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A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl

A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

I Leave It Up to You

You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
FictionFamily DramaComing of Age

Red Dog Farm

A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
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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.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Say Hello to My Little Friend

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Cuban literature, from the island and from its diaspora, has always been precise and powerful, taking a clear yet dreamy-eyed look at humanity. Jennine Capo Crucet’s new novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend, follows in this lineage, limning the catastrophic life of Ismael “Izzy” Reyes as he tries and fails to find his way in a sinking Miami. At the beginning of the novel, Izzy receives a cease and desist from Pitbull (aka Mr. 305) for doing unauthorized impressions of him around town, leaving Izzy at a loss of job and identity. He finds inspiration in Al Pacino’s Tony Montana from the movie Scarface (which he doesn’t actually watch until a few chapters later). With new wind in his sails, and a sidekick like Tony Montana’s Manolo found in his old high school buddy Rudy, Izzy tries to mold life into what he wants it to be: wealth, power and big booty women. Meanwhile, on the other side of Miami in a too-small Seaquarium tank, Lolita the orca senses the water level rising. She and Izzy are linked by their tragic orphan origin stories, and when the two meet, they share a telepathic message that transforms both of their fates.

Like many immigrant stories, Say Hello to My Little Friend is centered on transformation. Not only does Izzy transform into someone else for a living, but his entire life has been a process of transforming. Though he was raised in Miami, he never feels Floridian, much less American, and after having to take ESL (English as a second language) classes in school, his identity-formation has been constantly frustrated. There is something quixotic in watching Izzy spin himself and those around him into remakes of culture, but this, too, is true about the immigrant experience, which Capo Crucet details with breathtaking precision.

Capo Crucet’s writing strikes a balance between contemporary Spanglish (specifically Miamian), slang and achingly poetic descriptions. But Capo Crucet’s powers do not stop at this alchemy; she also has a rare knack for metanarrative, a skill that allows readers to think about Izzy’s story as a story without ruining its intimacy. Take one of the narrator’s interjections, asking readers to recall Melville’s Moby Dick. It not only grounds the antics of the novel in a classic tale of hubris but also emphasizes the delusional and naive nature of Izzy, allowing us to see him as a victim of fate. As Izzy creates himself again and again, readers are made aware of what stories make up a life.

Say Hello to My Little Friend limns the catastrophic life of Ismael “Izzy” Reyes, a Pitbull impersonator turned wannabe Tony Montana, as he tries and fails to find his way in a sinking Miami.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Mother Doll

Review by Sydney Hankin

Zhenia’s life is, admittedly, not going as planned. Having aspired to be an actor in Los Angeles, she now works as a medical translator for Russian-speaking patients, struggling to salvage what’s left of her marriage after breaking the news of a surprise pregnancy to her husband. So when a psychic named Paul calls to say that Zhenia’s deceased great-grandmother Irina wants Zhenia to listen to her life story and write it down, Zhenia hesitates only briefly; she has little reason to say no. Irina’s spirit seeks forgiveness from Zhenia, though she knows it will be challenging to obtain. They are both painfully aware of the generational pain stemming from Irina’s abandonment of Zhenia’s adored, and currently dying, grandmother Vera, when Vera was a young child. 

Through Zhenia’s listening sessions, author Katya Apekina makes the concept of ancestral connection fascinatingly tangible. Paul is able to connect Zhenia with Irina by venturing into a post-death communal “cloud” of regret, where Irina and others reside until absolved by the living. With Paul as an intermediary, Irina tells Zhenia tales of growing up in early 1900s Russia.

Apekina isn’t new to literary fiction; her first novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews and other outlets. But Mother Doll marks her triumphant first foray into fabulism. While Irina’s story is largely distinct and chronological, Zhenia’s life unfolds only in connection to her great-grandmother’s, producing parallel narratives that are impressively inseparable. Even as more details about Irina’s life surface, the reader remains grounded in Zhenia’s experiences, her dry humor lending a lightness to otherwise profound subject matter.

For those who enjoy diving into the metaphorical, Mother Doll holds a deep wisdom. Apekina’s writing is witty and compellingly relatable, leading to a fast-paced reading experience. She hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?

In Mother Doll, Katya Apekina hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?
FictionWorld FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Cozy reads for long winter nights

Feature by the editors of BookPage

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

As the days become shorter, there’s nothing more comforting than immersing myself in a sweeping historical novel—the bigger, the better! When my book club recently voted to read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, I welcomed the opportunity to escape nightly into the grand halls of the Metropol hotel where aristocrat Count Alexander Rostov, deemed a threat by the Bolsheviks in 1922, is sentenced to lifelong house arrest. Hotel employees, guests and other visitors round out the vibrant cast of characters in the Count’s orbit as he adjusts to his new circumstances and tries to pursue a meaningful life in confinement. His friendship with precocious 9-year-old Nina is particularly endearing; the pair’s quest to explore every nook and cranny of the hotel is a delight. All the while, outside the Count’s window, political turmoil and inevitable social change are transforming Russian society. Written with wit and warmth, Towles’ tale is one you’ll want to curl up with and return to night after night.

—Katherine, Subscriptions 

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

I spent a few sublime weeks last winter in the company of Umberto Eco’s magisterial debut novel, The Name of the Rose. This medieval whodunit is intellectually absorbing and slyly hilarious as it tracks Brother William of Baskerville and Brother Adso of Melk’s quest to solve a spree of bizarre murders at a monastery in Italy. A historian, philosopher and literary theorist, Eco transports readers into the 14th-century mind, and while things get heady (at one point, Adso contemplates a door for more than a page), Eco never lets his own erudition run away with him. There are impressively gruesome deaths to describe, tangled little dramas of monastery life to tease out and one of the most unforgettable libraries in literature to explore. I read long into the night, wrapped in blankets with a mug of tea at hand, happily looking up Latin phrases and medieval heretics until arriving at Eco’s grand finale, a satisfying conclusion with a few icy notes of existential dread to balance things out.

—Savanna, Managing Editor

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

To me, coziness is a cat dozing on my lap, but a book that captures the magic of our purring friends will also do. A sublime, delicate meditation on the passage of time within everyday life, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat washes over you like a dream, making it an ideal read for a long winter night. A male narrator and his wife fall in love with their neighbor’s cat, naming her Chibi as she begins visiting them at their rented house. The wife tells the man how a philosopher once said that “observation is at its core an expression of love,” and indeed, Hiraide’s ruminations on the quotidian—dragonflies flying towards water sprayed from a garden hose, Chibi climbing a tree—carry tremendous emotion despite the unembellished prose. With equal parts joy and melancholy, the couple’s relationships with the cat and each other shift, along with the course of their lives and Japan, as the late ’80s economic bubble bursts. Hiraide slips in and out of reflection and memory with precise, feline grace.

—Yi, Associate Editor

The New Life by Tom Crewe

There is something so pleasurable about spending a chilly day absorbed in the concerns of another time and identifying resonances with our own. Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life, provides just such a pleasure, placing vivid characters and thorny moral dilemmas against a finely textured historical backdrop. Based on two real life freethinkers in late Victorian Britain, Crewe’s John Addington and Henry Ellis are documenting the lives of gay men for a book that they hope will shift cultural perceptions of homosexuality. It’s risky, but they believe in the cause—and that their status as married men will protect them. However, ideological differences emerge, and Addington begins to wonder if ideals can be legitimate if they are not lived openly. Crewe excels when depicting the nuances of conflict and the question of balancing personal risk against the ability to effect change, drawing readers in with polished old-fashioned storytelling that also speaks to a modern sensibility—A.S. Byatt meets Alan Hollinghurst.

—Trisha, Publisher

Ready the fireplace, put the kettle on and get out some thick woolen socks. These four titles are worthy companions for long winter nights.
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYASocial ScienceNoirMysteryMiddle Eastern HistoryLiterary FictionHistoryHistorical MysteryHistorical FantasyFantasyFamily SagaContemporary RomanceChildren'sBlack HistoryAmerican History

Top 10 books for February 2024

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW

Top 10 books for February 2024

Beloved and buzzy authors such as Tia Williams, Francis Spufford and Katherine Arden took new and exciting directions in February!
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The author of the marvelous Winterlight trilogy returns to historical fantasy with this haunting tale set during World War I. Former nurse Laura Iven’s parents

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Book jacket image for A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

Once you’ve finished A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, you’ll undoubtedly be jealous of those who get to experience it for the first time.

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Book jacket image for The Last Stand by Antwan Eady

Moving and gently passionate, The Last Stand by Antwan Eady with illustrations from Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey explores determination, tradition, community and love.

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Book jacket image for Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

It’s a special gift when a favorite poet writes a novel. Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, after poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf

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Antonia Hylton’s Madness offers an unsparing reckoning with history as it excavates an infamous mental hospital for Black patients.

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Award-winning author Amber McBride teams up with acclaimed poets Taylor Byas and Erica Martin to curate an electric, extraordinary lineup of contemporary and classic Black

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Book jacket image for City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.

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Book jacket image for Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Visit an alternate America where European colonization never took place in this intricately plotted police procedural from Francis Spufford.

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Book jacket image for The Gardener of Lashkar Gah by Larisa Brown

Larisa Brown’s The Gardener of Lashkar Gah tells the harrowing story of the Afghan aid workers that NATO left to their fates when the Taliban

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Book jacket image for The Cancer Factory by Jim Morris

Jim Morris’ urgent, heartbreaking The Cancer Factory traces how a known toxic chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of Goodyear factory workers.

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Beloved and buzzy authors such as Tia Williams, Francis Spufford and Katherine Arden took new and exciting directions in February!
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Behind You Is the Sea

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Behind You Is the Sea, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s debut novel, brings readers into the lives of three Palestinian families in and around Baltimore: the Salamehs, the Baladis and the Ammars. Generational disputes form the core of the novel’s action, which unfolds through weddings, graduations, unplanned pregnancies and funerals. Women’s issues are also at the fore, as each of the novel’s chapters, which function as linked stories, reveal families both divided and united by class, gender and traditional values.

In the opening chapter, “A Child of Air,” teenage Reema Baladi resolves to keep her baby, while refusing to marry her Puerto Rican boyfriend. In “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at the Wedding,” Walid, patriarch of the wealthy Ammar family, despairs at the lack of Arab traditions at his oldest son’s wedding to an American. “Ride Along” focuses on a police officer, Marcus Salameh, and the rift between his father and his sister, Amal, over Amal’s perceived dishonor, a rupture which grows deeper after the death of their mother.

Darraj deftly explores class tensions in the titular chapter: When the Ammars employ young Maysoon Baladi as a housekeeper, she is shocked by the couple’s indolence and their spoiled teenage kids, but flirts openly with father and husband, Demetri. In a later chapter, Demetri’s daughter Hiba moves in with her grandparents after an embarrassing incident in college and an unspoken but deeply felt lack of support from her parents. The final chapter “Escorting the Body,” the only chapter not set in the United States, sees Marcus fulfilling his father’s wish to be buried in his Palestinian village, a visit which reveals dramatic secrets about the life he left behind.

Behind You Is the Sea draws a composite portrait of Palestinian American families with sensitivity and humor, its linked stories breaking down stereotypes and embracing complexity.

Behind You Is the Sea draws a composite portrait of Palestinian American families with sensitivity and humor, its linked stories breaking down stereotypes and embracing complexity.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

City of Laughter

Review by Laura Sackton

The protagonist of Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel, a queer grad student studying Jewish folklore, describes her work as collecting scraps. In the wake of her father’s death, 30-year-old Shiva decides to get her master’s, hoping to unravel the family mysteries her mother has kept hidden from her all her life. Shiva eventually travels to Warsaw, where a series of experiences, from a night in a queer bar to a performance of a famous Jewish play, lead her to a deeper understanding of herself, her mother and her ancestral heritage.

This novel, like Shiva’s work, is a collection of beautiful scraps—scraps of folktales and memory, hidden family histories, love letters, accounts of strange happenings in the past and present—all tangled together and rewoven into a whole that’s strange, lush, imaginative and pulsing with life. Fruchter draws on folklore remembered from her own childhood, as well as a whimsical (and sometimes dark) universe of invented tales to create something entirely new.

The narrative refuses to sit still, jumping between points of view, decades and countries as Fruchter traces four generations of Jewish women from a tiny Polish shtetl in the early 20th century to contemporary New York. Fruchter’s rich and unwavering exploration of queer lineages, alongside matrilineal and Jewish ones, is extraordinary. As Shiva becomes more deeply immersed in the lives of her foremothers, those foremothers become more vibrant and detailed, in prose that moves from shimmering and dreamlike to sharply funny to wonderfully contemplative.

Readers looking for easy explanations will not find them in City of Laughter. Readers looking for questions—and the spaces they open—will find them in abundance. This is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history, and storytelling that reshapes worlds. It’s a story about the work it takes to look into a rupture—in yourself, in your family, in history—and, through looking, begin to transform it.

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.
Fiction

Three acclaimed writers offer shimmering collections

Feature by bookpagedev

Short stories are often the vehicle of choice for young writers seeking to make their mark on the literary world, so it’s refreshing when established authors choose to work in the genre. These collections display the skills of three well-known writers from diverse backgrounds, each with a unique take on contemporary life. 

Perspectives on Native American life
In War Dances, his fourth collection (which features a dozen poems along with its 11 stories), National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie enhances his stature as a multitalented writer and an astute observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.

In the title story, a middle-aged Spokane Indian confronts the tension between traditional tribal culture and modern life as he watches over his alcoholic and diabetic father in the hospital while undergoing his own health crisis. “Breaking and Entering” tells the heartbreaking tale of a Native American film editor who commits an act of fatal violence in self-defense and must live with the consequences. And “Salt,” the story that ends the volume, is the moving portrait of teenage boy from the reservation who learns about life and death when he’s called on in his summer job at the local newspaper to write the obituary of the paper’s obituary editor.

Not all of the stories feature Native-American protagonists. “The Senator’s Son” is a modern morality play, as the son of United States senator is involved in an incident of violence against a gay friend, in the process exposing his father’s expedient ethical judgment. In “The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,” the narrator is a seller of vintage clothes, a lover of pop music and a serial philanderer, “a small and lonely man made smaller and lonelier by my unspoken fears,” a status he shares with several of Alexie’s male characters in this edgy and frequently surprising collection.

The eternal appeal of music
Best known for novels like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro offers a collection of five pensive tales in Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, that succeed in expressing music’s seductive power.

In “Crooner,” a chance meeting in Venice between an itinerant guitarist (a talent Ishiguro shares with his creation) and an aging Tony Bennett-like singer leads to an emotional encounter with the crooner’s wife as he offers a swan song for their marriage. That woman, Lindy, resurfaces in the story “Nocturne,” a meditation on the vagaries of fame, where she and a jazz saxophonist named Steve share a bizarre recuperation in a Beverly Hills hotel after plastic surgery at the hands of a celebrity doctor.

Ishiguro skillfully blends humor and melancholy in “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Its narrator, Ray, visits college friends in London whose relationship is imploding. The story veers wildly from broad comedy to pathos as Ray struggles to save his friends’ marriage. “Malvern Hills,” the story of a singer-songwriter and his encounter with two fellow musicians in the English countryside, and “Cellists,” the tale of an unorthodox music teacher and her enigmatic student, round out the collection.

Women and their discontents
Jill McCorkle’s Going Away Shoes concentrates on the plight of mostly middle-aged women struggling with the consequences of their flawed relationships. McCorkle is an acute observer of the foibles of domestic life, and in stories like the title tale, in which a woman is yoked to her dying mother as a caretaker while her younger sisters carp at her from a distance, or “Surrender,” where a grandmother must suffer the childish cruelty of her late son’s five-year-old daughter, she blends empathy for her characters’ predicaments with an unsparing take on those grim circumstances. 

Still, McCorkle’s stories don’t lack for humor, as in “Midnight Clear,” where a single mother gets a new outlook on life from a septic tank philosopher who answers her distress call on Christmas Eve, or “PS,” a sardonic farewell letter from a woman to her family therapist. 

The collection builds to a powerful climax in “Driving to the Moon,” as former lovers reunite while one faces death from cancer, and “Magic Words,” which features interwoven narratives of a married woman about to embark on an affair, a troubled teenage girl and a retired school teacher. Both stories are impressive demonstrations of McCorkle’s ability to infuse short fiction with an almost novelistic scope.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Short stories are often the vehicle of choice for young writers seeking to make their mark on the literary world, so it’s refreshing when established authors choose to work in the genre. These collections display the skills of three well-known writers from diverse backgrounds, each…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Martyr!

Review by Cat Acree

Cyrus Shams is, in his own words, “another death-obsessed Iranian man,” fixated on death—but more than that, on martyrdom. He needs his death to matter, for the act of his dying to have a purpose.

Cyrus’ family inheritance is one of pointless death. His mother died when her plane was shot down by American forces over the Persian Gulf; she was traveling to visit her brother, a man decimated by his experiences fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Cyrus’ father died soon after Cyrus left for college. Uneasily sober after years of chasing addiction, Cyrus decides to write a book on martyrs. To help himself get started, he seeks out an artist in New York City, an older Iranian woman named Orkideh, who, in a Marina Abramovic-style performance, has made herself publicly accessible while she dies of cancer by spending the end of her life in the Brooklyn Museum.

Over several days, Cyrus and Orkideh speak on death, art, nation, victimhood, gratitude and family. In between scenes of their easy connection, we read poems from Cyrus’ book and witness flashbacks to Cyrus’ mother’s, father’s and uncle’s stories. There are also chapters recounting supernatural conversations from Cyrus’ dreams, between his mother and Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and the American president of 2017, his father and the poet Rumi, and an imaginary brother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Martyr! has a certain loudness, between the echo of a weighted Iranian history, the roar of Cyrus’ broken family legacy and his intense internal warfare. Even the book’s title can be taken as a shout, its exclamation point signifying an accusation or revelation. That which quiets the noise is simple enough, delivered in sublime prose from Iranian American poet and debut novelist Kaveh Akbar: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes late in the novel. Akbar has previously published two collections of poetry (Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Pilgrim Bell), and his writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing.

Throughout Martyr!, language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so. “I get frustrated this way so often,” Cyrus’ mother says in a flashback. “A photograph can say ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say ‘This is what it was like.'” Similarly, although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.

Kaveh Akbar’s writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes in Martyr!, his debut novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Come and Get It

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Kiley Reid’s sophomore effort Come and Get It is a compelling, dialogue-driven novel about consumption, desire and class set at a state university in 2017. Readers who enjoyed Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, will find themselves in welcome territory.

Millie, a woman whose college years were interrupted by helping an ill parent, has returned to the University of Arkansas as a 24-year-old senior, working as a resident assistant in her dorm. Mature and responsible, she fantasizes about Josh, her hunky supervisor, and is diligently saving to purchase a house. Agatha is a visiting faculty member in her late 30s, recently separated from a younger professional dancer who married her for health insurance. At the beginning of the semester, Agatha asks Millie to organize a small group of students for Agatha to interview as part of her research for a potential book on wedding traditions. What starts as an innocent gathering of information becomes a more complicated entanglement when Agatha begins paying Millie for access to the dorm to spy on the students’ personal conversations, which she then writes up as a series of demi-comic pieces for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, a prank dreamed up by Tyler, the mean girl of the dorm, sparks a vengeful retaliation which threatens both Agatha and Millie’s livelihoods.

This reader’s advice is to follow the money, as much of Come and Get It is embedded in the details of ostensibly insignificant transactions. Reid prefers to serve her themes amid a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but underneath it all, her eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class. Though no crimes are committed, there are enough errors of judgment, blurred ethical lines and microaggressions to permanently alter the life trajectories of her characters. Yet Reid writes with enormous compassion, showing us flawed humans caught in systems outside of their control who are, mostly, doing the best they can.

Come and Get It is a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but underneath it all, Kiley Reid’s eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class.

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