Many of us think of the past as the “good old days,” and for 96-year-old Doris Alm, there is almost a century’s worth of good days to keep track of. Feeling that her end is near, Doris decides to revisit the names in her address book and unload her memories of each person on paper, with the hope that they are passed down to her only living family, her grandniece Jenny, who has loved and admired Doris all her life.
So begins Sofia Lundberg’s The Red Address Book, with a very fragile Doris recalling a life with people long dead. We start in 1928 Stockholm, when Doris is only 10 years old, and move on to her days as a model in Paris in the 1930s, then to New York City, where she hopes to reunite with the love of her life. She later heads to England, where she is rescued off a sinking ship, and finally returns to Stockholm, where she types her final pages for Jenny.
With love and humor, Doris’ stories prove that the good old days are often filled with a lot of regret, pain and heartache. But what the heart chooses to remember is our perseverance through the most impossible of challenges. Just when Lundberg has led you to believe that Doris has said all there is to say, Jenny delivers an ending that even Doris could have never imagined.
Like a cozy conversation with your grandma, The Red Address Book warms your heart and soul.
This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Many of us think of the past as the “good old days,” and for 96-year-old Doris Alm, there is almost a century’s worth of good days to keep track of. Feeling that her end is near, Doris decides to revisit the names in her address book and unload her memories of each person on paper, with the hope that they are passed down to her only living family, her grandniece Jenny, who has loved and admired Doris all her life.
The best retellings of myths and legends create an atmosphere like a dreamscape, faintly familiar in a way you can’t quite place. If you didn’t know it was a retelling to begin with, you might not piece it together until you’ve read the end, but a certain hypnotic sense memory sweeps you along in a way that feels very close to magic.
Everything Under, Daisy Johnson’s spellbinding debut novel, is a magical book in exactly that way. Using the story of Oedipus as a framework, Johnson leaps into an instantly compelling world, crafting a stunning book that’s at once an emotional character study, a meditation on the nature of memory and an examination of gender fluidity.
The novel is a story pieced together by Gretel, a lexicographer who spent much of her childhood with her mother in the canals of Oxford, until one day her mother simply left, sending Gretel off into the world and vanishing. When her mother calls her unexpectedly, Gretel’s past floods her brain, and a search begins for the memories that will unlock the past. It all concerns their last winter together, a runaway boy named Marcus and a strange—possibly imaginary—creature called the bonak.
Everything Under is, first and foremost, a novel of exquisite, heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Johnson leaps confidently and nimbly between present and past, switching narrative perspectives like a master and weaving gorgeous, spooky imagery. It has the effect of bewitching the reader, captivating us until we cannot look away from the dark gifts the novel holds and the lessons it can teach us about pain, time and memory.
Fans of Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer and other modern speculative fiction luminaries will devour Everything Under. This brief, artful novel announces Johnson as a gifted storyteller who’s here to stay, and you’ll be craving the next book by the time you’re done.
The best retellings of myths and legends create an atmosphere like a dreamscape, faintly familiar in a way you can’t quite place. If you didn’t know it was a retelling to begin with, you might not piece it together until you’ve read the end, but a certain hypnotic sense memory sweeps you along in a way that feels very close to magic.
It’s often said that there are two types of stories: A person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. In her debut novel, Sarah St. Vincent goes with option two: Ways to Hide in Winter opens with the arrival of a mysterious man in the Pennsylvania wilderness.
Both hunting season and tourism season are well over when the man, Daniil, stumbles over the snowy threshold of the hostel where Kathleen works. It’s obvious he’s not from the region, but Kathleen, who has chosen her job partly for its isolation, isn’t interested in prying into someone’s past. At 26, she’s been a widow for more than four years and is still recovering from the car accident that killed her husband. She also holds secrets about their marriage that she’s unwilling to reveal.
As she gets to know Daniil, Kathleen grows curious about what caused him to leave Uzbekistan. As she learns about the country’s troubled history, she finds herself unable to continue to compartmentalize her own past. Both Daniil and Kathleen carry the guilt of secrets and betrayal—but do they deserve to? Can you move on from your past after causing or enduring suffering?
St. Vincent, a lawyer who has worked with the Human Rights Watch, has vast experience with these questions, and readers unfamiliar with Uzbekistan’s human rights history (likely most of them) will find this novel especially eye-opening. Ways to Hide in Winter makes it clear that you can hide for a season, but spring thaw will catch up to you eventually.
This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
It’s often said that there are two types of stories: A person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. In her debut novel, Sarah St. Vincent goes with option two: Ways to Hide in Winter opens with the arrival of a mysterious man in the Pennsylvania wilderness.
As a lesbian in the 1920s, Miss Dara knows a thing or two about being an outcast. When she falls in love with her best friend, Dara runs from her hometown and everything she knows to work as a kitchen girl at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas.
Dara works herself to the bone, befriending a black inmate named Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Lead Belly, the soon-to-be famous singer who sings his way to a pardon. Dara lives a lonely life, dodging the aggression of the head cook and burning all the letters from her former lover. Then one day, she receives a marriage proposal from the warden. She decides to settle down with him, despite her heart’s true urgings.
Dara learns to enjoy domesticity and connects with the warden’s two daughters as they grow up. When the warden dies, Dara and her stepdaughters grieve in their own ways. Dara spirals into depression. She binge eats, gains weight and continues to repress her true desire—to be with a woman.
With a lively sense of humor and a great sense of place, tammy lynne stoner’s debut is a Southern novel from a voice that rings true. As Dara navigates these difficult circumstances, she realizes she’s constructed a prison around herself, keeping everyone out. With the help of her stepdaughters, one of whom dresses and presents herself as a man, Dara reclaims her life and comes out to her family.
A novel of exploration, bravery and redemption, with keen insight into race, class, gender identity and social norms, Sugar Land is the story of a woman learning to come home to herself.
This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
As a lesbian in the 1920s, Miss Dara knows a thing or two about being an outcast. When she falls in love with her best friend, Dara runs from her hometown and everything she knows to work as a kitchen girl at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas.
Silicon Valley, with all its excesses, lies at the heart of Kathy Wang’s insightful, witty and acutely honest debut novel of a Chinese-American family in crisis mode.
Patriarch Stanley Huang is dying of pancreatic cancer. His imminent passing is mourned by his two grown children, Kate and Fred; their mother and Stanley’s ex-wife, Linda; and his current wife, Mary. At the same time, each wonders just how their finances might be affected by his will, which has always remained a mystery. Stanley has hinted to Mary that he’s worth millions, but Linda is skeptical since she was the money manager during their marriage and knows that Stanley is clueless when it comes to investing.
Fred, though graduating with honors from Harvard Business School, is mired in a huge investment firm with little room for advancement. He begins to imagine the perks a few million would bring, though his discreet questions about the will are completely ignored. Kate also works for a tech company as a middle manager—and at the moment is the sole breadwinner in her family, as her husband has been on the verge of launching a startup for what seems like an endless number of months. An infusion of funds from her father’s will would obviously be most welcome.
Linda has invested wisely over the years since her divorce from Stanley. She’s financially stable, but she wants to make sure Fred and Kate get their fair share and don’t lose out to Mary, whom Linda knows expects to be handsomely rewarded for caring for her dying husband.
An intriguing side plot explores Linda’s involvement with an online dating site that harbors a global financial scam—one that, coincidentally, Fred barely escapes investing in himself.
Wang also graduated from Harvard Business School and worked in the tech field before deciding to write this engaging blend of family saga and Silicon Valley exposé. In Family Trust, her dissection of the glamorous appeal of this superficial slice of life succeeds on many levels and will appeal to a wide variety of readers.
This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Silicon Valley, with all its excesses, lies at the heart of Kathy Wang’s insightful, witty and acutely honest debut novel of a Chinese-American family in crisis mode.
Art school graduate April May nearly walks past the first robot and dismisses it as another cool New York City thing. It’s the middle of the night, after all. She’s tired, she wants to go home, and there are so many “cool New York City things.”
Then she reconsiders. How sad would it be to ignore the 10-foot-tall sculpture simply because it appeared in the middle of a city where remarkable is the norm? April calls her friend Andy. They make a video and post it on the internet. April goes home and goes to sleep.
She wakes up to a new world.
The video has gone viral literally overnight, and the world wants more of April, and more of the robot-sculpture, which she named Carl. In fact, Carls have appeared throughout the world, and people turn to April for insight. She’s convinced that the Carls exist to unify the world, but others aren’t so sure. When a communal dream travels from one person to the next like an infection, popular opinion becomes further divided. April quickly becomes a pundit—the very sort of person she once railed against in her art and conversation.
“It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it,” April thinks. “The circle jerk of mockery and self-congratulation was so intense I didn’t even notice I was at its center.”
In An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green explores the power of social media. As co-CEO of Complexly, a production company whose work includes the popular YouTube channel Crash Course, Green is well-versed in that realm. He is also known as one half of the VlogBrothers, alongside John Green, his superstar novelist brother and author of such YA bestsellers as The Fault in Our Stars. Green’s debut novel is an adventurous romp that combines science fiction and interpersonal drama to explore identity, relationships, a polarized world and the influence of media and popular opinion. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a fun, fast read that invites readers to contemplate their position in the modern world.
This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Art school graduate April May nearly walks past the first robot and dismisses it as another cool New York City thing. It’s the middle of the night, after all. She’s tired, she wants to go home, and there are so many “cool New York City things.”
In Our House, Fiona Lawson returns home from a long weekend, only to discover movers unloading a van full of another family’s belongings into her tony Trinity Avenue home. Stranger still, her belongings and those of her two sons have vanished, and this new family insists they own the house, although Fiona never put it on the market. From this unsettling scenario, British author Louise Candlish proceeds to masterfully spool out the complicated series of events that led Fiona and Bram, her estranged husband with whom she shares the home in a “bird’s nest” co-parenting arrangement, to reach this shocking moment.
Candlish tells a large part of the story through a podcast called “The Victim,” which Fiona narrates, and through a Word document written by Bram, both in retrospect. The podcast and Word document give the reader the opportunity to hear Fiona’s and Bram’s differing perceptions of the events as they unfold. This narrative structure also allows the reader to feel the full weight of the characters’ emotions, from Fiona’s initial utter perplexity to Bram’s almost fatalistic resignation, and to discover the deep-rooted origins of their relationship’s complexities. Allowing the reader to plumb these depths gives the plot real plausibility. What seems outlandishly far-fetched at first slowly becomes uncomfortably conceivable and makes this novel nearly impossible to put aside.
Candlish is the author of 12 novels, and she makes her U.S. publishing debut with Our House, a frightening journey that will leave readers wondering if this could happen to them. The novel is a clear demonstration of Candlish’s considerable skill as a writer, and is sure to garner a new throng of fans here in the States.
In Our House, Fiona Lawson returns home from a long weekend, only to discover movers unloading a van full of another family’s belongings into her tony Trinity Avenue home. Stranger still, her belongings and those of her two sons have vanished, and this new family insists they own the house, although Fiona never put it on the market. From this unsettling scenario, British author Louise Candlish proceeds to masterfully spool out the complicated series of events that led Fiona and Bram, her estranged husband with whom she shares the home in a “bird’s nest” co-parenting arrangement, to reach this shocking moment.
Take Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, King Lear, “The Jewel in the Crown,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization; pass them along to DJ Danger Mouse for a bit of a mashup; and you’d have a sense of the shape and scope of Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young.
Impressive in its heft (literally, as it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, and figuratively, as it won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for first-time novelists), We That Are Young chronicles the changing of the guard within a family-owned multinational conglomerate, set against the backdrop of the Indian anti-corruption riots of 2011-12.
Much like some of the most thrilling novels of the past decade, We That Are Young relies on individual narratives that are self-serving and suspect. One central element is clear: Its patriarch, Devraj Bapuji, a former prince and founder of the largest business empire in India, is an unsympathetic lunatic. All the central characters—Devraj’s three daughters who stand to be potential heirs (Sita, Radha and Gargi), plus his right-hand man’s two sons (Jeet and Jivan)—are deeply flawed, so it’s a bit difficult to pick a side. Factor in the casual and untranslated bits of Hindi, and this epic novel announces itself from the outset as no beach read or airplane book; it demands (and rewards) one’s full attention.
Like India itself, the novel is beset with contradictions, as impossible wealth and crushing poverty huddle with one another in an uneasy embrace. And while the setting is uniquely Indian, hints of the rising tide of global income inequality are impossible to ignore.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted of the rich nearly a hundred years ago, “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” And yet, when the rich are turned loose against one another as they are in We That Are Young, they are still beleaguered by, and often powerless against, the same forces of human nature that bring out our best and basest selves.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Take Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, King Lear, “The Jewel in the Crown,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization; pass them along to DJ Danger Mouse for a bit of a mashup; and you’d have a sense of the shape and scope of Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young.
Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s debut novel spans from 1968 to 2020, from rural Malaysia to vibrant, modern-day Singapore. Teo’s descriptions of life on the equator come alive; you may feel sweat slicking your back or the sting of a mosquito bite.
With razor-sharp wit and painstaking attention to detail, Teo jumps through time, telling the stories of three women. Years ago, Amisa was a ticket girl at a cinema when a director handpicked her for her chilling beauty. She starred in his cult horror trilogy called Ponti! and played the role of a pontianak. In Malay mythology, pontianaks are vampiric ghosts of women who died while pregnant. Over time, as Amisa’s dreams of fame fizzle, she wallows in her despair and becomes a sort of pontianak herself. Now, Amisa is the mother to Szu, a gawky girl with no friends—until Circe comes along.
Sixteen-year-old Szu’s life is bleak, and Teo paints a painfully true depiction of how it feels to be an angsty teen. With a loveless mother and an absent father, Szu aches for acceptance, and her misery contrasts with the pastel colors of her school’s decor. When Szu and Circe become fast friends at school, they seem in awe of the vast differences in each other’s lives. When Amisa dies, Circle tries to comfort her friend, but the grief is too much for both of them.
When 33-year-old Circe is tasked with managing the marketing campaign for a remake of the Ponti! films, she’s forced to remember her sad friend Szu and her long-ago fascination with the alluring and withering Amisa.
Ponti is full of brilliant prose about the heartbreaking truth of growing up. It’s a novel of friendship, isolation, despair and memories of childhood that haunt us into our adult lives.
Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s debut novel spans from 1968 to 2020, from rural Malaysia to vibrant, modern-day Singapore. Teo’s descriptions of life on the equator come alive; you may feel sweat slicking your back or the sting of a mosquito bite.
Great historical novels make you feel that you’re immersed in the periods they’re set in. The best ones can make you see it, smell it and feel it on your skin. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, which is why so many historical novels have such a narrow but intense focus. The Lost Queen, Signe Pike’s debut novel set in sixth-century Scotland, is the rare historical epic that manages to be truly sweeping and yet always intense and personal—at once a romance, a story of faith, a story of war and a story of family without ever sacrificing one element to focus on another. The romance does not cancel out the palace intrigue, the faith does not cancel out the magic, and the war does not cancel out the intimate moments of discovery and history. It’s all there at once, each element as rich as any other.
The titular lost queen is Languoreth, the twin sister of the man believed to have inspired the legend of Merlin. Beginning with Languoreth as a girl shortly after the death of her mother, the novel follows her—with a beautifully crafted first-person voice—through early womanhood, into motherhood and across a legendary era caught between the old ways and the new.
Languoreth’s narration, coupled with the sense that we get to discover the intrigues and mysteries of her world along with her as she ages, is the key to the novel’s success. Pike strikes the right balance of immersive historical detail and sincere emotional resonance, and it never falters throughout the book. By the end, you feel happily lost in this mist-shrouded place in history, and you only wish you could stay there longer.
Moving, thrilling and ultimately spellbinding, The Lost Queen is perfect for readers of historical fiction like Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and for lovers of fantasy like Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Great historical novels make you feel that you’re immersed in the periods they’re set in. The best ones can make you see it, smell it and feel it on your skin. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, which is why so many historical novels have such a narrow but intense focus. The Lost Queen, Signe Pike’s debut novel set in sixth-century Scotland, is the rare historical epic that manages to be truly sweeping and yet always intense and personal—at once a romance, a story of faith, a story of war and a story of family without ever sacrificing one element to focus on another. The romance does not cancel out the palace intrigue, the faith does not cancel out the magic, and the war does not cancel out the intimate moments of discovery and history. It’s all there at once, each element as rich as any other.
Perhaps the three scariest words in the history of human imagination were cast in iron atop a gate leading directly into the closest approximation of hell ever erected on earth: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. “Work sets you free.” The banal words that were nothing more than a cruel and tragic joke for thousands turned out to have a deeper meaning for Lale Sokolov, an Auschwitz survivor and the real-life hero of Heather Morris’ extraordinary debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Like the Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s Night, Morris’ work takes us inside the day-to-day workings of the most notorious German death camp. Over the course of three years, Morris interviewed Lale, teasing out his memories and weaving them into her heart-rending narrative of a Jew whose unlikely forced occupation as a tattooist put him in a position to act with kindness and humanity in a place where both were nearly extinct. While Lale’s story is told at one remove—he held his recollections inside for more than half a century, fearing he might be branded as a collaborator—it is no less moving, no less horrifying, no less true.
Just as a flower can grow through a sidewalk’s crack, so too can love spring and flourish in the midst of unspeakable horror, and so it is that Lale meets his lifelong love, Gita, when he inscribes the number 34902 on her arm. With the same level of inventiveness, dedication and adoration displayed by Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, Lale endeavors to preserve their love (and safety) amid the horrors.
Make no mistake—horrors abound. At one point, Lale is called to identify two corpses seemingly marked with the same number, which is anathema to the camp’s meticulous record keepers. Upon emerging from the crematorium, Lale is greeted by his Nazi handler, Baretski: “You know something, Tätowierer? I bet you are the only Jew who ever walked into an oven and then walked back out of it.”
For decade upon decade, Lale’s story was one that desperately needed to be told. And now, as the number of those who witnessed the terror that was Nazi Germany dwindles, it is a story that desperately needs to be read. The disgraceful words that once stood over Auschwitz must be replaced with others: Never forget. Never again.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Perhaps the three scariest words in the history of human imagination were cast in iron atop a gate leading directly into the closest approximation of hell ever erected on earth: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. “Work sets you free.” The banal words that were nothing more than a cruel and tragic joke for thousands turned out to have a deeper meaning for Lale Sokolov, an Auschwitz survivor and the real-life hero of Heather Morris’ extraordinary debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
“Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh. . . . We have nothing but we have God. We have nothing but we have each other.” This is the refrain of She Would Be King. Wayétu Moore’s debut novel is more than an imagining of Liberia’s mid-1800s beginnings; it is a magical account of ongoing, individual and collective independence from oppressive forces.
She Would Be King begins with distinct storylines about three cursed characters: Gbessa in Africa, June in Virginia and Norman in Jamaica. When she comes of age in the village of Lai, Gbessa is sent into the forest, where she’s expected to die from a snakebite but instead discovers her power of resurrection. Abandoned at birth, June is called “Moses” by his adoptive mother, a slave. Defending her against the plantation owner’s wife, June discovers his superhuman strength for which he is then banished. Norman is the son of a Maroon “witch” who can become invisible at will, and his British father wants to take advantage of this special power shared by mother and child. Gbessa, June and Norman meet in Monrovia, Liberia, where the curses that have made them pariahs become the gifts that help them defend freed slaves and Africans from invading French traders.
Ascending over the isolated stories is a comforting voice to both the characters and the reader. “Take care, my darling . . . my friend,” says the first-person narrator who ties these stories together in mysticism and eloquence. The pain that this narrator and the three main characters have in common becomes their shared language, focusing and sharpening their gifts. Moore’s insightful, emotional descriptions graft these stories right onto readers’ hearts.
A celebration of freedom and justice that compassionately tells the stories of exceptional people, Moore’s debut is about every fight against death and bondage.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
“Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh. . . . We have nothing but we have God. We have nothing but we have each other.” This is the refrain of She Would Be King. Wayétu Moore’s debut novel is more than an imagining of Liberia’s mid-1800s beginnings; it is a magical account of ongoing, individual and collective independence from oppressive forces.
The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days; they clear the plates and do it again. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore.
The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population (she calls this “the End”) and after (“the Beginning”). In the End, she works in the Bible production department of a New York City publishing company. She has a boyfriend named Jonathan with whom she watches classic New York City movies. As Shen Fever begins to spread, Candace continues to work—until she is one of the only living humans in New York, capturing the deserted metropolis via photographs posted to her anonymous blog, NY Ghost.
In the Beginning, Candace has joined a group of survivors led by a man named Bob. Bob leads the group on “stalks” into homes throughout the Midwest, gathering supplies and killing any of the fevered. The stalks are enacted as ritual, the survivors conducting a type of prayer over each house they enter. There is repetition here as well. The internet once rendered this world “nearsighted with nostalgia,” as Bob says, and the Beginning is supposed to be a second chance. But the stalks are laden with memories of who we once were. The fevered are even described as having the eyes of someone who is incessantly checking their phone, or who is staring at their computer, glazed and unseeing.
“It was like burrowing underground and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working,” Candace says of one of these stalks, though she easily could’ve been referring to a Bible she’s working on, or when she’s drifting about the city as NY Ghost, or even when she’s moisturizing her face.
Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned. It’s just an office novel, after all, with some worker-bee politics and consideration of the commute, the lunch break, the after-work cocktails. But Severance demands to be wondered at, only to flip around the gaze and stare back at you.
To be a millennial is to have been betrayed by an economy that once promised you everything. So after that fails, where do you look for yourself? In religion, in family, in memories on the internet? As a reader of Candace’s blog writes to her, “How do we know . . . that you’re not fevered yourself?”
Ling Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
