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Start the year with stories for your book club

Round up your reading group and ring in 2025 with one of these fabulous short story collections.
Round up your reading group and ring in 2025 with one of these fabulous short story collections.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Definitely Better Now

Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

I Made It Out of Clay

Though entertaining in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex, following a Jewish woman grieving the loss of her father who creates a golem when she can’t secure a date for her sister’s wedding.
Though entertaining in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex, following a Jewish woman grieving the loss of her father who creates a golem when she can’t secure a date for her sister’s wedding.
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FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Mrs. Gulliver

Review by Alden Mudge

Valerie Martin’s captivating new novel, Mrs. Gulliver, lies just beyond the horizon. The year is 1954. Verona Island floats a longish ferry ride away from the mainland. Lila Gulliver’s clients enter through a side door behind a hedge, unseen from the street, though prostitution is legal on the island.

Lila, who tells this tale, is a keen observer of surfaces. She crisply describes the clothing and demeanor of everyone we meet. Of the two destitute farm girls who arrive in her drawing room one humid day, Carita stands out. She possesses a rich velvet voice and “an archness as well, distant and amused.” Carita has been blind since birth. Lila thinks Carita might just fulfill a fantasy of some of her clients.

We readers, like Lila, her clients, her colleagues and a college boy named Ian, are soon enchanted by Carita. Lila notes that Ian is “a romantic, self-righteous boy, and I liked the idea of him with Carita, two healthy young bodies driven together by sexual attraction and not much else. . . . She would forget him in a month, but he would remember her for the rest of his life.”

Alas, Lila is not quite right. Ian decides he must save Carita from this den of iniquity. (Lila’s house, by the way, is a place where part-time sex worker Mimi describes the economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and Carita decides Marx is right.) Ian, scion of the wealthiest family on the island, is involved with a murder that may be a gangland hit. He loses his mind. He and Carita flee to an impoverished fishing village.

Many complications ensue, mostly having to do with money, and the varying temperatures and power dynamics of love. In her afterword, Martin writes that she did not want Carita to end up like Juliet Capulet, a tragic heroine. Instead, in Mrs. Gulliver, Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. Her touch is tender and light. There are shadows and there is sunshine. All’s well that ends well. We hope.

In Mrs. Gulliver, Valerie Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. All’s well that ends well. We hope.
FictionPopular Fiction

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

Review by Maya Fleischmann

A bookshop becomes an inspiration for transformation in this thought-provoking tale by author and essayist Hwang Bo-reum.

After she burns out from her intense career and divorces her controlling husband, Yeongju decides to find emotional fulfillment by pursuing her childhood dream of owning a bookshop. Although she finds the business aspect of running a bookshop more challenging than she expected, Yeongju discovers that she’s created a special space for thought, growth and connection with others. Included in the cast of characters who are inspired by Yeongju and her bookshop sanctuary are Minjun, a young man desperate for work after dropping out of university who becomes the shop’s barista; Jungsuh, a woman who quits her job because of its unfair policies and now spends her time crocheting at the store; and Seungwoo, an office worker-turned-author who hosts a writing workshop at the bookshop.

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is a slice-of-life tale with appealing characters whose trials stay light on drama. Their stories explore aspects of Korean culture, including the expectation that children defer to their parents and wives to their husbands, and the value placed on success in work over the development of one’s inner life. While the prose is clear and uncluttered, at times the narrative can feel stilted and repetitive, although this may be an impact of the translation from the original Korean. Still, the messages about happiness and not wasting time in unsuitable and meaningless endeavors are uplifting and provide a cozy read. This title may be a match for fans of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is an uplifting and cozy slice-of-life tale with appealing characters whose trials stay light on drama.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Tommy Orange on the strangeness of novel-writing

Behind the Book by Tommy Orange

Before March of 2018, I never intended to write a sequel to There There. When I first decided to do it, the mean voices inside immediately began judging me. Like it was lowbrow. Like it belonged in the Marvel universe of decision-making, like people would think it was a cash grab even though I made the decision before the success of There There.

The idea first came to me when I was sitting in a Penguin Random House warehouse signing an insane amount of books ahead of the publication of There There. That is not a romantic place for a novel to be conceived. I feel embarrassed to share that it came during that moment, but that is when it came. The sales reps who were helping me to sign all these books played a Spotify radio station based on the song “There There” by Radiohead. “Wandering Star” by Portishead came on and right when I heard it, I knew I wanted to write a sequel and that it would be called Wandering Stars. I didn’t at all know at first where the follow-up novel would lead based on this title, but I knew with strange certainty it would be the title. I could never have guessed all the unexpected places it would lead me.

Some of the earliest writing I did for Wandering Stars was about Maxine Loneman experiencing the death of her grandson. I was on a run in Baltimore, and I thought of Maxine and Tony in the afterlife and then of all these afterlife experiences of the characters from There There. That was the original conception—there was going to be a lot of weird afterlife stuff. And then in early 2019 I was in Sweden for the translation of There There. I almost didn’t go on this trip. I was to go to Italy, Sweden and Amsterdam. I’d traveled so much in 2018 that despite these being really cool sounding places, I didn’t actually want to go.

It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

Just before I was to leave I went to a Lunar New Year festival at the Oakland Museum with my family, and we parked at the Lake Merritt BART parking lot, which is notorious for break-ins. I think I wanted something bad to happen. I even left my backpack in the car. And then it did. Someone stole all of my luggage, my passport and my backpack with my computer in it, plus even my son’s toys and some of my wife’s clothes and jewelry. I was upset but also excited because I thought it meant I wouldn’t have to go to Europe. But my agent insisted I should. And she was right. So I got an emergency rushed new passport and only missed the Italian portion of the trip.

Anyway, so then the organizers in Sweden asked if I wanted a private tour of a museum. They said there was a Cheyenne exhibit. I ended up getting this really weird meta-tour where the person leading me through the museum kept explaining that they knew the museum shouldn’t have all this stuff and that they were trying to find ways to return it but weren’t entirely sure how yet. It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

When we came to the Cheyenne exhibit I looked at old regalia and felt that familiar sadness I feel at museums, wondering about why anyone thought showing stolen stuff directly related to colonialism was a good idea, when I caught sight of a newspaper article clipping that said “Southern Cheyennes in Florida, 1875.” I know enough about my tribe’s history to know we were never in Florida. Not as a people. When I came home from the trip, I ended up falling deeply down a rabbit hole researching why some of us were in St. Augustine, Florida, from 1875 to 1878, at a prison-castle called Fort Marion that was shaped like a star. St. Augustine was also the very first European settlement in the continental United States. It should be noted, and some know, but many do not, that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, not in North America. His discovery of the United States is just as false and meaningless as his legacy as some kind of hero. He went home in chains and will always be remembered by people who know the history as an awful human being.

But how would I connect this piece of history with the aftermath of the powwow from There There?

It was in the research that the moment happened. This was maybe six months after Sweden and first finding out about Fort Marion. I’d been reading a book called War Dance at Fort Marion by Brad D. Lookingbill. I was immersing myself in the world of Fort Marion and beginning to write what would become the beginning of Wandering Stars. I got to the end of the book and it listed the names of the prisoners. The character I had already started writing I’d named Star. And there in the list of names was a Southern Cheyenne named Star, and not far below him, someone named Bear Shield. I immediately started crying seeing the names. That I had already written a character named Star was one thing, but to see a family name from There There was just so overwhelming. I became convinced at that moment that I would make a generational tie between one of the prisoners at Fort Marion and one of the families who survived the shooting at the powwow at the end of There There.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing.

I have found in writing these two novels that there are things that go into the work, and also things that come out of it. For instance, the spider legs that Orvil Red Feather pulls out of his leg in There There, that was something that actually happened to me. In a West Oakland Target bathroom, just like Orvil. And then the week after I wrote the bat scene from the Thomas Frank chapter in There There, we had a bat fly into our house. The bat did what they call a flyby on my wife and niece. It felt so related to the bat I wrote into the novel and my wife definitely blamed me writing it in for what happened. And then my wife’s medical insurance had lapsed without our knowing and we ended up having to spend $10,000 to pay for rabies shots. One of the first things we did with advance money from There There was to pay that medical bill.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing. You have to be open to what it can become, I think. You have to open yourself up to what might be possible for it to become that you might never have imagined. It can be a kind of collaboration with your unconscious, and with something else. The process, I guess. It can feel like it takes everything you have. And it does.

Read our review of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange author photo by Michael Lionstar.

The author shares the moments from his life that became part of the story of his hit debut, There There, and the song that inspired his sequel’s title, Wandering Stars.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

After Annie

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Annie Brown was the proverbial glue of her family. She picked up her husband, Bill, at a party and they married after their fling led to a pregnancy—the first of many for the Brown family. Annie brought joy to the patients at the nursing home where she worked. She provided accountability for her best friend, Annemarie, when the temptation to revisit addictions flared. Beyond Bill’s trusted life partner, Annie was both role model and caregiver for their daughter and three sons. So when she dies, suddenly, the people around her are not simply bereft—they’re lost. As Bill reflects on his wife’s death, he observes the disjointed way Annie’s loved ones stumble through their grief: “There was some kind of river of loss underneath them all. There was no way to know how to move on.” 

In Anna Quindlen’s latest novel, After Annie, the novelist turns her masterful eye on the lives of the people closest to Annie: Bill, their daughter Ali, and Annemarie. As Quindlen cycles through their perspectives during the first year following Annie’s death, we see the ways the characters circle each other. Ali becomes an adult the moment her mom falls to the floor, absorbing the responsibilities her dad is too shell-shocked to take on. Bill, a plumber, responds to endless calls from the town’s single women. Annemarie initially makes time for Ali but soon drifts away as her addiction surges again. 

Throughout her career, Quindlen’s fiction and nonfiction alike have showcased her attention to detail and ability to weave compelling narratives from the common experiences that comprise life. After Annie follows in the footsteps of Miller’s Valley, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Alternate Side and other Quindlen novels that examine families and the people in their immediate orbits. After Annie is a heartfelt, nuanced portrait of life after loss.

In Anna Quindlen’s latest novel, After Annie, the novelist turns her masterful eye on a family’s life after loss.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Review by Cat Acree

Far too often, translators’ bylines go missing on book covers and in reviews. The author is seen as the one true artist, whose translators exist in service to them. Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (and many other authors), has become a leading advocate for changing this perception, encouraging readers to view translated books as acts of co-creation rather than pale shadows of their original text. In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

As the book begins, the eight translators of world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey have arrived at the author’s home at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval, endangered wood that sprawls across the border of Poland and Belarus. All the translators are initially referred to by their languages of translation (English, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, etc.), and the narrator of these events is Spanish, who insists that the translators are wholly devoted to the author and her original text. “Irena’s works were eternal,” Spanish says, “but our translations were no more enduring than socks.” As they prepare to translate Irena’s new novel, Grey Eminence, they cocoon themselves in her world, fully isolated and committed to her unusual rules. But Irena’s behavior is bizarre. She’s reluctant to give them the manuscript, and after a couple of days, she vanishes. The translators are left scrambling to figure out where she went, and over the course of “seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks,” they race from one clue to the next, terrified and paranoid, getting more and more lost in the proverbial woods.

Croft’s novel employs a beguiling structure that serves to undermine any sense of truth we might try to reap from Spanish’s version of events. Spanish’s book is not a memoir but a work of autofiction, and it has been translated by English, who has illuminated the book with a vicious preface and copious footnotes, often mocking Spanish and offering a peep show of (some of) the changes made in translation. The reader is left to wonder which writer, if any, can be trusted.

Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.

Read our interview with Jennifer Croft on The Extinction of Irena Rey.

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionGothic Fiction

King Nyx

Review by Arlene McKanic

At one point in Kirsten Bakis’ second novel, King Nyx, Anna Fort, the protagonist and narrator, contemplates the tendency of evil men to wreck the lives of everyone they come upon, especially women and girls. Such men can never have enough money or power, and cruelty is their intention. Anna has spent a good deal of her life reacting to men like this. One was her employer and father-in-law; another a mysterious magnate named Claude Arkel who invites her and her eccentric husband, Charles, to stay as guests on his private island.

On a late autumn day just after World War I, we find Anna and Charles (who are based on real people of the same names) waiting for a boat to take them to the island. All the while, Anna hugs a cage whose cover barely protects the two little parrots inside from the cold. Anna’s obsession with their care hints at the lengths she’ll go to protect the vulnerable, introduces themes of captivity and freedom, and serves as a callback to the titular bird, King Nyx. Despite the mighty moniker, King Nyx is a toy made of tin. To the lonely, impoverished and motherless Anna, the toy—thought of as female despite the name—was a childhood friend and a totem. It will turn out that it still is.

Once on the island, the Forts meet Frank and Stella Bixby, a couple who enjoy a strange, and as we learn, very dark dynamic. The couples take to each other right away. Charles and Frank bond over their mutual weirdness, and Stella and Anna both need a female confidant. Stella is a fantastic creation: She’s quick-witted, mouthy, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and has a heart of gold. Indeed, the injection of humor in some very tense scenes comes courtesy of Stella craving a cigarette or blurting out a bon mot.

Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the first chapter, when two strange women warn of trouble on Arkel’s island while the Forts wait for their boat. Trouble happens quickly, and there are scenes so anxiety-producing that you might want to put the book down and check to see that your windows and doors are secure. King Nyx is a scary good book.

 

Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
FictionLiterary Fiction

My Beloved Life

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Imagine finding yourself in the company of a stranger. A simple hello organically morphs into hours of conversation, full of resonating and enlightening stories. This is the feeling one gets while reading Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, My Beloved Life. Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, the novel is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Born in 1935 in the tiny farming village of Khewali, India, without electricity, money or much else, to a mother who nearly died of a snake bite while pregnant, Jadunath (or Jadu) nevertheless seems destined for big things. Curiosity and a thirst for knowledge lead him away from peasant life to the city of Patna where he eventually becomes a respected professor, a political activist and a loving husband and father. Jadu’s story provides glimpses of life in rural India steeped in superstition and faith, and of India’s struggles for equality and progress from post-independence to the modern day.

In contrast to Jadu’s upbringing, his daughter, Jugnu, is born in the bustling city of Patna in 1965. Raised in a loving home, surrounded by her father’s intellectual circle, Jugnu grows up to be a passionate journalist for CNN in the United States. Jugnu’s perspective adds deeply to our understanding of Jadu beyond his words alone.

The novel feels very intimate as it unfolds in the first person from Jadu and then Jugnu’s perspectives. In the skillful blending of individual experience with extraordinary world events, Kumar’s journalistic background shines through, often making one forget that this is a work of fiction. Additionally, Kumar’s own upbringing in a small town near Patna, and his experiences as an immigrant and professor in the United States, add a very powerful element to his ultimate message that everyone has a story that is worth remembering.

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and mundane, My Beloved Life is storytelling at its best.

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.
FictionPopular FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Four sweeping family sagas to captivate your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence chronicles the lives of Bengali sisters Deepa, Priya and Jamini beginning in 1947, during a period of upheaval in India. Deepa looks for fulfillment in marriage, while Priya hopes to become a doctor like their father, and Jamini focuses on family and duty. When their father is fatally shot during a riot, their lives are turned upside down. During the Partition of India and Pakistan, each sister is forced to make a life-changing choice. At once a tender family portrait and a powerful exploration of Indian history, Independence is a rewarding book club pick. 

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai tracks a diverse cast of characters whose lives are impacted by the Vietnam War. Phong, a Black American Vietnamese orphan, searches for his parents and dreams of immigrating to America. Dan, an American helicopter pilot haunted by his experiences in the war, goes back to Vietnam, aiming to lay the past to rest and mend his marriage. This stirring novel offers a nuanced look at how the country was affected by the conflict, and Nguyễn’s examinations of PTSD and racism will get book clubs talking.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers tells the story of two very different American families whose lives become interlaced over the course of several decades, beginning in the 1950s. James Vincent, a prosperous white lawyer, struggles to bond with his son, Rufus. Tensions mount after Rufus marries Claudia Christie, a Black woman. Through flashbacks, Porter provides a poignant account of Agnes, Claudia’s mother, who was raped as a young woman in Georgia. Porter masterfully spins the detailed stories of other family members as she explores the meaning of kinship and connection. The end result is an epic yet intimate tale teeming with humanity.

In Salt Houses, author Hala Alyan follows the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family displaced by the Six-Day War. The conflict splinters the family, as sisters Alia and Widad settle in Kuwait, and their mother goes to Jordan. Despite a troubled marriage, Alia and her husband, Atef, raise three children, two of whom move to America. Through skillful shifts in perspective, Alyan compassionately portrays the lives of the Yacoubs and their experiences across the years. Tradition, identity and assimilation are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.

Journey from India to Palestine, from Vietnam to midcentury America in these stellar reads.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Part campus novel, part ghost story, Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, fearlessly takes on racism and misogyny in the rarefied world of fine art and art history. 

Nodding to real-life Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta and her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, the novel opens in the late 1980s with the death of artist Anita de Monte. After a violent argument with her husband, Jack Martin, Anita was found on the sidewalk outside their apartment, leaving speculators to wonder—did she jump or was she pushed? As Andre was in his real trial, Jack is acquitted and continues his successful and lucrative career, while Anita’s art is all but forgotten. Ten years later, Raquel Toro is an art history major at Brown. Her working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place at the university and even more so in her department, where she doesn’t fit in with the privileged “Art History Girls.” Fortunes change when Raquel begins dating art major Nick Fitzsimmons, whose wealthy parents have ties to New York’s major museums and galleries, and when her advisor enthusiastically supports Raquel’s senior thesis on Jack Martin’s career. 

The dynamic between Raquel and Nick mirrors the one between Anita and Jack, with both men trying to control their partner’s physical appearance, clothing and schedule through microaggressions and expensive gifts. As Raquel’s summer internship redirects her research to include Anita’s experience, Anita’s story, told in parallel chapters, takes a turn for the uncanny; she subtly haunts Jack from beyond the grave, transforming into a bat and shifting his meticulously displayed art works. Though told with humor and a light touch, Gonzalez doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges. As Raquel brings Anita’s groundbreaking sculptures to light, Anita de Monte Laughs Last boldly questions the choices behind what we are taught and demands that the complete story be disclosed.

Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Woman in the Sable Coat

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Brooks returns to World War II-era England with her fourth novel, following two young women connected by their love of the same man. But The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.

Nina Woodrow and Kate Nicholson are first brought together on an August afternoon in 1934 when 14-year-old Nina is on the outs with her best friend, Rose, and Kate, married to her childhood friend Guy Nicholson, is pregnant and miserable in their new home in Cottenden village. That night, a spontaneous dinner party has both Nina and Kate acting impulsively and seemingly out of character.

Eight years later, the war is grinding on. Nina, now 22, has joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she folds silk parachutes and tries to find her footing. Back in Cottenden, Kate cares for her son, Pip, and takes in refugees. But Guy, now a Royal Air Force Pilot at the same base as Nina, tells Kate he wants a divorce and that he’s in love with Nina. This revelation draws the despairing Kate to Nina’s father Henry, an awkward, cautious widower.

The novel rotates between Nina’s and Kate’s perspectives, as each contrives to live with her decisions and precarious situations: Nina as the second wife of a divorced man and Kate as a divorcee. With a sense of suspense and menace in the vein of Daphne du Maurier (to whom there’s a nod as Kate obsessively reads du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek), The Woman in the Sable Coat lays clues for the reader to suspect a long-hidden deception, a secret that turns out to affect both women in unexpected ways. The novel also shows how the era’s prim morality feels suffocating for middle-class women, and how the trauma of the Great War still reverberates for some of these characters decades later. The Woman in the Sable Coat is a slow burn of a novel, with a lovely, surprising moment of redemption and connection for both Nina and Kate at the story’s end.

The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.
FictionInspirational FictionHistorical Fiction

Christian fiction picks for spring 2024

Feature by Edith Kanyagia

The American Queen

Bestselling author Vanessa Miller has penned yet another moving and illuminating novel in The American Queen. Inspired by a true story, it celebrates a Black woman’s pursuit of freedom and a community’s undying courage.

It is 1864, and though President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation over a year ago, Louella is still enslaved at the Montgomery Plantation in Mississippi. Emboldened by a speech of her father’s about revolution and freedom—one that later costs him his life—Louella decides to risk her own life to become a free woman. Together with her loving husband, William, she leads her community on a journey fraught with unimaginable obstacles to build a kingdom founded on equality, justice and love.

An indestructible spirit shines through the hardship and cruelty Louella and her community face. Brutal beatings and murders are constant on the plantation, and even after they establish their Kingdom of the Happy Land, inequality, injustice and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan threaten to destroy everything they have painstakingly built. Still, they persevere and create a society where Black people can not only live freely but also pursue their dreams.

With gentleness and empathy, Miller examines the complex relationship between faith and adversity. Though she is inspired by William’s faith, Louella struggles to reconcile her circumstances with God’s promises. Having lost both her mother and father, hate settles in her heart towards those who continuously seek to subdue Black people. Louella’s spiritual journey is beautifully chronicled, and by the end of the novel, her growth is evident.

 

The Irish Matchmaker

Matchmaking season is approaching and Lisdoonvarna’s matchmakers, Catriona Daly and her father, are preparing for the 1905 Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival. Though she’s helped many in the town find love, Catriona herself has been unsuccessful. With each matchmaking season, her hopes of finding her true love and finally leaving Lisdoonvarna are reignited. When Catriona is asked to be the matchmaker for Lord Osborne’s son, Andrew, she instead hopes to catch Andrew’s eye herself, and sets out to become the bride his family wants for him.

Meanwhile, Donal Bunratty is struggling to provide for his young daughter while facing the possibility of losing his farm. Fifty years after the Great Famine, Ireland is still suffering from its impact. Donal’s farm is not as productive as it once was, and without help, he may soon be forced to give it up. Though he misses his late wife, he decides to take part in the matchmaking festival with his daughter’s encouragement.

Filled with delightful twists, The Irish Matchmaker is an immersive story about faith and finding love in unexpected places from Jennifer Deibel, the author of A Dance in Donegal, The Lady of Galway Manor and The Maid of Ballymacool. Deibel skillfully weaves Donal and Catriona’s stories, creating realistic characters and a fascinating storyline. She also takes an honest look at the crushing impact of economic hardship and explores the role of faith when all hope seems lost.

 

The Foxhole Victory Tour

With enchanting prose, author Amy Lynn Green’s endearing historical novel, The Foxhole Victory Tour, follows the intriguing adventures of a group of USO performers during World War II.

Socialite Catherine Duquette joins a USO tour set to travel across part of North Africa, hoping to escape her sheltered life and find out what happened to Sergeant Leo Wallace, a pilot she’s in love with who suddenly stopped responding to her letters. After getting fired from her dream job, musician Maggie McCleod joins the USO camp show as well. Their unit also includes a magician, a tap dancer and a singer. As the group starts to bond, they learn that the USO talent manager will be selecting only one of them for the prestigious Pepsodent Show tour, a career-making opportunity that all of them are determined to land.

Green crafts a compelling and original cast of characters. Maggie is outspoken and witty, while Catherine is sophisticated and conflict avoidant. Then there is Gabriel, the pensive, withdrawn magician; Judith, the private and skeptical singer; Howie, the experienced tap dancer; and Douglas, their businesslike talent manager. The opportunity to grow their career adds an interesting twist to the group’s dynamics. All of them want to be selected for different, valid reasons. They grow individually and as a group, and beautifully exemplify the themes of friendship, faith and resilience explored in the novel.

The Foxhole Victory Tour is an eye-opening look at the experiences of brave USO performers who helped build troops’ morale and keep them connected to their lives back home during WWII.

Three Christian historical novels laud the power of faith, love and commitment in overcoming risk and tragedy.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Parasol Against the Axe

Review by Freya Sachs

To step into one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds, you have to give up control—accept that something magical and unpredictable is about to happen. Reading with a “yes, and” mentality will make your experience all the more dynamic, curious and surprising. Following up on 2021’s Peaces, Parasol Against the Axe uses place as character to question what, exactly, is true and can be trusted.

That place is Prague. The city is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for Sofie Cibulkova, her estranged friend. Hero has brought a book with her, Paradoxical Undressing, and she soon discovers that the book is a changing thing: Depending upon who is reading it, where, when and even why, the text alters. Its instability comes to reflect the ways that people appear and complicate what should be a celebratory weekend.

Stories within the story unfold, and there’s a particular satisfaction in following how they reflect the main narrative of the novel. At famous sights around the city, unexpected guests arrive, some from Hero’s past. They add to the tension between Hero and Sofie, and in each scene, these new characters raise doubts about the truth of the story, the past and the present.

Oyeyemi’s language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. Readers will find themselves checking the various versions of Paradoxical Undressing against one another, to make sure they haven’t missed any echoes or revisions. The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imagined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the difference even matters.

In Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe, the city of Prague is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for her estranged friend Sofie.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Great Divide

Review by Laura Sackton

In The Great Divide, her first novel since 2014’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance.

Instead of focusing on only one character, Henriquez threads together the stories of over a dozen people whose lives are profoundly affected by the canal project. This inspired choice suits the scope of the event and hints at even more stories beyond these pages: It’s easy to imagine, in the snippets of lives that Henriquez zooms in on, just how many more love stories, deaths, moments of radicalization, migrations, injustices, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the construction of the canal between 1903 and 1914.

The characters come from many countries and a wide range of backgrounds. There’s Francisco, a Panamanian fisherman who’s disgusted at what the canal project is doing to his country, and his son Omar, whose decision to work in the excavation zone causes a deep rift between them. There’s Ada, a girl from Barbados who arrives in Panama hoping to earn enough money to help her ill sister back home. She finds work in the house of John and Marian Oswald, a white American couple who have come to the isthmus in the hopes that John can eradicate malaria. Joaquin, a fishmonger who’s mostly content to live an ordinary life in the city, gets swept up in his wife’s burgeoning protest movement when she finds out her hometown is being forcibly moved to make space for the canal.

Additional points of view include those of canal workers from across the Caribbean, a foreman, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams of becoming a photojournalist and an egotistical French doctor. The canal disrupts their lives in different ways: It kills some of them and makes others rich.

The Great Divide is a collection of small narratives that together create a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. The novel’s greatest strength is this unrelenting smallness. It insists on the importance of every human life, and illuminates the endless, ordinary, forgotten stories that underlie every pivotal moment in human history.

Cristina Henríquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.

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