada’s thoughts and actions, Asughara sends Ada on a descent toward insanity that includes self-mutilation, multiple lost relationships and ultimately a total loss of self-control.

Ada’s story is told by her multiple selves through alternating chapters. Employing precise and poetic yet accessible prose, Emezi brilliantly crafts distinct voices for each of Ada’s selves and puts them in conversation with each other. The multiple perspectives and swift pace of the prose lead to calculated confusion in the reader that mimics the movement of Ada’s consciousness. As such, Emezi’s particular use of structure and language allows the reader to not only witness but also experience the battle of incongruent identities that define Ada’s mental instability.

Emezi’s fusion of traditional Nigerian spirituality and Western understanding of mental illness is well executed. They treat the ogbanje not as novelty or fantasy, but rather as legitimate sources of Ada’s strife. They balance multiple lands, ethnicities, perspectives and belief systems with the ease of a writer far beyond their age and experience. Freshwater is a brutally beautiful rumination on consciousness and belief and a refreshing contribution to our literary landscape.

Asymmetry, Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday’s debut, is a pair of novellas with a unique narrative shift. What begins as the story of a 25-year-old editorial assistant in early-2000s New York turns into the tale of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow on his way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

In Folly, the opening novella, Ezra Blazer, a novelist in his 70s who suffers from many ailments, passes on his knowledge of books and music to Alice, an editorial assistant with whom he is having an affair. In her spare time, Alice writes about “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.” In Madness, the second novella, economist Amar Ala Jaafari experiences firsthand the war and dictatorships that Alice writes about, especially during flashbacks to war-torn Iraq and when he encounters the casual racism of border control agents.

The first section of Asymmetry feels sketchy, but the novel gains considerable momentum in Madness. The prose becomes poetic and precise, as when Halliday writes that the bustle in Heathrow “had a kind of prolonged regularity to it, like a jazz improvisation that, for all its deviations, never loses its beat.”

Both novellas deal with insecurity and death, and Halliday draws connections between the two seemingly disparate stories in many ways. For example, in Madness, Amar refers to Saul Bellow’s line from Humboldt’s Gift: “Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” The same reference appears in Folly.

In a third and final section, wherein the two novellas come together, Ezra tells an interviewer, “We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium.” Asymmetry is a thoughtful look at many forms of disorder and the eternal struggle to reconcile them.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Critics claim that stories about adultery are going out of style. Contemporary adultery is so commonplace and banal that no one’s interested. Does any 21st-century woman stand to lose what poor, dumb Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina did back in the day? With Jamie Quatro’s stunning The Fire Sermon, the answer may not be as simple as we suppose.

Margaret Ellmann is a writer and amateur theologian. Brought up as an evangelical Christian, her faith is real and important to her, and thus a bit vexing. It keeps her tethered to a man who, though somewhat repulsive as a lover, is a great father, provider and citizen. Maggie would adore her two lovely kids whether she was devout or not. They are teenagers when she starts to correspond with a poet named James Abbott. Their correspondence—handwritten letters and email—is heady, with shared intelligence and enthusiasm.

Maggie and James meet at a conference in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Later, they meet again at a conference in Chicago. This time, James’ wife isn’t around. Neither is Maggie’s husband. She will spend the rest of her life wondering just how what happened could have happened. As her kids grow up and leave home, as her hair turns gray, as her husband starts to slip gently into dementia, Maggie will wonder what her affair meant and how it fits into her relationship with God. Could it be that her out-of-control passion for James was just a simulacrum of the passion she should have for God? If it was, was it a sin? Would God have understood if she’d run away with James? After all, Buddha’s Fire Sermon teaches that everything is burning, and to understand this is a path to enlightenment.

These questions aren’t the usual ones you see in a contemporary novel, and they make The Fire Sermon gripping.

Tackling life’s biggest question is an ambitious goal for a first novel—but Thomas Pierce, one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 recipients, does it with aplomb. Set in the near future, The Afterlives is a mordantly funny and deeply human look at one man’s quest to find out what happens after we die.

Jim Byrd has firsthand experience with death. His heart stops momentarily when he is only 33, but all he remembers is darkness. Ever since, Jim has wondered what that meant. Soon after, at a local restaurant, two more life-changing events happen: Jim reconnects with a high school girlfriend, Annie, and hears a disembodied voice that might be a ghost. As he and Annie fall in love, Jim draws her into his investigation of the voice, a search that uncovers a century-old love triangle and leads to a mysterious scientist in Little Rock, Arkansas, who might have some answers.

Pierce, a graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program whose short story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, was a literary favorite in 2015, displays a nimble sense of humor and wild creativity in The Afterlives. The near future he conjures here is one believable step from our own, with holograms, called “Grammers,” taking over service jobs and medical devices that can be monitored from your smartphone. The fantastical afterlife elements are grounded in Pierce’s realistic depiction of relationships, from romantic to parental.

“Do you think we’re not supposed to have it? That, to a certain extent, we’re supposed to live in the dark?” Jim asks. Maybe knowledge of life after death is a futile quest, but Pierce’s intelligent debut proves there’s still something to gain from pursuing it.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.