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FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A woman’s work

Review by Amy Scribner

“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

While Martin’s soaring surgical career takes him around the world, the famous Joan Ashby becomes Joan Manning, a housewife who takes yoga classes and shuttles her boys to school and swim lessons. She tells no one when, during the days while the boys are at school, she comes back to her writing. To her, the act of writing is “exquisitely important, so much like prayer.” Over nearly a decade, she writes a remarkable novel that she feels sure will signal her return as a force in the literary world.

But the time never seems right to publish. Younger son Eric blossoms into a gifted computer programmer who makes his first million (and many more) while still a teenager. Joan finds herself a stranger in her own home when a gaggle of coders move in seemingly overnight, much to Martin’s delight.

In a family of extraordinarily accomplished people, Joan’s other son, Daniel, struggles to find his identity. After showing early promise as a writer, a well-meaning teacher mentions Daniel’s mother’s fame. Daunted, he sets aside his stories and embarks on an ill-suited career in venture capital.

After a breathtaking betrayal threatens to fracture the family, Joan retreats to India and reclaims a room of her own.

It’s almost impossible to believe that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is the first novel by Cherise Wolas, a lawyer and film producer. Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A pulsating prewar New York

Review by Tom Deignan

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, September 2017

New York City on the cusp of World War II is brought to glorious, messy life in Brendan Mathews’ sprawling debut saga. The Dempsey brothers—Francis, Michael and Martin—all left Ireland under clouds of trouble. But Martin has started a new life in New York, marrying into a powerful political family, with ambitions to become a groundbreaking jazz musician. The trouble begins when his brothers come calling, and it becomes clear that the past is about to catch up with the Dempsey clan.

Mathews deftly handles a large cast of characters in The World of Tomorrow. On a collision course with the Dempseys is an IRA killer, an ambitious photographer fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe and a troubled heiress, among others. Perhaps the most vibrant character of all, however, is New York itself. In hard-boiled prose that ranges from gossipy to poetic, Mathews takes us from humble Bronx homes to rowdy Manhattan jazz clubs, from grimy back alleys to palatial Fifth Avenue estates.

Looming over these interconnected lives is the 1939 World’s Fair, held in Queens and seen by many as a light of hope in an increasingly dark world. But just as Old-World troubles follow Mathews’ immigrants to the New World, so will the war in Europe inevitably involve America. Until then, the Dempsey brothers—and all of the characters who’ve become entangled in their lives—may have only one choice: kill or be killed.

The World of Tomorrow is a sweeping, impressive accomplishment. Perhaps it could have been 50 or so pages shorter, and the ghostly appearance of an Irish literary icon may push past the cusp of believability. Still, Mathews has written an insightful immigrant epic, not to mention a first-class literary thriller.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

New York City on the cusp of World War II is brought to glorious, messy life in Brendan Mathews’ sprawling debut saga. The Dempsey brothers—Francis, Michael and Martin—all left Ireland under clouds of trouble. But Martin has started a new life in New York, marrying into a powerful political family, with ambitions to become a groundbreaking jazz musician. The trouble begins when his brothers come calling, and it becomes clear that the past is about to catch up with the Dempsey clan.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Lots of books and a little romance

Review by Amy Scribner

In this charmer of a story, Nightingale Books is in many ways the main character. A beloved if slightly rundown shop run by Julius Nightingale, it is a central meeting place in the British village of Peasebrook. Gossip is exchanged, tea is consumed, and occasionally, books are purchased. When Julius succumbs to cancer, his adult daughter, Emilia, inherits the business.

Julius had impeccable taste in literature, but his bookkeeping left much to be desired. Emilia is left to figure out whether she can keep the store afloat—or if she should sell the property to an eager real estate investor and flee her grief. Even as she grapples with this decision to stay or go, it’s complicated by her deepening friendships with some of the bookshop regulars: the shy but sweet chef Thomasina; the brilliant and bored housewife Bea; and the wealthy lady of the manor, Sarah, who has a secret connection to Julius. There’s also Emilia’s growing attraction to Marlowe, a violinist in the Peasebrook Quartet, of which Julius had been a member.

It truly takes a village for Emilia to untangle her finances, create a publicity campaign to bring in new customers and design a physical makeover that dusts off Nightingale Books but stays true to its history. As she slowly develops a plan to give the shop a new life, Emilia finds her own life in the process.

Veronica Henry is an award-winning romance novelist in her native United Kingdom. In How to Find Love in a Bookshop, her first novel to be released in the U.S., she takes the best of romance novels—the dashing figures, the complicated love triangles—and smartly ditches the clichéd sex scenes and overwrought dialogue. The book is reminiscent of the very best Maeve Binchy novels. It’s an enchanting story about the power of community—and books—to help heal a broken heart.

In this charmer of a story, Nightingale Books is in many ways the main character. A beloved if slightly rundown shop run by Julius Nightingale, it is a central meeting place in the British village of Peasebrook. Gossip is exchanged, tea is consumed, and occasionally, books are purchased. When Julius succumbs to cancer, his adult daughter, Emilia, inherits the business.

FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

The family Mazal

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

It isn’t easy being the youngest child. And for Isidore Mazal, being the youngest is further complicated by the five people ahead of him. The elder Mazal kids are smarter than average—perhaps genius-level smart—and while he’s no slouch, Isidore has yet to skip a grade. He doesn’t love to read and thinks it’s weird when his siblings deploy “hopeful borrowing”—taking a book and hoping the owner won’t notice, thereby making the book property of the borrower.

Sometimes this odd-man-out mentality leaves the 11-year-old ready to run. He’ll pack his things and plot a way to escape from his family. Hopefully they’ll lift their noses from their books long enough to notice he’s gone. But if he isn’t there, who will notice them?

In her first English-language novel, French writer Camille Bordas examines a lost family from its youngest member’s point of view. Isidore observes his siblings at great length. Simone, only 18 months his elder, assigns him the task of writing her biography. It’s a job that requires him to ask many questions of his sister. Isidore extends his examination to others around him and begins to notice the things that go unsaid. His only friend, Denise, is obviously depressed and anorexic. Isidore turns to his German teacher, Herr Coffin, for insight into the field. It turns out Coffin isn’t so wild about teaching—Isidore’s chosen profession—after all. The Mazal family neighbor Daphne Marlott is poised to become the oldest living woman in the world when the two Indian women older than her die. After she becomes his German conversation partner, Isidore learns a long life may not be everything it seems.

Bordas draws complex characters who face the challenging and sometimes mundane issues of daily life. In the process, she prompts readers to look within.

It isn’t easy being the youngest child. And for Isidore Mazal, being the youngest is further complicated by the five people ahead of him. The elder Mazal kids are smarter than average—perhaps genius-level smart—and while he’s no slouch, Isidore has yet to skip a grade. He doesn’t love to read and thinks it’s weird when his siblings deploy “hopeful borrowing”—taking a book and hoping the owner won’t notice, thereby making the book property of the borrower.

FictionThrillerDebut Fiction

On the run from a secret art society

Review by Mari Carlson

“What do you do when the one true thing in your life turns out to be a lie?” Lee Cuddy, the main character in Augustus Rose’s debut novel, spends the book deciding whom to trust. At 17, she steals for friends, but when the friends who’ve been benefiting from her thievery betray her, she’s sent to a juvenile detention center for a crime she ironically didn’t commit. She escapes—into the hands of a nefarious Philadelphia network of Marcel Duchamp fans, The Société Anonyme. She trusts them until she links the glassy-eyed, obliging kids from the mental ward of her detention center to Société Anoyme’s raves. To escape the Société requires all her thieving skills, navigating the Subnet (Rose’s conception of a network akin to Silk Road or 4Chan), urban exploration and her own instinct. Lee becomes an artist herself, as defined by Duchamp: “a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his own way out to a clearing.” A true heroine, Lee forges her own path and finds her own truth.

The story is structured like the Duchamp piece at its center, the elusive “Large Glass.” Like the nine bachelors in the artwork, The Readymade Thief is composed of nine books, with multiple chapters each. Steadily linear in chronology, it manages to digress into quantum and philosophical exploration without losing pace. (Keep up with the discussion using the resources cited at the end.) While much of the action takes place in dark, dirty subterranean spaces, the tone is expansive; Lee’s voice soars, a testament to her male creator.

The Readymade Thief features ingenious, culture-altering teens resembling another recent debut novel, Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn. Rose’s work entertains as well as invites us to think and imagine, as though we’re part of the conceit.

The Readymade Thief features ingenious, culture-altering teens resembling another recent debut novel, Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn. Rose’s work entertains as well as invites us to think and imagine, as though we’re part of the conceit.

FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

A community bound by loss

Review by Arlene McKanic

The little town of Sycamore, Arizona, the locale of Bryn Chancellor’s eponymous novel, is a place where the American Dream goes to die. Many of the denizens are there because of failure: the failures of marriages, families, relationships, careers they thought would be brilliant and have come to nothing. Ironically, they fetched up in Sycamore just to find versions of the same old failures and deferred dreams lying in wait for them. Children who are born there long to leave.

Few know this better than Jess Winters and her mother, Maud, who’ve fled to Sycamore to escape the fallout of a divorce that’s left them struggling both financially and emotionally. When the book opens, Jess is nearly 16 and already wants to be shut of the place where she’s lived for less than 24 hours. Restlessness plagues Jess even when she finds friends and boyfriends and discards them and makes that one last mistake. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that in the first chapter Jess is alive and by the second chapter, set some 18 years later, she’s not.

Much of the rest of the story of Sycamore is told by its women. In scenes that move between 1991 and 2009, we hear from tall, beautiful, fractious Jess; her first bestie, Angie Juarez, who’s blossoming lesbianism was too much for their friendship to bear; Jess’ next best friend, Dani, a brilliant girl whose ambitions are wrecked by betrayal; Esther, the high school teacher turned baker; and Rachel, Dani’s whirligig of a mother. The men around them strive to be decent; they often fail. In one case, the failure can’t be forgiven.

But Chancellor’s compassion for her characters balances their unwillingness to forgive (the event at the novel’s core wasn’t as bad as it could have been, after all) with imperfect impulses to connect and understand. Sycamore is a sad, knowing and timely book.

The little town of Sycamore, Arizona, the locale of Bryn Chancellor’s eponymous novel, is a place where the American Dream goes to die. Many of the denizens are there because of failure: the failures of marriages, families, relationships, careers they thought would be brilliant and have come to nothing. Ironically, they fetched up in Sycamore just to find versions of the same old failures and deferred dreams lying in wait for them. Children who are born there long to leave.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionMysteryLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

The mystery of the map

Review by Sarah Waller

When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

Thirty-something Stella is enduring almost more than she can handle. Complete with a fading workplace affair, annoying appearances by her almost-ex-husband, lunch with her glamorous and successful mother and a museum sponsor who wants to take over the world’s water supply, her week could not be more bizarre—until her coworker Paul is pronounced missing. As Stella begins to solve the mystery behind the map of a historical utopia, she is pulled into the museum’s origins and realizes there was much more to Paul and his work than she knew, with the potential to alter her life and her career as she knows it.

Impossible Views of the World is an original debut ringing with smart prose, engaging humor and cultivated taste. Similar to the brilliance on display in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Ives’ genius is apparent in the intricate way she weaves ironic confession, romantic comedy and artful treatise with explorations into the historic art world. The novel is best read thoughtfully to fully capture the details of Stella’s academic discoveries and the playful writing style incorporated into the banter between the lively characters. Readers are invited into Stella’s mind as she navigates the plethora of emotions that come with an early-30s crisis. Full of intelligence and imagination, this relatable literary mystery will charm even the most apprentice art devotee.

When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionMysteryDebut Fiction

Who killed Lucinda Hayes?

Review by Tom Deignan

Combining elements of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family with Dennis Lehane’s contemporary classic Mystic River, Danya Kukafka’s debut novel is an intricate, seductive murder mystery, in which a single awful crime exposes conflicts and traumas in an entire community.

“When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead,” Girl in Snow begins, “Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.” Thus, Kukafka plunges us into the story: Lucinda is dead, though it turns out this high school beauty is not quite the angel everyone remembers her to be. Then there’s Cameron, the creepy kid next door, who peeked though Lucinda’s windows (and worse), making him a likely suspect in the crime. Told largely over the course of a few winter days following Lucinda’s murder, Girl in Snow unfolds through deftly alternating chapters, through the eyes of many different characters. There’s Jade, an angry misfit with an abusive mother who disliked Lucinda. And Russ, a police officer with secrets. And Lee, another cop and Cameron’s absentee father, accused of his own violent crime.

Digging deeply into each of these lives paints a vivid, compelling canvas. Kukafka makes it seem eminently plausible for several of these characters to have killed Lucinda. “Everyone’s looking for the truth,” Jade thinks at one point. “I’m so afraid I’ll have to pry open its grave.”

Girl in Snow may not quite be perfect. Some sections are a tad breathlessly overwritten, and one (or two) of the many secrets that spill out may stretch the bounds of credulity for some readers. But overall, Girl in Snow is not just an impressive debut but one of the best literary mysteries to come along in some time.

Combining elements of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family with Dennis Lehane’s contemporary classic Mystic River, Danya Kukafka’s debut novel is an intricate, seductive murder mystery, in which a single awful crime exposes conflicts and traumas in an entire community.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

An epic saga begins

Review by Matthew Jackson

When a book is billed as a historical epic set in ninth-century Norway, with the evocative title The Half-Drowned King, there are certain expectations. A book like that should deliver great deeds by hardened warriors, kings cloaked in furs, great feasts, harrowing sea voyages and brutal battles. With this novel, the first in a promised trilogy, Linnea Hartsuyker delivers all of those historical epic goods. Then, she digs deeper.

In the ninth century, Norway is still a fragmented land ruled by many kings, but a prophecy promises that one king will rise to rule the whole land. That king is Harald, an ambitious young warrior whose name rings through history and Hartsuyker’s narrative. Her heroes are two characters playing smaller roles in this saga of kinghood. Ragnvald, the titular half-drowned warrior, is a man driven by a quest to take back his lands from his domineering stepfather Olaf. Svanhild, his sister, longs for a life beyond Olaf’s farm, a life where she’s not promised to a man she doesn’t wish to marry. Everything changes for them when Ragnvald is nearly murdered in an attempt to wipe away his family’s claim to land and title. As Ragnvald fights for revenge, Svanhild fights for freedom, and both end up at the center of history.

Everything you want from a medieval saga set during this crucial period of Norwegian history is here, from massive battles to honor-fueled duels to rituals and supernatural visions. What sets The Half-Drowned King apart is the way Hartsuyker renders it all. Her tales of great Viking deeds are given all of the epic gravity they require, but the character drama is what makes this novel addictive. In Ragnvald we see the proud warrior beset by vulnerability, self-doubt and moral ambiguity, and in Svanhild we see a powerful spirit longing to break free, discovering her own cunning and intellectual ferocity in the process. As they trade off chapters and the story barrels toward clash after clash, the timelessness of the tale becomes clear. Hartsuyker has captured an era with precise, powerful prose imagery, but she’s also vividly envisioned two enduring characters.

The Half-Drowned King is an essential new novel for fans of the medieval novels of Bernard Cornwell, the character-driven Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel or the violent fury of “Game of Thrones.”

The Half-Drowned King is an essential new novel for fans of the medieval novels of Bernard Cornwell, the character-driven Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel or the violent fury of “Game of Thrones.”

FictionDebut Fiction

How the mighty have fallen

Review by G. Robert Frazier

Seventy-two-year-old Johnny Ribkins has a unique gift: He can create maps to places he’s never been and remember his way to other locations by simply referring to the “map” in his mind. If the premise sounds a bit unusual, wait until you meet the rest of the family. First-time novelist Ladee Hubbard has created a collection of misfits like no other in The Talented Ribkins.

Each member of this black family is imbued with their own special ability, whether it’s being able to climb walls, catch any object hurled at them or spit fire. Not exactly Avengers or X-Men material, mind you, but fascinating nevertheless. For a while, Johnny and his extended family attempted to make good with their abilities by forming the Justice Committee, in which they fought for civil rights in the late 1960s. But their lofty ambitions and less-than-impressive powers proved to be an imperfect and rather ineffective combination.

When the novel opens, the Justice Committee is a long-forgotten dream, and Johnny is a simple antiques dealer, albeit one with an outstanding debt to an old mob boss. Facing a looming deadline to pay up or else, Johnny embarks on a haphazard trip across Florida to locate and retrieve the loot he and his brother Franklin stole and hid in the wake of their failed super group. The journey takes Johnny back to his old stomping grounds and to fresh encounters with forgotten relatives, as well as relatives he’s never met, such as his teenage niece Eloise, who joins him in his misadventures. Eloise, in turn, discovers her place in this bizarre world with each new hole, each new memory that Johnny digs up.

Hubbard’s tale ultimately transcends race, class and time itself as the pair discovers the heart of who they are.

Seventy-two-year-old Johnny Ribkins has a unique gift: He can create maps to places he’s never been and remember his way to other locations by simply referring to the “map” in his mind. If the premise sounds a bit unusual, wait until you meet the rest of the family.

FictionSuspenseDebut Fiction

Heart of darkness

Review by Trisha Ping

Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done. In August 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found bludgeoned to death by axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Who killed the Bordens, and why? Evidence pointed to Andrew’s adult daughter, Lizzie, but she was acquitted. Popular myth never let her quite off the hook (you’ve heard that eerie nursery rhyme). But was she really guilty?

See What I Have Done is interested in this question, but perhaps not as much as some readers might be. Schmidt eschews the “whodunit” format to focus on the warped relationships and deep resentments that hover over the house in Fall River. Told in the voices of Lizzie; her older sister, Emma; the family maid, Bridget; and a mysterious stranger named Benjamin, who comes to town with LIzzie’s sinister Uncle John, the novel turns that August afternoon around and around, examining it in microscopic detail from these four separate angles like a jeweler making an appraisal of a singularly dark gem. Lizzie and Emma have a codependent yet contentious relationship, and neither can stand their stepmother. Bridget can’t get over Mrs. Borden’s refusal to let her go home to Ireland. And Uncle John is holding a grudge against his brother, Andrew.

Schmidt sketches the motivations of her characters with subtle strokes, allowing readers to fill in some notable blanks—what is Uncle John’s deal, anyway?—but she leaves little to the imagination when it comes to their physical bodies. The damage done to the Borden parents is described with visceral relish; the scents of vomit, sweat and blood are almost palpable. Like her fellow Australian Hannah Kent, whose debut novel, Burial Rites, also centered on a real-life 19th-century crime, Schmidt conjures the explosive mix of claustrophobia and frustration that life in a small community with a rigid social structure can engender. See What I Have Done is a chilling summer read.

Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done.

FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

Links in a chain

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The lives of four women are at the center of Molly Patterson’s super debut, Rebellion. Although the action covers multiple continents and centuries, Patterson’s tight focus on her characters offer revolutions more personal than political. Each of the main characters reject the expectations of family or society—whether it’s leaving familiar surroundings, embarking on an illicit relationship or simply confiscating a second pair of car keys after being forbidden to drive.

The novel opens in 1999, when Hazel moves into a nursing home and her daughter arrives to close up the family farmhouse in southern Illinois. The novel then shifts back to the 1890s, after Hazel’s mother, Louisa, has left her comfortable family home in Ohio to follow her husband to their new farm. Her sister, Addie, also left home, traveling to China as a missionary’s wife in the years just before the Boxer Rebellion. Fast-forward to the 20th century, and Hazel, newly widowed, is left with the farm while halfway around the world, Juanlan, a young Chinese woman, gives up her career to help care for her father and work in her family’s hotel in a provincial area of China.

Though ties of blood bind most of the women, the thematic connections are even more significant: filial duty, the lure of forbidden love and the changes wrought to the rural landscape by urban development. Hazel, Addie and Juanlan are also drawn into sexual relationships that in turn deepen friendships they have with other women.

The four strands of this novel never really come together, and despite political upheaval, what rises to the surface are the smaller moments that occur between family, lovers and friends. Yet the lack of a tidy ending is actually one of the novel’s strengths. Patterson creates intimate moments that are moving but not manipulative. By not connecting all the dots, she allows her readers to bond more deeply with her characters in this refreshingly unsentimental historical novel.

The lives of four women are at the center of Molly Patterson’s super debut, Rebellion. Although the action covers multiple continents and centuries, Patterson’s tight focus on her characters offer revolutions more personal than political.

FictionSpeculative FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Girls rise up

Review by Stephenie Harrison

For fans of speculative fiction looking for a book that can go toe-to-toe with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic about female oppression and rebellion, look no further: Jennie Melamed’s chilling debut, Gather the Daughters, is the dazzling dystopian narrative you seek.

Spanning a year in the lives of four girls, Gather the Daughters hurls readers deep into the heart of a fringe island community that was founded when modern civilization collapsed and the mainland devolved into a burning wasteland. Theirs is a deeply patriarchal society, where the birth of a daughter is met with tears and girls are taught at a very young age to obey and serve their fathers in preparation for their summer of “fruition,” when they are married off and begin producing children. On the brink of womanhood, our four female protagonists are loath to accept their fate. When one of the girls witnesses an act so horrific it defies comprehension, they decide to challenge the dogma that has ruled for decades. Determined and courageous, the girls begin to question what they have been told, demanding answers and explanations, even if it means ripping asunder the very fabric of their community in the process.

Brutal and bold, Gather the Daughters is beguiling but not for the tenderhearted; its vision of the future is grim, and the realities daughters and wives face are undeniably harsh. For a first-time novelist, Melamed displays remarkable restraint and confidence, masterfully drawing out the mysteries of the island so that the girls’ sense of unease and confusion is perfectly mirrored by readers. The gradual reveal about what is really going is suspenseful and satisfying, and Melamed narrates the tale in dreamy, lyrical prose that provides a heightened contrast to the nightmarish aspects of the girls’ reality. Chilling in tone and fearless in its storytelling, Gather the Daughters is a fierce, feminist battle cry.

For fans of speculative fiction looking for a book that can go toe-to-toe with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic about female oppression and rebellion, look no further: Jennie Melamed’s chilling debut, Gather the Daughters, is the dazzling dystopian narrative you seek.

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