Julia Armfield’s Private Rites is part speculative novel, part domestic drama, as three feuding sisters seek closure after their father’s death while the city they live in is slowly destroyed by heavy rains and flooding.
Sisters Isla and Irene, and their much younger stepsister, Agnes, inhabit a London-like city where it has been raining longer than anyone can remember. All three are survivors of a traumatic upbringing: Their father, Stephen, was a harsh man, pitting the two older girls against one another and mocking their weaknesses. After divorcing Isla and Irene’s mother, Stephen, a notable avant-garde architect, quickly married again. But when Agnes was born,her mother disappeared, leaving all three girls to be brought up by their father. The sisters are resentful and jealous of one another, rarely getting together as adults. Bossy Isla is trying to keep her psychiatric practice going despite losing patients, and Irene spends her time scrolling through internet forums where people role-play the pre-apocalypse world: “I’d pick you up in my car because I have a car,” reads one post. Agnes, who’s used to drifting between sexual partners, meets a girl at the coffee shop where she works and is startled by the intimate relationship that develops. Meanwhile, as the rain continues, whole neighborhoods are lost to flooding, and their inhabitants are forced to move to higher and higher ground.
The fragile ties between the sisters further disintegrate after Stephen’s death. Harsh words are exchanged at Stephen’s funeral, and when the will is read, the two older sisters find that the family house has been left to Agnes, who doesn’t want it. The intense sibling drama can’t hide the fact that there are some very weird things going on besides the weather—the absence of their mothers, Agnes’ spotty memories and hazy dreams, and how strangers constantly recognize the three sisters when they are out in public.
Private Rites excels as a spooky character study, moving seamlessly between the sisters and their partners and creating a rich narrative despite its brevity (barely over 200 pages). Following its clever echoes of King Lear (an overbearing father, three bickering daughters, endlessly howling storms) and all-too-believable evocation of climate apocalypse, the novel’s resolution unfortunately feels like a misstep. Until the end, however, Armfield goes deep into the damaged psyches of three unusual women who search for connection despite their father’s cruel legacy.
Private Rites excels as a spooky character study, with clever echoes of King Lear—an overbearing father, three bickering daughters, endlessly howling storms—and an all-too-believable evocation of climate apocalypse.
When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum. Cancel culture, job displacement due to AI, government overreach, deteriorating middle class wealth, missing children, declining air quality, bad breakfast cereals . . . the future’s so dark, you gotta wear a miner’s helmet.
In fiction, a trip out into nature almost always ends up with Job-like trials being visited upon the vacationers. Deliverance. 127 Hours. Jurassic Park. Into The Wild. Even Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. But despite these fictional precedents, when May makes a little extra money by submitting herself as a test subject for a surgical procedure that will disguise her features from the latest iteration of AI recognition software, she decides to take her family on vacation to the very expensive hyper-natural Botanical Garden. May hauls her two kids and her husband off into this Disney-fied paradise, requiring them, for good measure, to leave their phones and other communication devices at home so they can reap the full benefit of the experience.
And reap it they do.
The “hum” of the title is an AI-powered, jack-of-all-trades android, able to fill roles from a dental hygienist to a pop psychotherapist. If there was any question as to whether Phillips has seen 20 minutes into the future, in addition to dispensing whatever wisdom is appropriate to the moment, hums shill commercial products—unless you upgrade to the ad-free tier. Hum is, as dystopias go, reasonably breezy; it’s suitable for a coast-to-coast airline flight or an extended stay on the beach as an antidote to binge-watching the latest season of your favorite TV show. For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, the setting is relatable enough to not make you feel like (ahem) a stranger in a strange land.
For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.
After their annual two-week hunting trip in northern Maine, lifelong friends Jess and Storey emerge from the wilderness to a bewildering new world. Bridges have been blown up, houses burned and villages abandoned—and there’s no internet connection to turn to for an explanation. Before their trip, there had been rumblings about militant groups that wanted Maine to secede, but the pair hadn’t been worried. Now, however, they find themselves “in the wake of a rolling catastrophe, moving behind some malign harvest whose shape and intention they could only guess.”
Peter Heller’s seventh novel, Burn, is one of his best: It’s full of heart and soul amid the bleak landscape (be forewarned, there are numerous bodies). In fact, even those who don’t normally turn to dystopian novels are likely to be completely captivated. Heller excels at writing about the wilderness, showcasing its might and beauty amid deadly situations, as he’s done before in books like The Last Ranger, The Guide and The River. Here, humans present the greatest danger as Jess and Storey attempt to make their way to safety, combining their intellects and survival skills in a way that brings to mind HBO’s The Last of Us, minus the fungus-infested zombies. Before long, these two men make a discovery that changes the calculus of their each and every move.
In addition to being a survival thriller and insurrectionist nightmare, this is also a story centered on friendship, how it is tested and how it perseveres. Burn interweaves the friends’ past and present lives with admirable flair, making each thread equally riveting. Some readers may find one surprising past relationship hard to buy, but even that doesn’t distract from the tight, authentic bond that forms the basis of this novel. “Love is attention,” Jess’s ex-wife once told him. “That is all you know on earth.” Over the course of the novel, Jess finally comes to understand what she means, making his emotional journey just as charged as the perilous landscape that he and Storey are forced to traverse. Burn is a propulsive tale that will keep readers on the edge of their seats from beginning to end.
Peter Heller’s seventh novel, Burn, is one of his best: It’s full of heart and soul amid the bleak landscape, and even those who don’t normally turn to dystopian novels are likely to be completely captivated.
Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, is set 500 years in the future. The world is broken up into warring hemispheres, in which some of the inhabitants are born invisible and consigned to second-class citizenship (vizzers) while the manipulative Dominant Population (DPs, or dippies) rule with an iron grip.
Sweetmint, born invisible but imaginative and hardworking, is granted a highly sought-after internship with eccentric inventor Croger Tenmase. He encourages her scientific creativity, inspires her with obsolete objects like books and cameras, and teaches her to play tennis. But Sweetmint’s projects are shut down after a political assassination; the Chief Executive of the Northwestern Hemisphere is killed and Sweetmint’s long-lost brother Shanu is accused of the murder. Sweetmint is determined to locate Shanu, embarking on a quest that takes her far outside her community, forging new relationships and digging into the mysteries of her origins. Meanwhile, a power struggle ensues between ambitious politicians and ruthless generals as they vie to win the hearts and minds of the DPs in an upcoming election.
Part political thriller, part sci-fi, This Great Hemisphere revels in dystopian details with plausible roots: the ruling class controlling access to information, history and religion; the abundance of cheap processed food to keep the Invisibles in poor health; and the hypocrisy of the DPs between their pious pronouncements and secret sex clubs. At the same time, a secret Invisibles army, the “Children of Slim,” gains strength and power through collective knowledge of their shared legacy.
Askaripour’s breakthrough 2021 novel, Black Buck, was a wicked satire about a young Black man leaving his job as a barista for a position in a dubious tech start-up with cultish vibes. Similarly, This Great Hemisphere explores the allure of power and the lengths people go to gain and retain it, but it’s also a story about rebellion, resilience and the strength to shape your own future. It’s only when Sweetmint stops relying on false narratives that she can truly become the inventor she longs to be.
Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.
“Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind,” opens Leif Enger’s fourth novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. In an unspecified near-future, as civilization slowly tips off a cliff’s edge, Rainy and his bookselling wife, Lark, eke out a cautious yet relatively tranquil life in a small community on the shore of Lake Superior. “Quixotes,” Lark calls the pair. “By which she meant not always sensible.”
When Lark brings home her favorite poet’s rare, unpublished manuscript, Kellan, the fugitive who gave her the book, comes with her and becomes their attic boarder. Though Lark and Rainy grow fond of Kellan, they’re uneasy about his past. Then Kellan disappears, heralding a violent sea change in their quiet lives. Kellan had warned of a ruthless pursuer, and when Lark becomes collateral damage in the chase, Rainy’s quixotic existence shatters.
Hounded by grief and the looming shadow of whoever was after Kellan, Rainy boards a tumbledown sailboat and takes to the lake. Soon, he is alone on Lake Superior with minimal sailing knowledge, and only Lark’s beloved manuscript and primal fear for company. He becomes a sort of Great Lakes Odysseus, sailing over a wine-dark sea toward the idea of his wife, and encountering no sea monsters, but instead finding fractious kingdoms and corpses rising from warming waters.
The novel’s ruined world, marked by book burnings, anti-intellectual sentiment, environmental disruption and casual brutality, will feel entirely too plausible for readers. Yet within its dystopian landscape, Enger’s story incorporates fabulism in the most traditional sense, featuring a serpentine quest, a rare and ancient tome, and even a bridge troll. As in the most memorable fables, I Cheerfully Refuse’s fantastical elements heighten the emotional impact of its depiction of violence and grief, elevating the entire narrative.
“I think the sea has no in-between: you get either rage and wayward lightning . . . or such freehanded beauty that time contracts,” Rainy observes early in his journey. Like the turbulent lake, I Cheerfully Refuse is filled with polarities that should contradict but somehow, instead, cohere: hopeless moments infused with light and shocking acts of cruelty depicted through beautiful, memorable prose. Although the struggle to survive leaves room for little else, Rainy still finds delight in simple, ordinary things: the post-storm sun or a ripe tomato. It’s in these moments of earnest wonder that I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn together by a shared desire to make something more—or different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways the three women’s lives converge and diverge.
Giselle turns to art, launching her career with an experimental performance piece in which she lives for a year in a hidden room in a mall. As she becomes more immersed in the art world, she begins to question her motives and desires, floundering through a life that is sometimes more display than substance. Jackie gets caught up in the early days of the internet, working for a tech startup by day and developing her own radical projects by night. Ellen becomes an activist in college, and devotes her life to community organizing and fighting against the gentrification threatening her home.
The novel’s three distinct sections drive home just how differently Giselle, Jackie and Ellen engage with and react to the world—and each other—as everything changes around them. Jackie’s section is full of frenetic energy, while Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes through at a remove, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s section is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read.
A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the whole of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen remain important to one another throughout their lives, there is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.
Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of
In Bluebird Day, Megan Tady delivers a cozy tale with layers as numerous as midseason snowpack, delving into the psyches of mother and daughter competitive skiers Claudine and Wylie.
In Bluebird Day, Megan Tady delivers a cozy tale with layers as numerous as midseason snowpack, delving into the psyches of mother and daughter competitive skiers Claudine and Wylie.
Quippy humor and refreshing honesty abound in CABIN, Patrick Hutchison’s memoir about his journey to restore a filthy, dilapidated cabin in the Cascade Mountains.
From start to finish, Shaina Feinberg and Julia Rothman’s book explores, celebrates and values work and the people who undertake it. Work is a helpful resource and entertaining read that’s sure to broaden horizons and inspire exploration.
In 2016, Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, a radical vision of what could happen if women became the physically dominant sex, offered transformative ideas about gender and supremacy. Now, Alderman offers readers a plausible world-to-come in The Future, a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
As a teenager, Martha Einkorn left her father’s back-to-nature cult on the Northwest coast to become the personal assistant to a powerful social media entrepreneur. Lai Zhen survived the destruction of Hong Kong and a year in a refugee camp to become a survivalist influencer. When these two women meet, the attraction is immediate, but their romance is put on hold as news reports stream in of an impending apocalypse.
The Future is awash with tech billionaires, preppers and an anxious population easily swayed by algorithms. It follows executives Lenk Sketlish, founder of the social network Fantail; Zimri Nommik, who runs the largest online retailer Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who heads Medlar, a leading PC company. These powerful techies have spared no expense to create safe havens for themselves and are ready to leave the rest of the world to face destruction.
The billionaires’ plan is thwarted by a band of rebels led by Martha and Zhen, including Ellen’s nonbinary child Badger Bywater and Zimri’s soon-to-be kicked to the curb wife Selah Nommik, who also happens to be a genius coder. With their combined expertise and shared conviction of bettering our world rather than manipulating it for their own ends, this group may just save civilization after all.
That Alderman keeps the plot moving forward despite constant shifts in perspective and time is a testament to her creative skills as a writer and a game developer. The novel never slides into parody, despite the three rather clever parallels to some of our real-life billionaires and tech leaders. Clearly, Alderman cares deeply about our future and believes that we already have the skills in place to course-correct. By the end of the novel, you might too.
The Future is a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
Marisa Crane’s debut novel is a remarkable feat of speculative fiction, its premise so strangely familiar that to call it speculative feels like a misnomer. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is set in an off-kilter version of the United States, but the emotional truths it untangles are so sharp that its intricate world building feels less like fiction and more like an excavation of the country we already live in.
In a U.S. governed by the ominous Department of Balance, criminals are given an extra shadow instead of being incarcerated, which serves as a reminder to themselves and everyone they meet of what they’ve done. This system, enforced by state-run surveillance, creates a culture of pervasive public shame: Shadesters, as they’re called, are shunned wherever they go and have few civil rights.
Kris is a Shadester whose wife dies while giving birth to their daughter, who is immediately given a second shadow because of the death. Grieving and unprepared, Kris stumbles through motherhood in a daze. She worries and wonders and analyzes, observes her daughter, gets lost in her own brain. Her first-person narration is dreamy and frenetic, so intimate that it’s often difficult for the reader to bear, as well as nearly impossible to know how much time is passing.
How does a person repent and forgive and reinvent? What kind of healing can only occur in community, and what kind of healing requires privacy? What happens when mistakes and misunderstandings are punished in the same way as abuse and deliberate violence? These are the turbulent, murky and unsolvable questions that roil inside of Kris, that define her life—but slowly, the kid grows up, and Kris is drawn back into the world.
Ruptures and tension propel the plot forward, but there’s a deliberate, underlying slowness to the story, too. On the surface, it’s all explosive force; underneath, it’s introspective and intimate. And always, Crane’s prose is gorgeous. Short, searing sentences depict ordinary moments perfectly, while long, melancholy meanderings are broken up by bleak humor and inventive pop quizzes that speak to the impossibilities of living through grief.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is an assured and surprising ode to queer family. It’s an untame story about motherhood and survival and the quiet, daily work of building a livable world. It’s about what humans can bear and what we can get used to, about the choices we make and that are made for us, about the worst things we do to each other and the most astonishing. Some books have the power to wake you up, shake you out of the old and push you toward something new and exciting and a little scary. This is one.
Some books have the power to wake you up, shake you out of the old and push you toward something new and exciting and a little scary. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is one of those books.
I’m Glad My Mom Died is a celebrity memoir, but even if you (like me) have never heard of actor Jennette McCurdy or seen a single second of “iCarly” on Nickelodeon, getting sucked into this frankly told and deeply nuanced story of a troubled mother-daughter relationship is almost inevitable. McCurdy’s story kicks off when her mother, Debra, pins her own dashed dreams of Hollywood stardom onto her shy 6-year-old daughter. The pressure’s on, and things get worse from there. McCurdy writes from the perspective she had in the moment, creating tension for the reader, who can see the unhealthy dynamic between McCurdy and Debra long before McCurdy can name or understand it herself. After reading I’m Glad My Mom Died, it’s impossible to see Debra as a good mother, but McCurdy’s commitment to portraying her mother as she truly was still somehow feels like a tribute.
—Trisha, Publisher
Tuesdays With Morrie
I first read Tuesdays With Morrie in my high school English class. Much like Mitch Albom’s teacher Morrie Schwartz, my teacher Mr. Baker longed for his students to understand what makes life worth living. As the book begins, Albom, a successful young columnist in Detroit, walks through life dead-alive, driven by the pursuit of fame and personal gain. He paints the plague of the modern world so poignantly—the slow and silent indoctrination of society, its swift corrosion of the soul. During his Tuesday visits with his old professor, Albom begins to realize that the dying man is more alive than he is. Tuesdays With Morrie is a book full of convincing triteness and truth. We all need Morrie’s reminders to dance with our eyes closed and reach down into the darkness for the sake of pulling up another. I still find myself in need of Morrie’s teachings—that love is all that stands at the end of time. For readers who share my appreciation of this book, be aware that Rob Schwartz, Morrie’s son, will publish his father’s writing posthumously in The Wisdom of Morrie later this month.
Humor must be just about the toughest thing to get right in fiction. It’s so subjective, first of all, and it’s tricky to balance lightheartedness with the serious bits. And then to be funny without being mean? Practically impossible. Bonnie Garmus’ delight of a debut novel made me laugh—often and loudly—while still honoring the hard road of its heroine. Elizabeth Zott is a female chemist and single mom in the 1960s, so obviously the world has it in for her, and this includes an assault early in the novel. But in the face of such cruelties, she is pragmatic and determined and wry, like a grown-up version of Roald Dahl’s indomitable Matilda. She ends up starring on her own cooking show and finds herself surrounded by a supporting cast that’s as endearing as can be. She also has a dog (named Six-Thirty) who’s enough of a lead character to tip the story into the fantastical. Like so many other readers, I absolutely loved it.
Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is the type of fantasy novel that seems tailor-made for the exact type of crossover success it has achieved. It’s a seemingly simple story of a young peasant girl trying to save her friend from dark magic, and with its fairy tale-inspired setting, engaging characters and just the right amount of romance, it appeals to fantasy readers and nonfantasy readers alike. I am as intrigued by these types of books as I am leery of them. It’s easy for a story to rest on folklore references and well-known character types within an aesthetically pleasing world and and still never quite step out of the shadows of other works. But Novik didn’t set out to just retell a fairy tale: She wrote her own, and it’s so enthralling that it gave me the type of stay-up-all-night, can’t-put-it-down reading experience I had when I was a 13-year-old first discovering fantasy. I read it within days, its impossibly perfect ending made me cry, and I still think about it more than a year later.
One of the perks of working at BookPage is getting to read books before they are published, but occasionally a high-profile title gets embargoed, meaning advance copies aren’t sent to the press. If members of the media do receive a copy, they’re forbidden to share the review before the publication date. I’ll always remember the day I was opening mail at the office and unwrapped a finished copy of The Testaments, the long-awaited and heavily embargoed sequel to Margaret Atwood’s groundbreaking 1985 bestseller, The Handmaid’s Tale. Set 15 years after the events of the dystopian classic, the suspenseful plot is driven by the narratives of three women whose fates converge just when their world’s authoritarian regime, Gilead, begins to crumble. The Testaments is the work of a writer at the top of her game; Atwood sticks the landing in a thrilling conclusion to an all too culturally significant tale.
—Katherine, Subscriptions
Every once in a while, it feels like everyone in the world is reading the same book—and we can all admit that sometimes, that book isn’t very good. This month, we’re celebrating books that are extremely popular and are actually (believe it or not) as excellent as everyone says.
Back in the 1980s, it was all “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” These days, not so much, with dystopian stories like The Hunger Games doing a much better job to capture the zeitgeist. Speaking of capturing, that’s one enterprise in which the United States still excels; about one out of every five incarcerated people worldwide occupy a jail cell here in America.
In his first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah mashes up “Orange Is the New Black,” The Running Man, Gladiator and mixed martial arts into a brutal prognostication of what could be next year’s worst “reality” show. It works like this: Prisoners whose sentences exceed 25 years are offered shots at freedom in exchange for three-year tours of duty as televised, weapon-wielding warriors. Much like in professional wrestling, there are storylines and factions and fan favorites, but “smackdown” in this ring means that only one “athlete” gets to leave alive.
Competing for-profit prison corporations provide teams called “chains” whose “links” vie against one another, either singly or in doubles matches. To ramp up the drama, individual links in a chain may occasionally turn on one another—many of them are murderers, after all—so the likelihood of living through the three-year tour is vanishingly small.
The story centers on a pair of warriors, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, who are members of the same chain, occasional doubles partners and lovers. While they are both successful at their current day job—being killing machines—Adjei-Brenyah has imbued them with a notable degree of tenderness. They’re aware that most of the links are going to be “freed” via slaughter in the ring, and their immediate survival requires them to focus their violence on their opponents rather than toward each other. A chain, after all, is only as strong as its weakest link.
The subtext here punches through like Anderson “The Spider” Silva delivering a knockout blow: The incarceration-industrial complex, hyped up on the steroid of private capital, encourages systematic racism and a rejection of any possibility of rehabilitation. So in Adjei-Brenyah’s brave new world, he recalls yet another notion perfectly articulated during the ’80s: “The Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.”
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah mashes up “Orange Is the New Black,” The Running Man, Gladiator and mixed martial arts into a brutal prognostication of what could be next year’s worst “reality” show.
People often ask, “When did you know you were going to be a writer? When did you decide?”
I have many answers to this question, because being a writer is a way of moving through the world, a way of seeing, of hearing and, I’ve learned, believing. When I was last asked this question, in relation to my novel, this is what came to mind:
There are bodies swaying. Air thick with exalting. An organ punches chords into the walls and into us. A pastor is conducting an energy that everyone in the space can feel, even me. He isn’t speaking English, but he is working with sound more than logic. There are women who wear handwoven cloth around their heads. They shake, electric with the Holy Spirit. I am with my mom. I am young enough that my head reaches her solar plexus. Soon I’ll be able to look down and see the crown of her head, but then and forever, I will look up to her.
“We are all chaotic systems, like the weather, and any particular offering an artist presents is one of many possible storms.”
She begins to speak in Tongues. Syllables of a language that has no book sing from her. She is Ghanaian, and since I don’t speak Twi or Fante, this is yet another language she has access to that seems to have missed me. Something I can’t grasp, though not for trying. I watch as the language of God flows through her and the people around her. I feel the energy all around me. I see it lifting others from their folding chairs, compelling them to dance, to erupt with praise.
Though I can feel the energy around me, I am siloed off. Somehow disconnected. I feel like a spectator in an Olympic arena. There is a great championship being won, but I am only watching. I want more than anything to believe in anything the way they all believe in that space. I want the spirit to fill me to language. I want to have a faith that can power me through all things. What I feel is proximity but very little of the thing itself. I want to be filled to the brim with what fills my mother, everyone in the space. What I am as I stand, the only still thing in the room, is lonely.
There in that room of thriving souls is where I learned to want to believe in something totally, which is a way of saying “being a writer.”
“We as a society can do better than making those who do harm suffer.”
More recently, when asked how I came to be the writer of this book, Chain-Gang All-Stars, I thought of another time, a time with my father.
In his life he was a lawyer. Again, as a Ghanaian, there were many people whom I called Uncle or Aunti who knew him as “Lawyer.” It was a title, a position. More than a job. When I imagine him, he is wearing a suit.
I was barely tall enough to look straight at my father’s waist without craning my neck when he came home to our apartment at this time. That day he’d begun in earnest to prepare a trial he’d been thinking about for a while. He was a defense attorney, something I’d known, though it was rare that he’d speak about the specifics of any one case. That day he was talkative. I viewed him as a paragon of Truth and Power, and so I was excited, elated to listen. He said he had a difficult case and that his client had committed murder. I remember how he looked, looking at me. Searching, close. I sunk further into our couch. I remember knowing even then to hide the colossal disappointment I felt. Murder equaled “bad guy,” and so by my child logic, my father was a villain or, at best, an accessory to one. A henchman.
I said how I felt in the nicest way I could summon. “Why are you helping somebody bad? Someone that would do that.”
And he said, “It is not that simple.” He said more after that, but there was a world-reframing kind of truth in just those few words. And this new novel is a direct extension of that reframing. He said to me as a child that “it is not that simple,” and our justice system currently is genocidal in its simplicity. This book calls to question that approach. In that moment when my father told me who he was defending and began to tell me why, he gifted me a curiosity toward nuance, which is another way of saying “being a writer.”
Chain-Gang All-Stars is my “debut” novel, but it’s a debut in the sense that it is the first novel-length story I am presenting to the world with the force of the publishing industry behind it. But when I think about how it came to be, and when I’m asked, “When did you know you could write a novel?” I think about my actual first novel. A book that will never come out. A book I wrote over 10 years ago, working daily through the summer on a Lenovo netbook in an apartment we would soon be evicted from. I thought that book would change my family’s life. I thought by force of will I’d be able to create something special. I thought it would heal the sicknesses that ailed my parents in swells over the years, I thought it would remove the pressures that had rendered such difficulty into their lives. I worked on it with the focus of someone fighting for their life. It was not good. And though that book will never come out, it was then that I learned to weave a great energy into a practice. Taking massive desire and placing it into actions with consistency is discipline. Nothing physical came of the book. We still got evicted. Maladies would still reign over us. But also everything came of it. It taught me what it felt like to finish a project. It taught me what it was to nurture discipline over days and months and years. And that, being a careful nurturer of discipline, is another way of saying “being a writer.”
“What if compassion were the rule that governed us above all things?”
It has been many years (seven) in the making, this new “debut” novel, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what people have asked me and what I ask myself. What do I think makes someone a writer? What do I think allowed me to write this new novel and why? I think we all have our own answer because art is born of each of our particular essences. We are all chaotic systems, like the weather, and any particular offering an artist presents is one of many possible storms. But for me, when I think about Chain-Gang All-Stars, I think about what happens when I write toward faith. I started the book hoping I was an abolitionist, believing deeply that we as a society can do better than making those who do harm suffer. Now that the book is done, now that I’ve done the research, now that I’ve considered the question of what it means to be a compassionate society, I know I am an abolitionist. It was a trust fall into faith. It required me to allow my curiosity and desire for nuance to move me through the world. The idea that “it is not that simple” is a simple lighthouse I am still following. Because it’s not that simple, but also it could be. What if compassion were the rule that governed us above all things?
When I think about how this book came to be, I think about the other books that have already come and those yet to come. I think about what can be forged from a willingness to excavate those questions that linger in my chest. I think of how finding the discipline to do that work, to accept that questions may be answered by more questions, is my answer. I’ve discovered myself writing this book. Learning more about the world through it has given me something real to believe in. And someone with something real to believe in is another way of saying “being a writer.”
Photo of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah by Alex M. Philip.
With his 2018 story collection, Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah set the world of literary fiction alight. His first novel, a bold evisceration of America’s for-profit prison system, stokes the flames.
October’s Top 10 list includes Alix E. Harrow’s best book yet, plus the long-awaited second novel from Ayana Mathis, a pitch-perfect romance from KJ Charles and a breathtaking debut memoir.
Jacqueline Woodson flawlessly intersperses explosive moments—and games of basketball—among quiet, reflective scenes while responding to her protagonist’s weighty fears with reassurance about the permeance of
Weaving history and fiction together, David Bowles fashions a rich story of political intrigue, ferocious battles, beautiful landscapes and the enduring hope of humanity.
C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel,
In The Unsettled’s short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting
Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Rebecca Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native American
In his memoir, award-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait.
Safiya Sinclair’s memoir should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all
KJ Charles concludes her Doomsday Books duology with the masterfully crafted, deliciously adventurous and so, so horny Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel.
Paleoecologist Kathy Willis explores the surprising physiological and psychological benefits of plants on human health in her entertaining, absorbing Good Nature.
While the masterful poems in Grace Notes evoke the specific history of her mother’s life, Nye never leaves readers out of the frame, encouraging them to ask questions and think deeply.
A fantasy-fuelled retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo, For She Is Wrath takes the tension and mystery of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel and transfers it to a lush, exuberant, Pakistan-inspired setting.
October's Top 10 list includes Alix E. Harrow's best book yet, plus the long-awaited second novel from Ayana Mathis, a pitch-perfect romance from KJ Charles and a breathtaking debut memoir.
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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.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
