Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
Sarah Cypher’s debut novel is as much about storytelling as it is about the characters who inhabit it. A swirling multigenerational family epic, it’s about the power that stories hold over families and whole nations, and the mysterious ways that certain indelible narratives can supplant real memories. Through an unusual structure that bucks narrative convention, Cypher explores the blurry lines between storytelling and history, memory and identity, exile and home.
Born with blue skin into a diasporic Palestinian family, Betty Rummani grows up awash in stories. During the first years of her life, she is passed between family members: her scientist mother, who often buries herself in work; her white father, desperate to remake the three of them into a functioning family unit; and her great aunt Nuha, the true keeper of the family’s stories.
Betty recounts this turbulent childhood many years later as an adult faced with a difficult decision: to stay in the city she knows, or to follow the woman she loves to a new country. Searching for clarity, she hungrily turns to the notebooks left behind by Nuha when she died, and begins to piece together the surprising story of her aunt’s life.
Though Betty narrates the novel in the first person, she often feels like a peripheral character. She slips into Nuha’s voice and life as if she were Nuha herself. The book is full of vivid scenes from before Betty’s birth and memories of Nuha’s life in Palestine. This unusual structure can feel a bit clunky at times, as Betty recounts not only events she never witnessed but also the associated complex emotional realities. But readers who can relax into this kind of magical storytelling will find it both whimsical and powerful.
Cypher’s prose has a softness to it and a melodic cadence. It often feels as if Betty is speaking directly to the reader, though when she breaks the fourth wall, she does so slyly, so quietly you’ll miss it if you blink. The story feels like it’s being untangled as it’s told, and this—along with subtle glimpses of almost-magic—provides the sense of mystery that permeates the book.
The Skin and Its Girl is an intriguing debut, a story within a story within a story, and a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.
Sarah Cypher’s first novel is a story within a story within a story, a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.
The adage “two’s company, but three’s a crowd” rings awkwardly and painfully true in Ore Agbaje-Williams’ debut novel, The Three of Us, which examines the inner workings of both a friendship and a marriage. There’s hardly any unselfish love to be found in this triangle formed by a prickly husband, a chameleonic wife and a manipulative best friend. Be aware that the proverbial third wheel may not be who you’d expect.
In three distinct parts, each character describes their perspective on both the past and present moment. Over the course of a single day, the wife, husband and best friend drink up and face off, each presenting the truth as they each see it. Agbaje-Williams’ dark wit and wry observations keep it all interesting. She slowly and slyly builds the tension between her three characters until it fairly sparks off the page.
The novel’s trajectory is foreshadowed early on by the wife (who is never named) as she notes that a fight between her husband (also unnamed) and best friend Temi isn’t out of the ordinary: “Usually those moments occur when an exorbitant amount of alcohol has been consumed.” The wife and Temi share a complex history and intimacy, and they both roll their eyes and laugh at the husband in equal measure. But that afternoon, Temi’s discovery of a pregnancy test in a bathroom trash can causes her to overreact, first comically and then calculatedly. The novel unfolds almost like a play as Temi and the husband exchange passive-aggressive (or outright aggressive) barbs within the confines of a posh house in a posh neighborhood. Society and culture and their conventions get skewered right alongside the characters.
At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next. The tightly wound plot drops a few revelations along the way, calling into question what the characters—and the reader—think they know. When two people vie for the attention of a third, who will win? How far will each go? Agbaje-Williams keeps readers wondering until the end.
At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next.
The Roman Colosseum is full of wonders and history and secrets—and plants. Observing, cataloging and communicating with these plants is the heart of Katy Simpson Smith’s impressive novel, as the narrative connects two women across time who are both performing these archival acts. Set in 1854 and 2018, The Weeds moves between the voices of these two women, interlocking their lives as they document the presence of (or absence of) plants.
In 1854, a woman was caught stealing, and her misbehavior has led to her being indentured to English botanist Richard Deakin; he sends her into the Colosseum to catalog the flora and their uses. She also tells her own story and meditates on the ways that society impinges upon her selfhood. She speaks to her missing love, a woman who is off on a boat, now married to a man. In 2018, a woman has run from the entrapment of her life, but she finds herself newly hemmed in as she seeks the plants on Deakin’s list, makes notes, begrudges the presence of tourists and wonders what her next step might be. What will science, and her male adviser, allow?
The novel moves in quick (and often blurry) shifts between these centuries and women. They mirror parts of each other; they both encounter violence at many turns and scales, and each reacts to the ways their voices and choices are constrained in their societies. The plants around them produce their own forms of tension and elements of violence; they are undoubtedly characters in their own right.
Just as the plants in the Colosseum ask of the women, The Weeds requests the reader to observe and look for connections, to question structures and patterns, and to discover new ways of seeing. Each detail is carefully attuned and revealed, and each seed opens at the moment it needs to bloom and stretch. Patience is necessary, but close attention reveals infinite rewards.
“I’d hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn’t write based on the color of their skin.” R.F. Kuang, the award-winning, bestselling author of Babel and the Poppy War series, fans the discourse on diversity, racism and the “right” to tell certain stories with her novel Yellowface, a thought-provoking first-person narrative of a plagiarist.
June Hayward is a struggling 27-year-old straight white author, and as the novel begins, she’s getting drinks with Athena Liu, her Asian American friend whom she’s known since college, to celebrate yet another of Athena’s huge literary successes. However, when the picture-perfect Athena ends up dead, envious June makes a decision that leads her to stardom—and damnation. June edits her dead friend’s manuscript, a cultural saga set in China, and presents it as her own work under a pseudonym that uses her middle name, Song, as her surname.
Despite a few readers’ protestations of possible cultural appropriation, the book is a huge success, and June Song embraces her soaring status in the publishing world. But the questions around June’s authenticity and ethnicity keep getting louder, as more and more anonymous social media accounts wonder if June has the right to pen a story about Chinese culture. June’s followers revolt, and her star plummets.
Kuang hooks readers from the first chapter with June’s preoccupation with Athena and the life-altering choice to steal her frenemy’s manuscript. June’s theft makes her an immediate antagonist, and her delusional entitlement makes her a compelling unreliable narrator. But exactly how unreliable is June? Kuang casts a light on this question with her adroit representation of June’s disloyal social media following, which lurches from commendation to castigation, and of a publishing world committed only to financial success.
“I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer. And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist. Hear me out. It’s not so awful as it sounds,” June assures the reader. Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom. Kuang allows for numerous sides of our society’s heated conversations about cultural (mis)appropriation and censorship, and examines how judgment is so often clouded by perception rather than shaped by truths. This is a riveting read for fans of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong and George Orwell’s 1984.
Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom.
At a reading in 2022, I heard poet Jane Wong describe her obsession with time-lapse videos of rotting fruit. Her poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is full of the physicality of food, informed by Wong’s research into the Great Leap Forward, which was a stage of Mao Zedong’s reforms that led to the starvation of 36 million Chinese people. Wong’s great-grandparents died during the Great Leap Forward, and several poems ring with their voices. In others, the speaker reckons with the contrast between the relative abundance in her life—the apples “rotting on the ground,” an egg thrown onto pavement just to hear the “sumptuous splat”—and the false promises of the American dream for herself and her parents. Lucky for me, and you, Wong has a memoir coming out this month, so you can pick up Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City when you finish her breathtaking book of poetry.
Megha Majumdar’s debut was one of the most important social novels of 2020—highly political, furiously propulsive and ruthlessly unsparing—but if you, like so many readers, spent that year sticking to lighter fare, now is the time to go back and see what you missed, because A Burning still hits hard. In contemporary India, a young woman named Jivan unthinkingly voices criticism of the government in a Facebook post, and she is immediately labeled a terrorist and sent to prison, where she awaits her trial. Two other main characters provide additional perspectives on these events: the luminous wannabe Bollywood star Lovely, a transgender woman who was learning English from Jivan; and PT Sir, Jivan’s resentful former gym teacher who gets involved in nationalist politics. Each character is ambitious in their own way, but within this world marked by the tyrannies of rampant corruption, racism, poverty and inequality, their fates are often outside their control, and the few choices available to them are murky at best. This novel is a short shock that leaves a lasting burn.
Author Joanna Ho and illustrator Dung Ho each made their publishing debut in the first week of 2021 with Eyes That Kiss in the Corners,a radiant picture book that became an instant bestseller and launched both creators’ successful careers. To read it is to immediately understand why. Its first-person narrator is a girl who explores, via gorgeous, lyrical prose, how her eyes connect her to her mother, grandmother and little sister and to their shared heritage. Meanwhile, the book’s digital illustrations positively glow as every spread seems suffused with sunshine. Read this aloud to savor similes such as “my lashes curve like the swords of warriors”; then read it again and pay special attention to how the characters in every spread look at one another. You’ll see one of the most moving renderings of love made visible on the page that I’ve ever encountered.
Elizabeth Miki Brina’s form-bending memoir starts with her personal history—contending with her mother’s alcoholism as a child, feeling ashamed of her Japanese heritage in her predominately white hometown, expanding her horizons on the West Coast as a young adult—and spirals out to engulf not only her parents’ story bu also the history of Okinawa, the island in Japan where her mother grew up before meeting Brina’s father, a white American stationed there during the Vietnam War. After years of conflict with her mother, Brina found compassion as an adult for the trauma her mother experienced when she left her homeland for a culturally and linguistically isolated life in a hostile new country. As Brina spells out Okinawa’s past, from an independent land to a pawn in Chinese-Japanese-American relations, readers get a sense of the generational trauma that has shaped her and her mother’s lives as well. It’s a story that encompasses both the broad horrors of colonialism and racism and the deeply personal details of forgiveness and familial love.
Heartfelt and emotional, Samuel Park’s moving debut novel is a must-read for fans of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or the K-drama “Crash Landing on You.” Set in 1960s Korea, This Burns My Heart features a resourceful heroine torn between love and duty in the wake of partition. Soo-Ja meets Yul and immediately feels a connection to him—a confusing development, since she has just decided to marry another man. Unwilling to disgrace her family by going back on her promise, Soo-Ja rejects Yul to marry Min, a decision she will revisit and regret for the next 20 years. Yul and Soo-Ja see each other only periodically and usually by chance, but their fraught encounters are tense with the passion of unconsummated love. Full of poetic observations and memorable lines, This Burns My Heart will leave you pondering the “what ifs” in your own life.
—Trisha, Publisher
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! To celebrate, we’re shining a spotlight on some of our favorite stellar reads by Asian American authors.
Must-reads for May include the latest from bestselling historian David Grann and romance superstar Emily Henry, plus the long-awaited second novel from Abraham Verghese.
Share this Article:
Nonfiction
Our Migrant Souls is one of the most important pieces of Latino nonfiction in several decades. Turning the last page, you will feel the weight of history on your shoulders.
Abraham Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations again and again in his long awaited follow-up to Cutting for Stone.
David Grann’s narrative nonfiction masterpiece about an 18th-century man-of-war that ran aground in South America reveals humanity at its best and worst, from heroism to cannibalism.
Julia Lee’s piercing discussions of Asian American identity are likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, she even challenges her own views.
Paraic O’Donnell inserts touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension in his breathtaking gothic historical mystery, The Naming of the Birds.
In Gloria L. Huang’s fantastical, heartfelt coming-of-age tale Kaya of the Ocean, the protagonist’s gradual willingness to trust herself will resonate with readers on their own journey to self-confidence, magic-infused or otherwise.
Must-reads for May include the latest from bestselling historian David Grann and romance superstar Emily Henry, plus the long-awaited second novel from Abraham Verghese.
I approach a book as if it were a body. An object not only to shape through words but also to bring to life—activate!—using a collection of tools that go beyond hammer and nail. Though this method can apply to any project, it has felt more urgent to me in fiction that tackles the past as a subject; how do I convince readers that a distant time is not a grainy photograph but is fleshy and real? I feel a pressing responsibility to bring characters out of the realm of the theoretical and place them in moving forms—and, through careful research, to turn the framework of their narrative into a body too.
“A book’s body should be lovely, should move with vigor and should be convincing down to its beating heart, its sturdy bones.”
First the skeleton: Who were these people, what was their philosophy about faith and love and sin, how did their culture conceive of itself? This demands highbrow research, the investment in archives and thick history texts. Then the muscles: What pushes these people through space? What are the events ordering their lives, the goals driving them, the particular bends of their relationships? Historical studies help here too, but we begin to drift toward areas the internet excels at. (“What happened on this date in 891?”) Finally the skin, the hair, the eyes. What did this world look like? Here the internet with its gift for trivia takes over (“how to tie a toga”; “recipe for 18th-century cornbread”; “minerals used in Renaissance paint”). By the end of this construction process, a book’s body should be lovely, should move with vigor and should be convincing down to its beating heart, its sturdy bones.
Having written several historical novels, I thought I had a pretty good feel for this research strategy. I knew what to read, where to turn. But then I decided to write a novel about plants. What lessons could I carry over to a field in which I was a neophyte? How could I build the bones, the muscle and the skin not for a young woman but for a violet? I structured The Weeds as a botanical flora, using 19th-century botanist Richard Deakin’s list of plants growing in the Roman Colosseum (420 species!) as a framework to tell a story. Each entry describes a plant while pushing the human narrators along their arcs; each entry shows how flower and human intersect. The point of The Weeds is that women and unwanted plants have an uncomfortable amount in common, so I set out with the same approach: to find first the highbrow, foundational sources that would give me a holistic sense of this kingdom of flora to which I had devoted a narrative.
Onoclea sensibilis, sensitive fern
What is the philosophy of a flower? The closest I came to an answer was in the research room of the New York Botanical Garden’s library, where an archivist laid out the lusciously illustrated floras of past centuries. These folios, composed in Latin or French or Italian, were as large as atlases; exotic flowers bloomed on vellum. I handled a first edition of Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome and paged through Giorgio Bonelli’s massive 18th-century Hortus Romanus, Antonio Sebastiani’s 1815 catalog of the Colosseum and Domenico Panaroli’s fragile 1643 flora. The illustrations ranged from simple black engravings to full watercolors of a grapevine’s brown tuberous roots, the crimson berries of a butcher’s broom, hot-pink caper blossoms. One might think an illustration of a plant, unlike a photograph, can only be an approximation; it’s not true, one might say. But consider Rembrandt’s self-portrait at age 53; how much more do those blue-gray lines creasing the artist’s eyebrows tell us about his stance than a photograph would? Art, I must remember as I turn the heavy pages of the flora, can evoke something much rounder than fact. From the dusty manuscripts, I gleaned that even the mildest plants explode in beauty, and they demand a painstaking attention from their human witnesses.
How do you put the characters of plants in motion? I had some gardening knowledge inherited from my mother, a basic sense of what plants grow best in sun, which weeds taste good, how to make a snapdragon talk. But many of the plants in Deakin’s flora were unfamiliar to me, and what Deakin was interested in—their botanical structure but also their medical uses and mythological meanings—were subjects I too needed to understand. More importantly, I was using the essence of each species as a springboard for a narrative moment. The unusual umbels of a candytuft, shaped like a rabbit’s paw prints, trigger a memory of a narrator’s childhood bunny. The worldwide antipathy toward chickweed prompts a narrator to consider the abuse suffered by women in academia. Where could I learn these details about flowers? As a historian, I told my students to look beyond Wikipedia. As a novelist searching for the muscles of a book, Wikipedia was my lodestone. There I discovered the Grand Duke of Wurttemberg’s 1671 edict against grass pea flour; the presence of a 1,600-year-old olive tree on a Croatian island; the particular osmotic pressure at which a squirting cucumber can eject its seeds. (On the equally democratic and chaotic YouTube, you can find erotic videos of this phenomenon in slow-mo.) Wikipedia is in some ways a flora unto itself: scientific, cultural, idiosyncratic. A page on Bellis perennis, the common daisy, includes sections on its botanical description, etymology, distribution, cultivation, uses and the fact that Daisy is “a nickname for girls named Margaret.” These are the muscles that begin sending the plants into my story-world, into action.
Daucus carota, Queen Anne’s lace
How do you put a final, sensory skin on vegetation? What does a plant really look like, beyond its pinnate leaves and hollow stems? This research turned out to be internal, spiritual, and it took me to my own childhood memories in my mother’s wild garden. I saw her clambering roses as houses that could hide my body; her pansies were the faces of friends; the wild oxalis dotting the lawn was a sour snack. Everything in her garden taught me that plants were vibrantly alive—neither remote nor static but endlessly growing, always responsive to my young imagination. They filled my world with scent and color and taste, but they also needed my tending: My mother paid me a penny for every spent bloom I cut. So I had no fear when it came to writing a book dominated by plants; I had long ago seen how they could become characters in their own right.
Still, I believed writing about weeds would demand a new research strategy—that what I had learned as a trained historian would fall short. (Would I need a doctorate in botany too?) But a novel is still a novel; a book still requires a body. And from 17th-century watercolors to 21st-century internet encyclopedias to my own tactile attachment to an elm’s raspy leaf, the material was already at hand. I merely had to foreground these plants not as decor but as protagonists. They too needed bones, muscles, the beautiful yellow eyes at the center of forget-me-nots. Like any element of fiction, they needed to come alive.
Photo of Katy Simpson Smith by Elise L. Smith. Illustrations from The Weeds by Kathy Schermer-Gramm. Used with permission from FSG.
In the latest novel from acclaimed, bestselling author Katy Simpson Smith, two women in different time periods are tasked with cataloging the plants that grow in the Roman Colosseum. But how can unnoticed little weeds hold up the weight of a story?
People often ask, “When did you know you were going to be a writer? When did you decide?”
I have many answers to this question, because being a writer is a way of moving through the world, a way of seeing, of hearing and, I’ve learned, believing. When I was last asked this question, in relation to my novel, this is what came to mind:
There are bodies swaying. Air thick with exalting. An organ punches chords into the walls and into us. A pastor is conducting an energy that everyone in the space can feel, even me. He isn’t speaking English, but he is working with sound more than logic. There are women who wear handwoven cloth around their heads. They shake, electric with the Holy Spirit. I am with my mom. I am young enough that my head reaches her solar plexus. Soon I’ll be able to look down and see the crown of her head, but then and forever, I will look up to her.
“We are all chaotic systems, like the weather, and any particular offering an artist presents is one of many possible storms.”
She begins to speak in Tongues. Syllables of a language that has no book sing from her. She is Ghanaian, and since I don’t speak Twi or Fante, this is yet another language she has access to that seems to have missed me. Something I can’t grasp, though not for trying. I watch as the language of God flows through her and the people around her. I feel the energy all around me. I see it lifting others from their folding chairs, compelling them to dance, to erupt with praise.
Though I can feel the energy around me, I am siloed off. Somehow disconnected. I feel like a spectator in an Olympic arena. There is a great championship being won, but I am only watching. I want more than anything to believe in anything the way they all believe in that space. I want the spirit to fill me to language. I want to have a faith that can power me through all things. What I feel is proximity but very little of the thing itself. I want to be filled to the brim with what fills my mother, everyone in the space. What I am as I stand, the only still thing in the room, is lonely.
There in that room of thriving souls is where I learned to want to believe in something totally, which is a way of saying “being a writer.”
“We as a society can do better than making those who do harm suffer.”
More recently, when asked how I came to be the writer of this book, Chain-Gang All-Stars, I thought of another time, a time with my father.
In his life he was a lawyer. Again, as a Ghanaian, there were many people whom I called Uncle or Aunti who knew him as “Lawyer.” It was a title, a position. More than a job. When I imagine him, he is wearing a suit.
I was barely tall enough to look straight at my father’s waist without craning my neck when he came home to our apartment at this time. That day he’d begun in earnest to prepare a trial he’d been thinking about for a while. He was a defense attorney, something I’d known, though it was rare that he’d speak about the specifics of any one case. That day he was talkative. I viewed him as a paragon of Truth and Power, and so I was excited, elated to listen. He said he had a difficult case and that his client had committed murder. I remember how he looked, looking at me. Searching, close. I sunk further into our couch. I remember knowing even then to hide the colossal disappointment I felt. Murder equaled “bad guy,” and so by my child logic, my father was a villain or, at best, an accessory to one. A henchman.
I said how I felt in the nicest way I could summon. “Why are you helping somebody bad? Someone that would do that.”
And he said, “It is not that simple.” He said more after that, but there was a world-reframing kind of truth in just those few words. And this new novel is a direct extension of that reframing. He said to me as a child that “it is not that simple,” and our justice system currently is genocidal in its simplicity. This book calls to question that approach. In that moment when my father told me who he was defending and began to tell me why, he gifted me a curiosity toward nuance, which is another way of saying “being a writer.”
Chain-Gang All-Stars is my “debut” novel, but it’s a debut in the sense that it is the first novel-length story I am presenting to the world with the force of the publishing industry behind it. But when I think about how it came to be, and when I’m asked, “When did you know you could write a novel?” I think about my actual first novel. A book that will never come out. A book I wrote over 10 years ago, working daily through the summer on a Lenovo netbook in an apartment we would soon be evicted from. I thought that book would change my family’s life. I thought by force of will I’d be able to create something special. I thought it would heal the sicknesses that ailed my parents in swells over the years, I thought it would remove the pressures that had rendered such difficulty into their lives. I worked on it with the focus of someone fighting for their life. It was not good. And though that book will never come out, it was then that I learned to weave a great energy into a practice. Taking massive desire and placing it into actions with consistency is discipline. Nothing physical came of the book. We still got evicted. Maladies would still reign over us. But also everything came of it. It taught me what it felt like to finish a project. It taught me what it was to nurture discipline over days and months and years. And that, being a careful nurturer of discipline, is another way of saying “being a writer.”
“What if compassion were the rule that governed us above all things?”
It has been many years (seven) in the making, this new “debut” novel, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what people have asked me and what I ask myself. What do I think makes someone a writer? What do I think allowed me to write this new novel and why? I think we all have our own answer because art is born of each of our particular essences. We are all chaotic systems, like the weather, and any particular offering an artist presents is one of many possible storms. But for me, when I think about Chain-Gang All-Stars, I think about what happens when I write toward faith. I started the book hoping I was an abolitionist, believing deeply that we as a society can do better than making those who do harm suffer. Now that the book is done, now that I’ve done the research, now that I’ve considered the question of what it means to be a compassionate society, I know I am an abolitionist. It was a trust fall into faith. It required me to allow my curiosity and desire for nuance to move me through the world. The idea that “it is not that simple” is a simple lighthouse I am still following. Because it’s not that simple, but also it could be. What if compassion were the rule that governed us above all things?
When I think about how this book came to be, I think about the other books that have already come and those yet to come. I think about what can be forged from a willingness to excavate those questions that linger in my chest. I think of how finding the discipline to do that work, to accept that questions may be answered by more questions, is my answer. I’ve discovered myself writing this book. Learning more about the world through it has given me something real to believe in. And someone with something real to believe in is another way of saying “being a writer.”
Photo of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah by Alex M. Philip.
With his 2018 story collection, Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah set the world of literary fiction alight. His first novel, a bold evisceration of America’s for-profit prison system, stokes the flames.
From the author of The Dutch Wife comes a riveting novel set during World War II about a woman who offers shelter to a Jewish baby, and her sister, who must choose between family loyalty and her own safety.
Amsterdam, 1941. When the Nazis invade Amsterdam, singer Johanna Vos watches in horror as the vibrant music scene she loves is all but erased, her Jewish friends forbidden from performing with her onstage. Alongside her friend Jakob, Johanna helps organize the Artists’ Resistance, an underground network allowing Jews to perform at house concerts hosted by their allies. When Johanna hears of a Jewish orphan headed for deportation, she does not think twice. She takes the baby in as her own, hiding the truth from even her own sister, Liesbeth.
Meanwhile, Liesbeth finds herself in a dilemma, as she knows of her sister’s staunch support for the Resistance, but her husband supports the Nazis. When a charming member of the Dutch Fascist Party sets his eyes on her, her predicament only deepens. As secrets continue to grow between the sisters, severing their once-unbreakable bond, they are both forced to make choices that will alter their lives forever.
From the author of The Dutch Wife comes a riveting novel set during World War II about a woman who offers shelter to a Jewish baby, and her sister, who must choose between family loyalty and her own safety.
Jimmy Propfield joined the army for two reasons: to get out of Mobile, Alabama, with his best friends Hank and Billy and to forget his high school sweetheart, Claire.
Life in the Philippines seems like paradise—until the morning of December 8, 1941, when news comes from Manila: Imperial Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor. Within hours, the teenage friends are plunged into war as enemy warplanes attack Luzon, beginning a battle for control of the Pacific Theater that will culminate with a last stand on the Bataan Peninsula and end with the largest surrender of American troops in history.
What follows will become known as one of the worst atrocities in modern warfare: the Bataan Death March. With no hope of rescue, the three friends vow to make it back home together. But the ordeal is only the beginning of their nearly four-year fight to survive. Inspired by true stories, The Long March Home is a gripping coming-of-age tale of friendship, sacrifice, and the power of unrelenting hope.
Inspired by true events, this gripping coming-of-age tale of friendship, sacrifice, and the power of unrelenting hope during WWII follows three friends from Mobile, Alabama, as they struggle to survive the Bataan Death March and make it home to their families—and the girl they left behind.
One book. Nine readers. Ten changed lives. New York Times bestselling author Erica Bauermeister’s No Two Persons is “a gloriously original celebration of fiction, and the ways it deepens our lives.”
That was the beauty of books, wasn’t it? They took you places you didn’t know you needed to go…
This program includes a bonus conversation between the author and narrator. This program is read by a full cast:
Rachel Jacobs as The Writer
Barrie Kreinik as The Assistant
Braden Wright as The Actor
Jesse Vilinsky as The Artist
Max Meyers as The Diver
Gabra Zackman as The Teenager
Stephen Graybill as The Bookseller
George Newbern as The Caretaker
Cassandra Campbell as The Coordinator
Carol Jacobanis as The Agent
One book. Nine readers. Ten changed lives. New York Times bestselling author Erica Bauermeister’s No Two Persons is “a gloriously original celebration of fiction, and the ways it deepens our lives.” Read by a full cast.
Jennifer Neal’s debut novel is a haunting coming-of-age story, a melodic love letter to the language of music and a fierce, dark, rage-filled upbraiding of patriarchal violence.
Gabrielle has the ability to change the color of her skin, a quality inherited from her mother, Tallulah. As a child, Gabrielle learns how to shift from her natural brown into vivid reds and blues and golds, as well as how to hide her skin tones from the world when needed. Chillingly, Gabrielle and Tallulah most often make their skin white to appease the family patriarch, a violent, abusive man who demands everything in the house, including his wife and daughter, be whitewashed.
When Gabrielle’s controlling father insists that she take a year off after high school to improve her piano playing and bulk up her resume for college applications, she finds an unexpected source of freedom and solace in her piano teacher, a queer woman named Dominique. Dominique and her mother, Niyala, fill their colorful home with love, music and food—so unlike the cold and fearful house where Gabrielle grew up. As Gabrielle spends more time with them, she slowly begins to face—and heal—her deep old wounds.
Notes on Her Color unfolds almost glacially at first, in a series of meandering scenes—some banal and domestic, others startling in their harsh depictions of violence. A series of events toward the end of the novel heightens the book’s emotional impact, and though the pacing may feel a bit dizzying to some readers, it also captures the often tumultuous whims of adolescence.
Neal’s prose is assured and evocative, and the magic of shifting skin tones enables a fascinating commentary on race, power, invisibility and desire. But where this novel truly shines is in its nuanced exploration of relationships between women. There’s a softness in the way Neal writes about Gabrielle and Dominique, and a hard-edged tenderness to how Dominique and Niyala bicker and tease. Gabrielle and Tallulah’s thorny, muddled relationship is described with prickly honesty: They are haunted by many of the same demons, and yet they struggle to see each other clearly. With small but devastating details, Neal paints a vivid picture of their close bond and, just as gracefully, depicts the ways the world frays it nearly to breaking.
Notes on Her Color is about familial violence and the complex legacies of generational trauma. It’s also about queer joy and the hard, slow work of liberation. Musicians and artists will likely find it especially compelling—the women in this novel use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should look out for this debut.
Musicians and artists will likely find Jennifer Neal’s novel especially compelling—the female characters use music as a form of resistance and power—but anyone craving a fresh, inventive take on the bildungsroman should read this debut.
Aisha Abdel Gawad mixes family drama with a coming-of-age narrative in her debut novel, resulting in a gripping, intimate portrait of a Muslim family in the post-9/11 United States.
Amira and Lina are twin sisters living in Brooklyn who will soon graduate from high school, but their celebration is cut short by life-changing news: Their brother, Sami, is being released from prison. At the same time, during the holy month of Ramadan, their Muslim neighborhood is experiencing hateful attacks. As their brother readjusts to society and the twins teeter on the precipice of adulthood, they all find that, although family and faith tie us together, such bonds can also be used to restrict and smother.
Between Two Moons is narrated primarily by Amira, the more bookish twin. She is ready for a fresh start, and college promises a profound reinvention. Unfortunately, freeing herself from the chains of family, specifically her two siblings, is far easier said than done. Although Lina looks up to Amira, Amira has always felt overshadowed by her freewheeling twin, who aspires to be a model.
Meanwhile, Sami remains cloaked in mystery; the twins have never known the reason he went to prison, and their adolescent memories of him are defined by his rage and destruction. However, when Sami returns, he doesn’t go back to making drug deals on the corner or getting into screaming matches with their parents, a shift that initially makes the twins uneasy. But soon, the family learns to be together again: Sami works with their dad at his butcher shop, and the five of them take a trip to Coney Island in a heartwarming scene of unity.
Such rosy moments are fleeting, as Islamophobia casts a long shadow over the story. Characters frequently make jokes or references to the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons, but this comes from their collective pain, the torture they have experienced under the threat of hate. Some characters find ways to resist this malice, such as Faraj, Amira’s love interest and a community organizer who tries to teach Amira about bringing people together. Meanwhile, Sami devotes himself to his faith, developing a “third eye” mark on his forehead from praying.
By the end of Between Two Moons, it is unclear whether these efforts make any tangible change, but that isn’t really the point. Coming together, feeling for one another no matter what each of us have been through—this is what Abdel Gawad’s novel advocates for. There is no more powerful message.
In Aisha Abdel Gawad’s powerful novel, although family and faith tie its characters together, such bonds can also be used to restrict and smother.
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.
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.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
“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.
