While reading YA author Jennifer E. Smith’s first novel for adult readers, The Unsinkable Greta James, I wondered how a story like this one, about a vivacious, career-minded woman who is iffy about settling down, would have worked out 70 years ago. Of course, the woman would meet a nice chap on an ocean liner, as Greta does in this novel. An epilogue would see her married to the good man, happily pregnant in a sunny kitchen while the souvenirs of her old career, whether as a singer or an athlete or what have you, collected dust in the attic.
Of course, that’s not what happens in The Unsinkable Greta James.
Greta is a rock ’n’ roll musician who is famous enough to be recognized but not so famous that a room goes silent when she walks into it. Ben, a Jack London fanatic, is the love interest whom Greta meets on the cruise ship (and who doesn’t know who she is at first). But for Greta, the “man in her life” isn’t Ben, but her father, Conrad. Greta agreed to join Conrad and his friends on the Alaskan cruise after the sudden death of her mother, Helen, who planned the trip.
Greta and Conrad’s relationship has always been uncomfortable. While he acknowledges her talent, he’s nervous about the precariousness of a career in entertainment. She thinks he’s never been on her side and favors her brother, who has a wife, kids and a steady job with health insurance. They’re completely different and too much alike, and Helen’s death poleaxed both of them. (Another reason Greta is on this ship is to forget an onstage episode when her grief became too overwhelming. She’s not quite unsinkable.)
Smith’s style is as smooth as an Alaskan cruise is supposed to be—though like Greta, the ship does rock and roll now and then. Smith’s characters are good and nice. She does allow for some eccentricity, as in Helen’s friend Todd, an obsessive bird watcher who longs to see some avian rarity on an ice floe. But Smith reserves nearly all the novel’s real complexity for Conrad, a man who can’t seem to overcome a certain midcentury rigidity. Greta is wary of him, and because she’s wary of him, so are we, and this is the real meat of the novel. Can these two stubborn people lay down their arms at long last and connect? That’s the question of The Unsinkable Greta James.
Can two stubborn people lay down their arms at long last and connect? That’s the question of Jennifer E. Smith’s first novel for adult readers.
Lan Samantha Chang’s fourth book, the terrific novel The Family Chao, draws inspiration from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which three brothers struggle against their father’s tyrannical behavior. Instead of 19th-century Russia, Chang’s dialogue-driven novel is set in contemporary Haven, a small town in Wisconsin where larger-than-life patriarch Leo Chao and his wife, Winnie, have built a successful Chinese restaurant with the help of their three sons and O-Lan, a recent immigrant from Guangzhou who nobody seems to know much about.
The Chao family is about to gather for their annual holiday party. Dagou, the oldest son, works for Leo in the hope of eventually taking over the business. Middle son Ming is in New York pursuing a financial career, and the youngest, James, is in college. When Ming and James return to Haven for the holidays, they find their family in chaos: Winnie has taken refuge in a Buddhist nunnery, and Dagou and Leo are feuding about the fate of the restaurant.
After the Chaos’ extravagant Christmas party, attended mostly by Haven’s Chinese community, Leo is found dead in the restaurant’s freezer. The police suspect foul play, and Dagou is eventually charged with murder, although others, including James and Ming, have motives in the crime.
As in Dostoyevsky’s novel, there is a trial in The Family Chao, and various family secrets come to light, but Chang uses the framework of the Russian novel to touch not only on family dynamics but also on questions of community, assimilation and prejudice. While the first half of the novel focuses on the Chao family and Haven’s small Chinese population, the second half shows what happens when that community becomes the subject of scrutiny by neighbors and indeed the wider world, as the case against Dagou is fraught with anti-Asian bias and stereotypes.
Like in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Chang looks backward to move forward, borrowing the storyline of a revered classic to explore something brand new about the American dream. Funny, thought-provoking and paced like a thriller, The Family Chao radically redefines the immigrant novel while balancing entertainment and delight.
Funny, thought-provoking and paced like a thriller, The Family Chao radically redefines the immigrant novel while balancing entertainment and delight.
The uber-talented Olga Acevedo, the titular heroine of Olga Dies Dreaming, grew up in a working-class Nuyorican family (New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent) full of strivers and revolutionaries. But as an adult, she makes her living as a wedding planner, catering to New York City’s elite and fiercely chasing the American dream. Through Olga’s story, first-time novelist Xochitl Gonzalez brilliantly calls into question what that dream really means.
Gonzalez is the Brooklynite daughter of militant activists from the 1970s Chicano Power movement: her mother Nuyorican, her father Mexican American. After many years as an event planner and entrepreneur, Gonzalez’s journey to transform her own story into Olga’s fictional tale led her to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was honored as an Iowa Arts Fellow and won the Michener-Copernicus Prize in Fiction. She was also the winner of the 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize in Nonfiction. We reached out to Gonzalez to unpack the ideas behind her striking debut.
This is a complex book with many intriguing layers. What are its origins? When I first started writing—writing creatively as art, versus commerce like marketing materials—I was intimidated by fiction. So I went to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference with an essay about being abandoned by my activist mother as a kid so she could go out and “save the world.” People really responded to the themes but basically told me it was a book.
I had no interest in writing a memoir. But in time, I found the courage to write some fiction and had scratched out some stories about upwardly mobile Latinas—mainly Puerto Rican—living in a very different Brooklyn than the one they had grown up in.
I had for years been extremely frustrated by the situation in Puerto Rico, that the U.S. has a colony in contemporary times. It was just a news story that never could break through, not even after Hurricane Maria. One day while commuting, I was reading the book The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, which is about disaster capitalism, and listening to Alynda Segarra’s album Navigator. I realized that if I borrowed just enough biography from myself, I could weave a pretty entertaining, hopefully beautiful story that would personalize both one version of a contemporary Latinx experience as well as the real-world emotions and experiences of gentrification, colonialism and resilience. I ran out of the train to get a napkin to scratch the ideas out.
“It was like I had to get this story out before Brooklyn changed even more, somehow.”
You sold the manuscript for Olga Dies Dreaming to Flatiron in a 10-way auction and made a TV deal with Hulu before its release. First of all, congratulations! That can look like overnight success, but I understand that the real story is more complex. Can you tell us about your journey as a writer and path to publication? I will try to be concise! The long story is that I went to college—Brown University, after having attended a big Brooklyn public school that I adored and thrived in—thinking that I would do creative writing. But when I got there, my freshman roommate was such a rock star in this arena. I was so intimidated that I thought it was a sign to find my own lane. (I was 18 and didn’t drive, what did I know of multilane highways?) But I always wanted to write, and so later as a wedding planner, I started a blog that became kind of popular and led to freelance writing opportunities around etiquette and weddings and the like.
Eventually, though, someone thought I should try a memoir about my life and back then—this was probably 10 years ago or more—I was more open to that. So I put together a proposal and it—ironically—landed with the agent who is now my agent today (Mollie Glick). She loved the writing but ultimately passed because “it was a very dark book about a wedding planner.”
I put writing to the side completely for another five or six years while I was hustling to get my business back together after the Great Recession and pivot to more than weddings, and just managing life and family more generally. Then I turned 40 and the last of my grandparents who had raised me passed away, and I suddenly just felt like life was short. Writing was the one constant, nagging thing I felt I’d always needed to try and do. The thing is, owning a small business, especially one that focuses on customer service like my event-planning business, well, it’s a hustle. It doesn’t leave a lot of creative space.
So the first thing I did was sell my part of the business and get a nine-to-five job. Then I applied and went toBread Loaf—for nonfiction—which really immersed me in community and craft, which was so important. It was so helpful to refine who I could be as a writer that I decided to pursue my MFA. I applied to only NYC programs except for—encouraged by my Bread Loaf friends—Iowa. I never thought I would get in, but I started Olga Dies Dreaming almost the same day that I found out that I did.
I was terrified to leave my whole life and my rent-stabilized apartment and pretty great job, to be honest. But I believed in this book and understood the rarity of this opportunity and the blessing, in that moment, that being single was. It was emotionally hard, but not logistically hard. I was able to literally put every waking hour that I wasn’t at work into the novel. Eventually I gave up exercising because I was so obsessed, but before that happened, I ended up reconnecting with Mollie at an exercise class. We had a mutual friend there, and she told Mollie about me and Iowa and the Disquiet Prize, and I shared the first 100 pages of Olga with her. So I was fortunate in that by the time I arrived at Iowa, I had drafted about half the novel and had an amazing agent who saw the possibility of what this was going to become—but who also stayed out of it until it was done.
And honestly, at 42—which is the age I turned when I started the program—two academic years doesn’t feel long. I had the fortune of Sam Chang offering a novel workshop, so I just put my nose down and worked around the clock. I was barely eating or sleeping, to be honest. I don’t know what made it feel so urgent. It was more than just the time at grad school, it was like I had to get this story out before Brooklyn changed even more, somehow.
From the start, the reader gets to see, in a kind of humorous way, the fighting spirit and rage brewing in Olga. This makes her such a complex and original character, especially because she’s a woman. At one point she even calls herself a “terrible person.” Do you think of Olga that way, or is she judging herself too harshly? First, thank you for saying that about her. I don’t think of Olga as a terrible person, but I think there are massive moments when she feels this way—when she feels that she isn’t succeeding with her family because her time is so devoted to her economic pursuits, but her ambitions in that arena leave her feeling emotionally empty. She has some peccadilloes, but really, she is not terrible; she is lonely. Her upward mobility has left her, as the saying goes in Spanish, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá.” [Neither from here nor from there.] I felt this was an experience I personally had, and one that I think is reflective of many Latinx women, women of color and any person who has tried to “excel.”
Something else that sets Olga apart is that she seems to live by her own rules. When she cuts corners in her business, she sees it as equalizing: the little guy scoring one over the exploitative uber-wealthy. But she’s also loyal and can be generous. She has high expectations of her congressman brother, Prieto, and she struggles when he is not as compassionate as she’d like. How would you describe Olga’s moral compass? I would say she is very Old Brooklyn. Loyalty, spreading love—that’s more than a Biggie lyric. (There’s a reason he’s our borough representative, even posthumously.) It’s really how people who are from here so often are. Do you need money to eat? Is there something that’s not that hard for me to do that will make a huge impact on your day? Tell me, and I’ll try and do it. She grew up with that value system.
I also think, despite the place that it is now, the Brooklyn she was raised in was a place of underdogs. Taxis wouldn’t even come here. So it’s ingrained in her to always help the underdog.
There’s some bits of her that maybe are spiteful. Tiny acts of revenge. But the Robin Hood gestures that we see, that’s her strange way of reconciling her parents’ values with her own perceived discarding of them. When she “levels the field” in these tiny ways, it’s her version of not being completely disconnected from her parents’ values about money and class.
Growing up, rules were suggestions, to be honest. The most important thing was not that you live by any black-and-white code but that you were doing the “right thing,” and I think what we see is that “right” for Olga depends on evening out the balance of power.
“I haven’t seen this larger history in fiction in a minute and felt it important to my community that it was correct.”
Because of what Olga and Prieto do for a living and the circles in which they operate, there are lots of fun details about luxury weddings and the lifestyles and excesses of New York’s elite. As a former wedding planner yourself, did you approach these parts as an insider writing a comedy of manners, or did you step back to unpack it all, more in the tradition of true crime? Ha. Probably more a comedy of manners, though it’s truly a bit of a mix. I know a lot of people in politics, and while I took a number of liberties, that area was a bit more tactical in my thinking. But the weddings were definitely in the spirit of a comedy of manners. Mainly, it was so important for me to show how these two characters have to have vast fields of knowledge and cultural fluency to move throughout the world, and also the toll and exhaustion of slipping in and out.
Olga’s mother, Blanca, is a fascinating, destabilizing character. Her absence from her children’s lives (in combination with her husband’s addiction) was devastating for Olga and Prieto. But Blanca’s mission is righteous, and some of the difficult, harsh things she tells her children are important and true. What did you want people to take away from Blanca and the choices she makes? Sort of, exactly that. None of us are purely bad or purely good, and that is the most starkly true with Blanca. She made choices, and they are the extreme choices of a woman who thinks in absolutes. In many ways this is how truly revolutionary thinkers need to be; we just don’t see them in intimate settings too much, such as in letters to their children.
But the main point I wanted to make with Blanca is that even when she’s wrong, she’s always also a little bit right. Motherhood is so, so fascinating. That bond, that knowing. Her actions beyond her insights are what’s problematic, but her ability to know—that felt very real to me and also important to show.
This is beyond your question, but this is a mirror of how Olga and Prieto feel about Puerto Rico itself: It’s a place they only sort of know, and yet it cuts through to something bigger than familiarity.
Listen to an audiobook excerpt from Macmillan Audiobooks. Read by Almarie Guerra, Armando Riesco & Inés del Castillo.
Puerto Rico’s plight, both past and neocolonial present, plays a big role in the story. Tell us about your approach to this element. Did you undertake additional research? I did. My day job when I started this book was at Hunter College, so I would jet uptown from the main campus to CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and research Maria data, the Young Lords, eco-pollution in Latinx communities and waves of activism. Some stuff was ingrained in me; my parents were activists, and I don’t remember not knowing about sterilization on the island or the Nuyorican poets, to be honest. Fania and that era of salsa and the cultural history of freestyle are things I dork out on anyway.
But generally speaking, I spent lots of time on colonial history and the history of activism in the diaspora. I spent tons of time watching Maria footage, researching HIV and AIDS in the 1990s—another era I lived through but wanted to refresh. I talked to Puerto Ricans who had been on the island and were displaced because of Maria—that was important. But I tried not to get bogged down in it, writ large. I tried to absorb it, forget it and then go back and write, because it all needed to come from character and story, not messaging. I just wanted to be sure I got it all correct, because I haven’t seen this larger history in fiction in a minute and felt it important to my community that it was correct.
The title, Olga Dies Dreaming, is particularly striking. Can you tell us about how it came to you and its significance? I sought a politically relevant name for the protagonist, and I settled on Olga Viscal Garriga, who was an activist for Puerto Rican independence who was born in Brooklyn. That felt right. Very, very right. In the earliest phase of the book, which would have been a million pages long, I wanted to write more of Blanca and Johnny’s story, and so I did lots of deep dives into the Young Lords and the Nuyorican poets. As I was writing, I was inspired by Alynda Segarra’s album and kept listening to it on repeat. In her song “Pa’lante,” she samples audio of the Pedro Pietri poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” where he chronicles the dangers of assimilation and losing culture through the lives of four Puerto Ricans in New York: Juan, Miguel, Olga, Manuel. They lose their way by getting caught up in a mainland American notion of success. The characters repeatedly die, dreaming. Olga dies dreaming of a five-dollar raise, of real jewelry, of hitting the lottery. And that felt very right, too. But more than anything, it felt like the right title because it connected this moment—and Puerto Ricans and diasporic people—to our intensely long lineage of using art to speak truth to power.
Was it hard to find a balance between the personal and the political in telling this story? How did you approach that challenge? Yes and no. I wanted to write a book for my people. I mean that in a few contexts, but to direct it back to the question, when I saw Donald Trump throw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico after Maria, that was not political. That was personal. When I see the city council vote on an 80-story high-rise of multimillion-dollar apartments that only creates 150 school seats and blocks out a community garden, that doesn’t feel like a political story to me. It hurts me in my soul. As an artist, one goal was to try and put that on a page: that for many populations, the political is personal. But technically, my approach was to make these characters feel so real so that their pains are your pains.
“My approach was to make these characters feel so real so that their pains are your pains.”
There are many complex characters in this book with different perspectives on progress, power and effective strategies for change. But Dick, the libertarian capitalist paramour, is more obviously flawed than most. What was the inspiration for him? My strange life and professional experiences have given me the opportunity to have access to a wide variety of people—many of them people of power who are well-intentioned, in their own ways of thinking. Not stereotypical “bad people.” With Dick, I wanted to show how someone relatively self-centered, with theoretical justification for their self-interest, can cause great harm by simply existing, even if they never overtly seek to cause great harm. He can be seen, in many ways, as the U.S.’s stance and effect on Puerto Rico itself.
Olga’s family has an ancestral history of enslavement, and they and the people in their Brooklyn neighborhood are specifically referred to as Black and Brown. The text pays attention to color as well as culture, social class and ethnicity, and getting those details right is vital to the story. Olga is “pretty and fair,” her and Prieto’s father is “brown-skinned,” Reggie is Black, and Matteo is a biracial Black Jewish man with “lightly freckled café-con-leche skin.” Does the casting of the Hulu series adaptation reflect the vision you had when you were writing? Hollywood has a tendency to whitewash or flatten those layers in the movement to screen. How do you mitigate that? This is such a thoughtful question. Everyone, from my co-executive producer Alfonso Gomez-Rejon to our partners at 20th Television and Hulu, understood the importance of reflecting our community and illustrating the dynamics of colorism—and the intersectional ripples—that exist in Caribbean Latinx families and communities. And I never felt pressure to flatten roles at all. Olga’s privilege as a white-passable Latina is part of her experience and what has shaped her character itself and in relation to, say, her cousin Mabel. Both characters are successful and beautiful, but the messaging that they get about it—in school, at home—is different. It was exciting to see Aubrey Plaza and Jessica Pimentel in those roles.
There is a line of dialogue in the pilot where a DJ interviewing Reggie says, “I forget you’re Puerto Rican.” And that needed to feel plausible. That is a giant part of Reggie, too, that he gets boxed into one identity for so long, when in reality it’s much more complex, his Afro-Latinidad. On set, I spoke with Laz Alonso, who plays the role, about how moving and exciting it was for him to get to be his full self—a Puerto Rican version (he is Cubano)—but how rarely he gets roles where he can be who he is, an Afro-Latino.
And with Matteo, yes, it was important that he be plausibly racially ambiguous. We were very fortunate in that Jesse Williams, who plays him, is biracial (though not Jewish) with a lot of lived experience around Puerto Ricans and being mistaken for one. So that was a fortunate coincidence that he got to bring that to the role. But mainly we were extremely pointed in this, using this chance to see our spectrum of bodies and complexions and hair types that make Puerto Rican people so beautiful and that reflect our full history and story.
Can you talk about your creative influences? Were there specific authors or literary forebears you looked to as you developed the story? Yes! I spent a lot of time rereading books before I started. I was very taken with Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem and The Sellout by Paul Beatty. These books have a love of community, and Lethem that heart, and Beatty that razor wit, and I took a lot from both of these novels. I reread The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because of history and diaspora and language. I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude, because it’s a religion to me, but also for scale and scope and to not be afraid of being big, and The World According to Garp for how to talk about complicated, flawed people. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and The Bonfire of the Vanities for inspiration on capturing New York and its multitudes. And finally, The House on Mango Street because I wanted to remember who the girl was that Olga would have been when she gets the letter from her mother that changes the trajectory of her life.
With her roots in Puerto Rico and heart in Brooklyn, the heroine of Xochitl Gonzalez’s vibrant and raw debut novel finds that politics and family are hopelessly intertwined.
Beirut-born author Yara Zgheib’s skills have become even more finely honed in the years since her excellent 2019 debut, The Girls at 17 Swann Street. Her devastating second novel, No Land to Light On, is an illuminating, intimate look at the Syrian refugee crisis and the immigrant experience in America during the Trump administration.
On January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 banned entry of individuals—including refugees and preexisting visa holders—from seven Middle Eastern countries into the United States. No Land to Light On chronicles this directive’s cruel impact on one married couple, Sama and Hadi. Hailing from Syria, they separately immigrated to America—Sama to attend Harvard University, Hadi as a refugee—where they subsequently met and fell madly in love, marrying within months.
Sama is five months pregnant when Hadi is summoned abroad to attend to the sudden death of his father, and he promises to return to her in a few short days. Unfortunately, he returns just one day after the travel ban against majority-Muslim countries, which effectively bars him from entering the U.S. As Hadi is detained for questioning, Sama enters premature labor, giving birth to an American son whose father is in the process of being deported. Within the blink of an eye, their elusive and ever-so-precious American dream is transformed into the stuff of nightmares.
Shuttling between times, perspectives and countries, Zgheib’s novel deftly documents Sama’s and Hadi’s lives in Syria and the circumstances that prompted them to leave, as well as their ensuing experiences as American immigrants. The narrative is purposefully fragmented, an artful reflection of the ways in which the lives of immigrants and refugees are uprooted and disrupted. Within the context of a tense and bittersweet love story—one with a healthy dose of nostalgia for days when hope and possibility seemed likely to prevail—Zgheib offers nuanced insights into the complex psychology of and challenges faced by displaced people, and effectively makes the consequences of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies feel personal to all readers.
Written in soul-searing prose, No Land to Light On is an essential, compassionate story that reinstates a sense of humanity for the countless people affected by U.S. travel bans.
Through this tense and bittersweet love story, Yara Zgheib makes the consequences of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies feel personal to all readers.
In Xochitl Gonzalez’s vibrant and raw debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, love and family drama crash into politics.
Proudly Nuyorican (Puerto Rican New Yorker) Olga and her brother, Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, faced some serious challenges when they were growing up in their diverse, working-class neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They were devastated when their uncompromising, demanding mother abandoned them to chase revolution, and again when their troubled father, who loved them unconditionally, died. And yet, all told, Olga and Prieto were fortunate. As driven, bright children, they had each other and a fiercely loving grandmother as a parental surrogate, and they grew up to become complicated, charismatic adults.
In the summer of 2017, at the start of the novel, Olga and Prieto should both be in a good place. They have thriving, high-profile careers and a chaotic, mostly supportive extended family. However, this ostensibly glittering present is overshadowed by the past and divided loyalties. Identity is complex and slippery for both Olga and Prieto, and individual successes don’t negate that. A new love is a tantalizing possibility for Olga, but with their family history, it’s a dream she’s never dared to have.
Olga and Prieto are both haunted by the devastating decline and exploitation of the island where they’ve never lived but always felt connected to. They’ve built more conventional lives than their mother, who chose the fight for Puerto Rican independence over her family, but both siblings remain conflicted. As a congressman, Prieto is the pride of the family, but he has a mandate to advocate for his largely Puerto Rican constituency, and a lot of people don’t think he’s lived up to the hype. Meanwhile, as a luxury wedding planner catering to wealthy New Yorkers, Olga’s chosen profession serves her quest for stability and security but is at odds with who she is and what she values. Highly educated and hypertalented, she’s an artist and a fierce Puertorriqueña, and although she’s great at her job, people in the fiercely status-conscious New York scene still treat her like she’s “the help.”
The real center of the story, which sometimes moves between the past (often in the form of letters) and the present, is Olga and Prieto’s reckoning with the tensions and contradictions that have made them who they are. The siblings have to come to terms with their identities and their mother, and what it would look like to authentically achieve something approximating the ”American dream” or maybe just happiness.
That’s equally out of reach for Olga and Prieto as they contend with the intersections of love (romantic and familial), identity, politics and history. With so many different moving parts and conflicts, Gonzalez’s story sometimes seems overstuffed, with writing that isn’t quite as beautiful as the journey. But the characters and the issues they’re grappling with are deeply compelling. Olga Dies Dreaming delivers a roller coaster’s worth of beautiful highs and lows. All told, it’s an experience worth savoring.
In Xochitl Gonzalez’s vibrant and raw debut, family drama crashes into politics.
Charlie Barnes, the hero of Joshua Ferris’ novel A Calling for Charlie Barnes (11.5 hours), has pancreatic cancer. Or maybe he doesn’t. He is a shyster, a con man and a liar. Or perhaps he’s a dreamer, a nobody who could be a somebody, if only the planets would align in his favor and grant him some grace. The task of discovering the true Charlie falls to his novelist son, Jake, the narrator of this hilarious and tragic story of love, failure and redemption.
Nick Offerman, best known as the laconic misanthrope Ron Swanson on “Parks and Recreation,” delivers a powerful performance as Jake. His whiskey-soaked baritone swings effortlessly from world-weary cynicism to wickedly dry observations about siblings and stepmothers. Like his namesake in The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes is a flawed and vulnerable character, but Offerman’s deft reading convinces the listener that Jake also has the strength necessary to understand and forgive the inexplicable and unforgivable.
Nick Offerman delivers a powerful performance as Jake Barnes, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’ hilarious and tragic story of love, failure and redemption.
Every so often, a book flows so seamlessly that you hardly notice you’re reading it; it feels more like you’re simply existing with the characters. Neel Patel’s gorgeous debut novel, Tell Me How to Be, is a book like that. An emotionally layered family saga about cultural identity, first love, grief and the power of second chances, it’s a painful, funny and ultimately redemptive story.
The novel unfolds through two perspectives. Akash is a gay Indian American man whose life is spiraling. His relationship with his white boyfriend is falling apart, his drinking is out of control, his career as a songwriter in Los Angeles isn’t going anywhere, and he’s not out to his family. Renu, his mother, is in the midst of a different kind of crisis. A year after her husband’s death, she decides to sell the family house and move back to London. She wants to regain the freedom she gave up when she married and came to America 30 years before. When Akash and his older brother, Bijal, return home to help Renu pack up the house, the secrets they’ve all been hiding from each other come to light.
Both Akash and Renu narrate in the second person. Akash speaks to his childhood friend Parth, while Renu directs her sections to Kareem, the Muslim man she fell in love with before getting married. As the book progresses, the profound impact that Parth and Kareem have had on Akash’s and Renu’s lives slowly becomes clear. It’s an elegant narrative device that never feels cliched or contrived. Instead, the parallels between Renu’s and Akash’s stories highlight the rift between mother and son and its origins. So much of this novel is about what parents and children don’t say to each other and the trauma that silence can cause. Akash and Renu are both lonely and unhappy; they wrestle separately with their ghosts, and then slowly find their way back to each other.
This is a rich story that’s as vivid and surprising as its characters. In addition to all the nuances of Renu and Akash’s complicated mother-son relationship, Patel explores sibling relationships, racism in small-town Illinois, first- and second-generation immigrant experiences, alcoholism and more. Renu is observant, bitingly funny and deeply caring. Akash is morose and impulsive; his pain often feels claustrophobic, while his love of music comes across as buoyant and joyful.
Tell Me How to Be is a contemporary family story that captures all the contradictions and challenges of 21st-century life. It’s a rare treat to watch Renu and Akash navigate such tumultuous change—and come out stronger on the other side.
Neel Patel’s gorgeous debut novel flows so seamlessly that you hardly notice you’re reading it; it feels more like you’re simply existing with his characters.
“Life, this up and down life” is on full, multifaceted display in Ethan Joella’s debut novel. A Little Hope begins with a family facing one of life’s greatest tests: a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer within white blood cells. Greg Tyler and his wife, Freddie, are caught up in worry and fear. How do they tell their daughter, Addie, that Greg is sick? What will the next looming doctor’s appointment reveal? The calendar year may be sliding into fall and then winter, but it is just the beginning of a long, unknown road that neither of them wants to take. And they are not the only ones questioning and wrestling. They are so very far from alone.
The small, fictional town of Wharton, Connecticut, is a well-connected community of characters who feel like people you know or people you could be: mothers and sons, wives and husbands, lovers and friends, parents and those soon to be. The cast of characters—Freddie and Greg, Ginger, Luke, Iris, Alex and Kay, Suzette, Damon, Ahmed, Darcy—are honest as they move through the vagaries of love, illness, infidelity, death or disappointment as best they can, searching for a foothold in the midst of all that is happening. Their unceasing thoughts and fickle feelings all strike a familiar and fully human chord.
Joella’s poetic side shines in his moving but never maudlin novel. He captures loneliness, sadness, happiness and anger in all their fleeting hues. He has created a truly intertwined world around the Tylers, portraying their neighbors truthfully yet kindly. From beginning to end, A Little Hope finds the grace of the everyday and homes in on the surprises (both heavy and light) that each day can hold.
Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Joella’s world, it is blessedly more of the latter.
Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Ethan Joella’s debut novel, it is blessedly more of the latter.
Neighborhoods can become cities within cities, providing their residents with the sort of community that human beings crave. But proximity combined with intimacy can mean vulnerability. In new novels by Anna Quindlen and Abbi Waxman, two women are shaken to their core by the real-life dramas that play out on their streets. Each book is set in one of the nation’s largest cities but centers on a single neighborhood block. The lives that intersect in those spaces become a microcosm of interpersonal complications.
In Quindlen’s Alternate Side, Nora Nolan is frustrated by her husband’s obsession with his newly acquired parking spot. It’s a hot commodity on their New York City dead-end street, and it means a break from the alternate-side parking that is the bane of so many New Yorkers’ existence. But it also means Charlie is now tight with some of the street’s most grating characters, especially busybody George. The way he patrols the parking lot and the neighbors’ business, you would think George owned the place, rather than a mere unit. Then there’s Jack, the man who doesn’t offer any kindness when talking to the neighborhood handyman. They seem like mere annoyances until an incident forces everyone to re-examine what they know about truth and their neighbors.
Waxman’s Other People’s Houses is set on the opposite coast, but her characters have much in common with those in Quindlen’s novel. Four families in Los Angeles’ Larchmont neighborhood are tied together by carpool, if not friendship. Frances Bloom volunteers to run the neighbors’ children to school along with her own three. She’s a stay-at-home mom, after all, so why shouldn’t she take the responsibility off the other parents’ shoulders? The neighborhood learns the answer the hard way when Frances walks in on a neighbor in the throes of an affair.
In both novels, surprising incidents begin the unraveling process of friendships and other relationships. It doesn’t matter whether an individual was involved in the incident; each person begins to examine his or her own place on the block and relationship to the people in their own households.
Quindlen is well established as a documenter of life’s personal moments, with several bestselling novels and a Pulitzer Prize for commentary to her credit. Waxman’s effort, on the other hand, is her sophomore release and a strong follow-up to her debut, The Garden of Small Beginnings. Both Quindlen and Waxman show they are adept at fleshing out the fine details that comprise a life, and leave readers reflecting on the intimacy and risk of finding your community within a larger land.
Neighborhoods can become cities within cities, providing their residents with the sort of community that human beings crave. But proximity combined with intimacy can mean vulnerability. In new novels by Anna Quindlen and Abbi Waxman, two women are shaken to their core by the real-life dramas that play out on their streets. Each book is set in one of the nation’s largest cities but centers on a single neighborhood block. The lives that intersect in those spaces become a microcosm of interpersonal complications.
Humor may be the hardest thing to write. Everyone’s sense of humor is different, and it takes a very special person to see the hilarity in day-to-day life, so it’s understandably hard to find a novel that truly makes you laugh. For me, Elizabeth Strout, Gail Honeyman and Jen Beagin make me laugh (though, honestly, Mary Roach’s nonfiction is my go-to laugh machine).
In 2019, we’ve enjoyed a number of good comic tales—but they’re dark, a little wicked, and even when they’re a little fantastical, they’re deeply, utterly real. Here are five of our favorites.
Gravity Is the Thingby Jaclyn Moriarty
The stronger the wellness and self-help industry grows, the more we need fiction to poke fun at it. Moriarty had me guffawing from the opening pages of her debut, the story of a woman who attends a retreat to discover the mystery behind The Guidebook, a strange guide that has been mailed to her for 20 years, one chapter at a time, and certainly not in order. But the humor serves to break down any skepticism in the reader (because the premise definitely gets stranger), allowing them to be vulnerable and receptive to the underlying message of loss, grief and recovery.
Live a Littleby Howard Jacobson
There’s always a place on our reading lists for late-in-life love stories and tales of grumpy old men and women. In Jacobson’s latest novel, the humor is highbrow and crotchety, as two nonagenarians strike up a conversation that blooms into a friendship and more. Of the two characters, snarky Beryl Dusinbery’s very bad attitude was my favorite, but I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed her snide remarks without the counterbalance of Shimi Carmelli. It takes a little while to get to the wittiest parts, but patient readers will be rewarded.
There’s a Word for Thatby Sloane Tanen
It’s a feat to write a novel about a flawed family that makes the reader laugh—but not at the characters. I’m not interested in ridicule or judgment of complicated, ridiculous people, and neither is Tanen. Her latest novel, about two crumbling celebrity families that collide at a rehab clinic, will appeal to optimistic readers who love Hollywood stories and thoughtful takedowns of delusional, self-involved characters.
Fleishman Is in Troubleby Taffy Brodesser-Akner
I’m just as surprised as you are that the story of a divorced dad being inundated with sexual advances via his dating app is necessary reading for 2019, but here we are. Brodesser-Akner is vicious as she nails the woe-is-me cry of a man who has no idea how much of a fool he is. For divorcees, for dating-app users, for anyone trying to understand what love is or what marriage is, this is the book. But if you’re not sure if this one appeals to you, I suggest trying it on audiobook. Reader Allyson Ryan nails the satirical tone, so you’ll never miss a punchline.
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton Who,I thought as I started reading Buxton’s debut novel earlier this year, who am I going to recommend this book to?! The answer is: weirdos with an outstanding sense of humor. It’s a philosophical zombie novel narrated by a Cheetos-loving, foul-mouthed crow who sets out on a journey to try and save humanity. You already know if this appeals to you just from that line—so check it out, hug your pets and then blow your friends’ minds by telling them all about the novel you just read.
In 2019, we’ve enjoyed a number of good comic tales—but they’re dark, a little wicked, and even when they’re a little fantastical, they’re deeply, utterly real. Here are five of our favorites.
Reading groups who fell for Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere—now a series on Hulu—will savor these smart, sophisticated and brisk domestic dramas.
Anna Benz, the protagonist of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau, leads an affluent life in Switzerland with her family. But when an increasing sense of emptiness—and a distant husband—lead her into a string of secret sexual assignations, she becomes caught up in a web of lies. This bold debut from Essbaum succeeds thanks to its nuanced portrayal of Anna. How much do gender stereotypes play into our responses to a character like Anna? Prepare for a lively debate.
In Ask Again, Yes, Mary Beth Keane shrewdly dissects the tensions and connections between two families. Both new to the NYPD in 1973, Brian Stanhope and Francis Gleeson are next-door neighbors grappling with work and personal issues. Lena, Francis’ wife, feels isolated, while Brian’s wife, Anne, is becoming increasingly volatile. The entwining of their lives over decades results in emotional devastation for everyone involved. Expect serious discussion of topics like mental illness and addiction, stemming from Keane’s portrayal of the ways families can be torn apart. Yet there’s hope in this dark drama, as Keane’s characters reckon with the past and find redemption and grace.
Suburban life is anything but dull in Joshilyn Jackson’s Never Have I Ever, another new paperback release. Contented wife and mother Amy Whey’s peaceful existence is turned upside down during a book club meeting where she meets the captivating Angelica Roux. Angelica knows about a terrible incident from Amy’s past, and when she threatens blackmail, Amy must outmaneuver her. Readers can unpack themes of female friendship, morality and loyalty while delighting in the intricate, twisty plot and the novel’s singular momentum. Taut and enthralling, Jackson’s novel will inspire rousing conversation—while also providing an effortless read.
Any Big Little Lies superfans in your group? Pick up another winner from Liane Moriarty, The Husband’s Secret, which shares the same blend of propulsive writing and penetrating social commentary. Cecilia Fitzpatrick finds a letter from her husband that she’s not supposed to open until after his death. She reads it—naturally—only to learn that he harbors a shocking secret with repercussions that go well beyond their family. It’s the worst (best?) possible permutation of the “How well do you know your spouse?” plot, and readers of this provocative novel can look forward to fascinating discussion when their group convenes.
Reading groups who fell for Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere—now a series on Hulu—will savor these smart, sophisticated and brisk domestic dramas.
When the sun is high and a summer afternoon stretches out before you with zero expectations, a great book—read for inspiration, thrills or pure enjoyment—is all you need.
For readers who want the fun of reality TV but the heart of a good drama
Laura Hankin’s Happy and You Know It is the sort of novel that can suck a reader in and hold them until a whole day has passed, but it’s also a multidimensional story with riches revealed through close attention. After Claire is fired from her band, she’s trying to pay her way through New York City life, and a gig as a playgroup musician will have to do. The mothers in the group are wealthy and wellness-obsessed, but they easily incorporate Claire into their lives, and she welcomes the inclusion. As the playgroup moms work out their insecurities—within themselves and within their friendships—the metaphorical masks they wear begin to slip. With a light hand and a touch of mystery, Hankin’s debut explores feminism, class and the expectations placed on mothers. This is a romp with substance, consumed as easily as a beach read but offering ample opportunities for self-reflection.
—Carla Jean Whitley
Safecracker
For readers who want fiery pacing
Michael Maven is a New York thief who’s very good at his job and thinks that his next gig, stealing a rare coin from a rich guy’s apartment, should be easy. Then the job is interrupted by a mysterious woman, and within a matter of days, Michael finds himself at the center of a deadly web of drug cartels, crooked cops, the FBI and the woman who very nearly killed him—twice. Tight, thrilling and charming, Safecracker is a new take on the classic “crook-in-over-his-head” crime story, unfolding through Michael’s effortlessly cool narration. In prose that calls to mind the breeziest work of crime legends like Elmore Leonard, author Ryan Wick drives his narrative forward like a freight train. It’s expertly paced, witty and surprising, while also retaining a sense of the familiar that only comes from a love of the genre.
—Matthew Jackson
Editor’s note: Safecracker was originally scheduled for publication on June 2, 2020, but it has been canceled by the publisher. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
In The Madwoman and the Roomba, Sandra Tsing Loh finds comedy in the indignities and absurdities of contemporary life while chronicling her 55th year. In two earlier nonfiction books, Loh adjusted to motherhood and went through a rocky divorce. This time, Loh is happily divorced and happily post-menopausal but still recording her life with let-it-all-hang-out charm. She recalls her embarrassing, claustrophobic freakout at the March for Science and tries to unleash her inner midlife goddess while parenting two teenagers. She describes her efforts to improve her terrible front yard, hire a painter, understand her malfunctioning high-tech fridge and follow her new cookbook’s recipes. Loh’s tone is chatty and self-deprecating, like having a glass of wine or a long phone call with your favorite witty, goofy friend. Because the narrative is loosely structured, you can read straight through or just dip into an essay when the mood strikes.
For readers who believe that any season can be the season of the witch
In the kingdom of Morgrain, there is a castle. In that castle is a great black tower. And inside that tower, behind innumerable and impenetrable enchantments, is a door that should never be opened. Ryx, who has the power to kill anything she touches, is the Warden charged with keeping it safe. When a visiting mage ventures too close to the magic of the tower, Ryx finds herself at the heart of an international crisis. She must use all of her wits and talent to keep Morgrain, and the world, safe from unspeakable ruin. Like any good mystery, Melissa Caruso’s The Obsidian Tower slowly feeds the reader clue after clue, never fully revealing everything at once. But this book has moments of real pain and longing that have nothing to do with magic or towers. Not being able to have physical contact with anyone has changed Ryx, and the choices she makes to subvert or embrace this fact are beautiful and terrible—which makes her eventual confrontation with some very nasty magic all the more satisfying.
Sky is only 10 years old, but she’s experienced as much pain and confusion as someone three times her age. Although she was abandoned at a fire station as a newborn, she found a home with her adoptive parents. Now she’s starting over again, and this time she’s old enough to be aware of the pain. Sky’s adoptive parents have died in a car crash, and their will designates that Leo, Sky’s father’s best friend from childhood, will become her guardian. Leo is torn up at the loss of his friend, and now he must create a loving home for Sky. Her presence sends Leo and his husband, Xavier, into a tailspin. In My Kind of People, novelist Lisa Duffy paints a portrait of a community of people trying to find out who they are—and with whom they can be themselves. As neighbors jump in to help raise Sky, or to weigh in on what Leo could do better, Sky and Leo wrestle with their understanding of their changing circumstances. Duffy’s story is sweet but never cloying, and she’s unafraid to depict uncomfortable circumstances as the tale unfolds.
For readers who say they hate drama but actually love it
It is a truth universally acknowledged that mothers will meddle in their daughters’ love lives. For Andrea Tang, a successful 33-year-old lawyer in Singapore, that truism extends to her aunties, cousins and anyone else who can claim relation to her. What everyone wants to know is, when will she get married? After ending a long-term relationship, Andrea feels the pressure to find The One while also putting in as many billable hours as possible to secure a partnership in her law firm. Her friends offer support, but Andrea can’t stop thinking about Suresh, her officemate and competition for partner. He’s annoying, engaged to a beautiful but domineering Londoner and not at all Andrea’s type. Except that he’s exactly her type. Author Lauren Ho is a former legal adviser, and her debut novel is a blast. With a relatable, laugh-out-loud protagonist, Last Tang Standing is a near-perfect blend of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary, yet it still feels wholly original.
For readers who miss their feminist film studies class
In Zan Romanoff’s YA novel Look, Lulu Shapiro has mastered Flash, a Snapchat-like app that shares her perfectly edited life with 10,000 followers. But a racy Flash, meant to be private, accidentally goes public, and now everyone has seen Lulu being intimate with another young woman. Her classmates think she just did it for attention, but Lulu is bisexual and fears what sharing this truth about herself could mean for her popularity. Then Lulu meets the beguiling Cass and her friend Ryan, a trust-fund kid refurbishing an old hotel. With no phones allowed at the hotel, Lulu experiences a social life less focused on carefully curated images. She feels like she can truly be herself—until an abuse of trust brings it all crashing down. Anyone who has engaged in content creation—even just photos on Instagram—will have a lot to chew on regarding the praise and scorn women experience based on how they depict themselves. The cast of characters is almost entirely teens, but older readers will take a lot from Look as well. Self-commodification hardly started with Snapchat, after all.
In 2010, following her divorce, Diane Cardwell finds herself shuffling listlessly through her life and work as a New York Times reporter. Casting about for an assignment, she heads out to Montauk, Long Island, and spies a group of surfers out in the shimmering surf. Transfixed by this group of men and women, she begins trekking out to Rockaway Beach from her Brooklyn apartment to take lessons and join her newfound troop. Cardwell dives into surfing, alternating between fear of failure and dogged determination. As she gains confidence and develops her own style, she moves to Rockaway Beach, buys a little cottage and a board and thrives in her new neighborhood. When Hurricane Sandy hits in 2012, she rides it out in Rockaway with some of her friends, and they emerge as an even more tightknit community. In Rockaway, Cardwell’s moving story washes over the reader with its emotionally rich portrayal of the ragged ways we can embrace our vulnerabilities in order to overcome them.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this feature incorrectly stated that Lauren Ho is a former attorney.
When the sun is high and a summer afternoon stretches out before you with zero expectations, a great book—read for inspiration, thrills or pure enjoyment—is all you need.
Summer 2020 has been a season of big shifts, including in the world of fiction. We’re delighted to give a warm welcome to these new voices and their debut novels.
The author: Writer and activist Cherie Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community in Ontario. She has published five books in Canada and makes her U.S. adult debut with Empire of Wild.
The book: Drawing inspiration from legends of the werewolf-like rougarou, Dimaline’s powerful and inventive novel follows a woman who is searching for the truth behind her husband’s mysterious disappearance and even more suspicious return.
For fans of: Literary thrillers that draw from the author’s cultural heritage, such as LaRose by Louise Erdrich.
Read it for: Indigenous empowerment and a flawless mixture of supernatural events and realistic characters.
The author: A former student of Zadie Smith (who hyped Luster earlier this year in Harper’s Bazaar), Raven Leilani has won multiple prizes for her fiction and poetry and is the Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence at NYU.
The book: This gritty novel explores many appetites—for sex, companionship, attention and money—and what happens when those lusts are sated.
For fans of: Spike Lee’s 2017 reboot of She’s Gotta Have It and heavy-hitting millennial writers like Ling Ma and Catherine Lacey.
Read it for: Leilani’s cerebral, raw writing and keen social observations—especially about the truths that some people don’t want to see.
The author: Dublin-based author Rónán Hession is a social worker and songwriter who has released three lyrical acoustic albums as Mumblin’ Deaf Ro.
The book: Hession explores the ordinary lives of two everyday guys in their 30s. Leonard’s mom has just died, and he’s working through his grief and loneliness. Hungry Paul lives at home with his parents and is occasionally accosted with motivational speeches by his older sister. These two lifelong friends go to work (or not, as the case may be), meet new people, try new things—the stuff of everyday life.
Read it for: The reminder that we’re all just doing our best. Simple and straightforward stories often get overlooked in our noisy world, but not by Hession.
The author: French Armenian Australian writer Alex Landragin is a former author of Lonely Planet travel guides.
The book: Crossings is composed of three imaginative tales: a ghost story written by Charles Baudelaire, a German Jewish exile’s dark love story on the precipice of the Nazi invasion of Paris and a memoir by a woman who lives through seven generations. The reader can read each story individually or follow the “Baroness” style, following directions to leap between the three tales.
For fans of: Books that play with storytelling structure, like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
Read it for: The totally unexpected reading experience, which is as incredibly fun as it is nuanced and engaging.
The author: Charlotte McConaghy has published eight books in her native Australia and has worked in script development for film and TV for several years.
The book: Set in a near-future world that’s facing the mass extinction of animals, McConaghy’s U.S. debut follows a young woman named Franny who, grappling with a lifelong inability to define the nature of home, joins a fishing crew to follow the last migration of Arctic terns.
For fans of: Emotionally resonant tales like Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.
Read it for: A message of hope when all feels hopeless.
The author: Lysley Tenorio is a Filipino American professor at Saint Mary’s College of California whose stories have been adapted for the stage in New York City and San Francisco.
The book: Excel, a young Filipino immigrant living in California, lives paycheck to paycheck with his mother, a former low-budget movie star who now scams men online. When Excel meets a girl named Sab, the two run away and find themselves at the whimsical desert community of Hello City.
For fans of: Unique perspectives of the immigrant experience, such as The Leavers by Lisa Ko.
Read it for: A powerful examination of the bond between mother, son and motherland.
The author: Born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, Sanaë Lemoine was raised in France and Australia. She now lives in New York, where she has worked as a recipe writer and cookbook editor.
The book: Margot Louve is the product of a long affair between a married public figure and a well-known actress. In her final year of high school, Margot decides that she is ready to expose the lie and go public with her story—anonymously.
For fans of: Stories of young women searching for truth, such as Saltwater by Jessica Andrews and Actress by Anne Enright.
Read it for: A realistic Parisian atmosphere and complicated, nuanced female characters.
The author: Combat veteran Odie Lindsey is the Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.
The book: Inspired by the author’s work as an editor of the Mississippi Encyclopedia, Some Go Home is set in the fictional town of Pitchlynn, Mississippi, where white residents are forced to face buried truths during a retrial for the violent, decades-old murder of a Black man.
For fans of:The Bitter Southerner and Southern novels that wrestle with the region’s complicated, brutal history.
Read it for: Reflections on how the sins of our ancestors replay in our own lives.
Cherie Dimaline photo by Wenzdae Brewster. Raven Leilani photo by Evan Davis. Rónán Hession photo by Barry Delany. Alex Landragin photo by Helga Salwe. Charlotte McConaghy photo by Emma Daniels. Lysley Tenorio photo by Laura Bianchi. Sanaë Lemoine photo by Gieves Anderson. Odie Lindsey photo by Dana DeLoca.
Summer 2020 has been a season of big shifts, including in the world of fiction. We’re delighted to give a warm welcome to these new voices and their debut novels.
Sign Up
Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.
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.
Cherie Dimaline, author of 
Rónán Hession, author of 
Alex Landragin, author of 
Charlotte McConaghy, author of 
Lysley Tenorio, author of 
Sanaë Lemoine, author of 
Odie Lindsey, author of 
