Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Homeseeking

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.”
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

I’ll Come to You

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.
Previous
Next

All Fiction Coverage

Filter by genre
FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Trinity

Review by Arlene McKanic

There are people who swear they can hear the voices of the departed. The dead want their stories told, demand justice for past doings or even offer encouragement to the listener. Lottie Rebecca Lee, the eventual protagonist of Zelda Lockhart’s powerful and hopeful novel Trinity, has heard all three. Three generations go by before Lottie incarnates, which partially explains the book’s title.

The story begins in 1939 in Sampson, Mississippi, where Black people live only a few steps up from slavery. Old Deddy, a 62-year-old Black sharecropper, enters into a contract to marry the 12-year-old daughter of his white boss in exchange for a parcel of land that the boss really has no intention of letting him own. That Old Deddy is a victim of such injustice doesn’t make him a saint; he beats his wife and sons as hard as he works. His son Bennie is gentler but still uses a switch on his own son just to let him know who’s in charge. Both Old Deddy’s and Bennie’s wives become pregnant with girls who would have housed Lottie Rebecca’s soul, but the pregnancies are lost. And so she is born as the daughter of Bennie’s son, traumatized Vietnam War veteran B.J. To break the cycle of familial violence, B.J. closes himself off from his wife and daughter even as he loves them.

Being the vehicle of the ancestors makes Lottie Rebecca a strange and uneasy child. Like Alia Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, she seems to have been born with the knowledge of many lives that came before hers. Such knowledge is so oppressive that it causes screaming fits that Lottie’s family doesn’t understand. Yet she is buoyed by love, especially the love of her wise, gentle, Afrocentric mother, Sheila. When Lottie is a young woman, Sheila takes her on a pilgrimage to Ghana and the castle from which Africans were shipped off to be slaves in the Americas. It’s a place where the voices may ease up.

The author of Fifth Born, Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle and Cold Running Creek, Lockhart explores how pain and injustice are passed down, and how that pain can ease and injustice can be reversed. Sometimes, though, it takes the whispers of the ancestors to make it happen.

Zelda Lockhart explores how pain and injustice are passed down and how they can be reversed. Sometimes it takes the whispers of the ancestors to make it happen.
FictionLiterary Fiction

You Can’t Stay Here Forever

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Ellie Huang has lived in focused pursuit of traditional markers of success. She earned good grades in college and then enrolled in Stanford Law and excelled there, too. While in law school, she met Ian, a golden boy whose good looks were widely appreciated. Ian wasn’t the best student—Ellie quickly learned to downplay her successes to avoid outshining him—but his considerable charms carried him through law school. After graduation, Ellie snagged a prestigious clerkship in Washington, D.C., but as soon as it ended, she returned to Ian’s side. They married, and she continued to meet expectations, playing the model minority while working long hours as an attorney. 

As You Can’t Stay Here Forever opens, Ian’s death in a car crash, only months after their wedding, shakes Ellie loose. She learns that Ian had been cheating on her with one of her colleagues. Ellie confronts the other woman, berating her with an outpouring of anger—behavior that’s certainly justified but also out of sync with Ellie’s carefully orchestrated life. Returning to normalcy seems impossible; Ellie can’t focus on the law anymore, so she cashes in Ian’s life insurance and flees the country with her best friend, Mable Chou, in tow. But against the lush backdrop of the French Riviera, Ellie’s inner turmoil is even uglier. 

Debut novelist and San Francisco attorney Katherine Lin examines expectations and disappointment in You Can’t Stay Here Forever. In Ellie, she has created a character defined by insecurities, angst and a palpably tense interior landscape. As much as some readers may dislike Ellie, it’s clear that her own self-loathing is just as strong. Ellie thinks uncharitably about Mable because she refuses to live by the rules that have guided Ellie’s life, and she is equally scornful of her mother, who was never at ease with Ian. An American couple at the resort, Robbie and Fauna, also draw Ellie’s ire. Fauna, an older, wealthier and thrice-divorced white woman, holds power over her Asian American boyfriend that parallels the power that Ian, also white, held over Ellie. 

Lin laces observations about racial, gender and other power dynamics throughout, but the plot still moves swiftly enough to make the novel a vacation read. Just as with its protagonist, there’s much more to see if you’re willing to read between the lines.

After her husband’s death, Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance and flees the country with her best friend, Mable Chou, in tow. But against the lush backdrop of the French Riviera, Ellie’s inner turmoil is even uglier.
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionFictionFeaturedLGBTQ+LGBTQ Fiction

Your big, gay reading list for Pride 2023

List by the editors of BookPage
Pride 2023 reading list
STARRED REVIEW

June 6, 2023

Your big, gay reading list for Pride 2023

Celebrate Pride Month with 28 queer stories by pioneering novelists, memoirists and journalists.

Share this Article:
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+Humor

Leg

Review by Alice Cary

When Greg Marshall and his childhood friend, Gretchen, ran for president and vice president of their high school class, they were something of an unconventional pair. Both were non-Mormons, making them a minority in Salt Lake City, Utah. Marshall had a pronounced limp and had yet to tell anyone he was gay, while Gretchen had a pacemaker “and a bone spur hanging off one foot like a sixth toe.” Marshall writes that their winning campaign strategy “was simple, and that was to make fun of ourselves.” Marshall takes that same winning approach in his stunning debut, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It. 

Marshall’s limp in his right leg caused weakness and spasms throughout his life and required surgeries from time to time. He had actually been diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 18 months—but his parents never disclosed this fact, telling him instead that he had “tight tendons” and encouraging their son and other four children to simply rely on the mantra, “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP.” Marshall didn’t discover the true origin of his mobility limitations until 2014, by accident, when applying for health insurance. “Every day growing up was like an ABC Afterschool Special in which no lessons were learned, no wisdom gleaned,” he writes.

In different hands, this memoir might have become a tragic family story, overshadowed by a mother who was diagnosed with cancer and required decades of treatment for that and other conditions, and a kindhearted, dad-joking father who died from Lou Gehrig’s disease when Marshall was 22. Instead, Marshall has written a riotously funny book that will grab your attention and steal your heart from the very first page. His writing brings to mind early David Sedaris, with its bitingly funny caricatures and descriptions, bathed in blistering commentary, deep-seated opinions, wit, intellect and, above all else, fierce family love. Additionally, Marshall details several of his sexual experiences—not to be salacious but to illuminate his ongoing quest for identity and relationships, despite his long-standing fear of contracting HIV. “As a gay man and a person with a disability, I come out every day,” he writes.

The Marshalls’ lives are full of twists, turns and surprises that will leave readers yearning for more, and this memoir serves as a love letter to all of them, especially Marshall’s late father. Rare is the book that makes me both laugh out loud and shed actual tears, but Leg made me do both.

Bitingly funny and full of blistering commentary and fierce familial love, Greg Marshall's memoir is a winning debut.
NonfictionNatureMemoir

Better Living Through Birding

Review by Alice Cary

Christian Cooper has been bird-watching in Central Park for decades, but a spring migratory excursion took a dramatic turn on May 25, 2020, when a woman refused his request to leash her wandering dog, per park regulations. He was hoping to spy a ground-dwelling bird called a mourning warbler and knew that her unleashed pet would make his quest impossible. After she refused and Cooper began filming with his phone, Amy Cooper—a white woman of no relation—announced that she was about to call the police, adding, “I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her blatant use of “weaponized racism” went viral. As Cooper aptly sums up the incident in Better Living Through Birding, “Fourteen words, captured amid sixty-nine seconds of video, that would alter the trajectory of two lives.” This encounter happened on the same day George Floyd was murdered. 

A year later, Cooper was invited to attend a birding festival in Alabama. As he walked across Selma’s infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, he reflected on the day that bridge became a bloodbath in 1965 and on the travails his ancestors must have endured. “In that context, my incident in Central Park is just an asterisk,” he writes. “More than a year later, it remains exceedingly strange for me—the notoriety, that I’d even be mentioned in the annals of the nation’s racial strife.” 

Throughout his wide-ranging memoir, Cooper is a thoughtful, enthusiastic narrator. Growing up as a Black kid on Long Island, New York, in the 1970s, “I was rarer than an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the very white world of birding,” he writes. “As I simultaneously struggled with being queer, birds took me away from my woes suffocating in the closet.” Cooper gradually came out to family and friends, beginning while studying at Harvard in the 1980s. He went on to become one of Marvel’s first openly gay writers and editors—aside from birds, his other passions include superhero comics and sci-fi and fantasy—and introduced the first gay male Star Trek character in the Starfleet Academy series. In entertaining prose, Cooper reminisces about his life, writing especially poignantly about his often-difficult relationship with his father.

Tying these multifaceted strands together is no easy feat, but Cooper does it well. He peppers the text with helpful tips for beginning birders while recounting vivid excursions through Nepal, the Galapagos, Australia and, of course, his beloved Central Park. Generous soul that he is, Cooper writes that outrage shouldn’t be focused on Amy Cooper. Instead, he concludes, “Focusing on her is a distraction and lets too many people off the hook from the hard, ongoing examination of themselves and their own racial biases. . . . If you’re looking for Amy Cooper to yell at, look in the mirror.”

In thoughtful prose, birder Christian Cooper reminisces about his life before and after the day a white woman threatened to call the police on him in Central Park.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Early in his freshman year at Yale in 1973, Nate Reminger encounters his classmate Farrell Covington: “Farrell wasn’t simply my cultural opposite, a blinding sun god to counter my pale, Jewish, brown-haired, generous-nosed eagerness. He was a genetic accident, a green-eyed, six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered gift, and yes, there were dimples when he smiled.” Farrell, also a freshman, lives in a swanky townhouse with a butler, and he speaks as if he’s in a Cole Porter production, with a voice like a person who’s “been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” 

Farrell happens to be the scion of the very conservative, very Catholic, immeasurably wealthy Covington family of Wichita, Kansas. And narrator Nate, who knows he’s gay but never had so much as a kiss, is shocked when Farrell declares that he may be in love with Nate. This opening section of Paul Rudnick’s novel Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is especially strong, offering a mini coming-of-age story that’s filled with new friends and well-grounded in both place (the Yale campus and New Haven, Connecticut) and time (the early 1970s).

After a whirlwind freshman-year romance, Nate and Farrell are separated when Farrell’s flinty homophobic father blackmails his son into leaving Yale and promising to never see Nate again. It’s no spoiler to say that Nate and Farrell do indeed see each other again; the novel follows them for almost 50 years. Nate narrates the forces that keep the two apart and Farrell’s ingenious measures to bring them together, along with the ups and downs of late 20th-century gay life—the vibrant downtown club and disco scene of the ’70s, and the AIDS crisis and its effect on both Hollywood and New York’s theater world. But while Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is heartfelt, it’s rarely somber. It’s a good-natured romp through the decades, with a large cast and plenty of clever quips and throwaway lines.

Rudnick is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, and here he draws on his own life, sometimes to comic effect. (Rudnick wrote the play I Hate Hamlet and the screenplay for the movie Sister Act, while Nate writes the play Enter Hamlet and the screenplay Habit Forming.) Because it covers so much time and summarizes much of the action, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style occasionally feels more like the outline for a novel than a novel itself. Still, it’s a warmhearted, funny story with unexpected twists and to-die-for settings, a sweet recounting of a 50-year romance.

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is a warmhearted, funny story with unexpected twists and to-die-for settings, a sweet recounting of a 50-year romance.
NonfictionTravelLGBTQ+

Moby Dyke

Review by Catherine Hollis

Are lesbian bars endangered places? Down from a high of 206 bars recorded in 1987, there are currently only 20+ of these beloved, sticky, red-painted bars left in the U.S. Moby Dyke, the chronicle of Krista Burton’s obsessive quest to visit each of these remaining bars, offers readers a hilarious and affectionate investigation into the past and future of queer gathering spots.

Traveling from San Francisco to New York City, from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Mobile, Alabama, Burton visits both historic neighborhood bars and newer nightclubs, talking to owners and patrons about why they love these bars and who is welcome there. Virtually every bar Burton visited is lesbian-owned but welcomes everyone, including the full range of queer identities: trans men and women, nonbinary folks and the emerging generation of gender-diverse young queers. Burton also asks why so many gay bars for cisgender men continue to thrive as exclusive spaces, while lesbian bars thrive on inclusion.

An accomplished and very funny journalist, Burton is able to track serious issues around queer belonging in a fresh and lively voice. The personal narrative underlying her pursuit of lesbian bars—including her marriage to Davin, a trans man, and coming out to her conservative Mormon family—is as topical and good-humored as the interviews and reportage contained here. 

Burton’s road trip was also shaped by COVID-19, and her experiences reveal how the isolation of the pandemic stoked a real hunger for the joy of being with others in crowded, sweaty rooms, singing karaoke, partaking in dildo races and people-watching (after showing a vaccination card, of course). Even the details about the economics of Burton’s quest (such as how to fund a road trip on a book advance while still working a day job) offer a fascinating glimpse into the reality of a writer’s life. 

Burton’s portrait of the evolution of lesbian bars into communal spaces offers a timely and engaging snapshot of queer life in America.

Krista Burton’s obsessive quest to visit each lesbian bar in the U.S. offers a hilarious and affectionate investigation into the past and future of queer gathering spots.
NonfictionLGBTQ+HistoryBiography

Lesbian Love Story

Review by Kelly Blewett

New York City-based book publicist-turned-writer Amelia Possanza dedicates her book “to all the queers, ordinary and extraordinary, whose names have been destroyed by history, and to the rosy-fingered custodians of the queer archive.” Possanza is one such rosy-fingered custodian, a queer person attracted to the archives not just to understand history but also to understand her own story. “I was certain that if I uncovered enough lesbians in history, they would reveal a message or a lesson, a blueprint of how I might build my own life,” she writes.

Possanza’s debut book, Lesbian Love Story, is part archival research and part memoir. It includes seven chapters, each of which historicizes a lesbian love story. While the chapter on Sappho harkens back to antiquity, the other six span the 1890s through the 1990s, offering a lively lesbian mix: golf star Babe Didrikson Zaharias, groundbreaking memoirist Mary Casal, Chicana activist and writer Gloria Anzaldua and others. Possanza digs into the details of their lives with passionate engagement, frequently turning the narrative from the archival subject back to herself and exploring personal topics vis-a-vis these historical women: gender identity, the vagaries and politics of cross-dressing, the insidious narrowness of second-wave feminism, friendship, power dynamics in relationships and, most of all, obsessive love.

“In case it isn’t obvious yet,” Possanza writes in a late chapter, “I am an unforgivable romantic. I love love. Not as a means to an end, a steppingstone on the path to marriage and children, but as a surrender to passion, even when it’s surely doomed. Obsessive, selfish love that feasts on its own ruin.” As she unearths these romantic stories, Possanza also identifies the gaps within them, the moments when she wants to know more. To fill these silences, she imagines the scenes she longs to see, engaging with history not as a disembodied historian but as a young lesbian who wants answers, who wants to find her people. Though a blueprint does not, and cannot, neatly emerge from this sea of stories, Possanza does find the space, movement and complexity provided by a multifaceted past to buoy her ongoing becoming.

Amelia Possanza weaves her own memories through seven moving lesbian love stories from the archives in her debut book.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Late Americans

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Much like his first novel, Real Life, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans follows a loosely knit circle of lovers and friends in and around a university in Iowa as they badger, seduce and provoke one another over the span of an academic year. Financial, class and racial divisions are at the core of many of their interactions, as are disputes over the value of art rooted in trauma and concerns about selling out.

The Late Americans lacks a central character; instead, the story flows from one character or pair to the next, leaving the reader to make connections and hold onto each person’s secrets and dreams. The novel opens with a blistering portrayal of a poetry workshop where Seamus is verbally attacked for critiquing a peer’s work, then later he has sex with an older Iowan visiting the hospice facility where Seamus is a cook. From there, the novel switches focus to Goran, Timo and Ivan, all of whom gave up music or dance to pursue business or finance degrees. Noah, who is still studying dance, befriends another dancer in the program, Fatima, who supports herself by working in a cafe and contemplates leaving school after she is assaulted by another student. The novel ends in early summer, when the cast gathers at a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains to bid their former lives goodbye and move into the unknown.  

Taylor has previously written stories about ballet, and his plotting and style mirror the art form. In dance, our focus moves from performer to performer, now watching a pas de deux, now a solo. His novel functions similarly, seamlessly shifting our gaze from the individual to the duo, to the group and back again until, almost magically, the story is told and the piece comes to a close. A thought-provoking and lyrical novel about a group of people on the precipice of change, The Late Americans is a perceptive look at passion, sacrifice and intimacy among friends. 

A thought-provoking and lyrical story about a group of people on the precipice of change, The Late Americans is a perceptive look at passion, sacrifice and intimacy among friends.

Get BookPage in your inbox

Sign up to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday. 

SIGN UP HERE

Recent Features

All Features
Celebrate Pride Month with 28 queer stories by pioneering novelists, memoirists and journalists.
FictionFeaturedHistorical Fiction

The best World War II novels so far in 2023

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
June 26, 2023

The best World War II novels so far in 2023

Outside of the Regency, perhaps no other era in world history has a stronger pull in fiction than World War II. These are our favorite WWII-era novels so far in 2023.
Share this Article:

Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.

BookPage enewsletter

Sign up to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday.

SIGN UP HERE

Recent Features

All Features
Outside of the Regency, perhaps no other era in world history has a stronger pull in fiction than World War II. These are our favorite WWII-era novels so far in 2023.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Apartment

Review by Eric A. Ponce

In Ana Menéndez’s fifth work of fiction, The Apartment, Miami is not just a luxurious playground for spring breakers but also a colorful tableau with an intricately wrought history. 

The Helena is an apartment complex in South Miami Beach that has stood for over 70 years, bearing witness to changes in landscape, climate and population. On the second floor of the Helena, apartment 2B anchors our story as characters and circumstances flow by like currents. Sometimes these currents are calm and deep, but Menéndez focuses on the rougher ones, showing us Miami during World War II and immediately after 9/11. By the time readers meet the mysterious Lana in 2012, we already have a rich historical memory of 2B and the Helena, creating a unique intimacy that challenges the limitations of time and space. 

The novel begins in 1942, when a woman named Sophie moves with her husband, Jack, to Miami for his military service. She soon finds that between the war and Jack’s increasingly abusive behavior, Miami is not the tropical paradise of her dreams. The next resident of 2B, Eugenio, a concert pianist and Cuban refugee in 1963, is trying to start his life over again. As he reflects on his career while playing piano at a nursing home, he comes to acknowledge the importance of generational memory. 

A primary concern of the book is the capacity and limitations of marriage; in addition to Sophie’s story, we meet Marilyn, a disaffected wife in 1994 who grows bored and disgusted with her husband’s miserly ways. But the highlight of this thematic exploration, and of the book as a whole, are the relationships between Beatrice, Ignacio and Maribel in 2002. Beatrice is Ignacio’s girlfriend, but Maribel is his wife, a setup that is born out of the desperation of immigration. Maribel’s Cuban heritage grants her easier access to citizenship, which, through a fraudulent marriage, she tries to give to Ignacio, who is from Colombia. Beatrice, meanwhile, who is from Haiti, is caught between her love for Ignacio and his struggle for citizenship, raising questions about the restrictive self-labeling of nationality and marriage.

All of this occurs before we meet the final resident of 2B, Lana, who bears the weight of all of this history. Her residence is preceded by a man named Lenin (who also reveals himself as the book’s narrator), and as the mystery of Lenin begins to unfold, Lana’s own enigmatic past comes into sharp focus. Through this kaleidoscope of characters and relationships, apartment 2B, with its white mice and diminishing ocean views, proves the transcendent quality of both individual lives and Menéndez’s writing.

The Helena is an apartment complex in South Miami Beach that has stood for over 70 years, bearing witness to changes in landscape, climate and population. On the second floor of the Helena, apartment 2B anchors our story as characters and circumstances flow by like currents.
FictionAudioHistorical Fiction

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

Review by Anna Zeitlin

Tom Hanks’ first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (16 hours), is an appropriately star-studded audiobook. Hanks narrates most of the story, with additional narration provided by actors Rita Wilson, Holland Taylor, Ego Nwodim, Nasim Pedrad and more.

The novel tells the story of the troubled present-day production of a new superhero film, going back to the 1970s comics that inspired the movie, and then further back to the World War II-era source material that led to the comics. As someone who’s worked on about a hundred movies (but ironically, no superhero films) as an actor, producer, writer and director, Hanks has insider knowledge of the film industry that makes him perfectly equipped to write about it in a cynical but loving way. His narration is ideally suited to the stylized dialogue; he sounds like a folksy dad pretending to be a noir detective.

Read our review of the print edition of The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.

As someone who’s worked on about a hundred movies as an actor, producer, writer and director, Tom Hanks has insider knowledge of the film industry that makes him perfectly equipped to write about it in a cynical but loving way.
FictionFamily Drama

All-Night Pharmacy

Review by Matthew Jackson

A Los Angeles dive bar packed with personalities. A sibling dynamic that runs the gamut from nourishing to obliterating. A mysterious woman who promises to be a kind of guru to a narrator on the brink of self-destruction. All this and more can be found in Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel, an exploded view of a conflicted young woman’s brain that delivers page after page of witty, often heartbreaking narration.

The unnamed protagonist of All-Night Pharmacy is a teenage girl just out of high school who’s swept up in the life and adventures of her older sister, Debbie, a stripper and party girl who encourages her younger sibling to go out and live, no matter the consequences. But in between swallowing random pills and taking shots at a local bar called Salvation, the narrator begins to wonder if Debbie is anything more than a master manipulator and chaos agent. When their clash of personalities turns bloody, Debbie disappears, but this is only the beginning of the narrator’s search for meaning and understanding. 

With her sister gone, the narrator turns to Sasha, a charming and spellbinding woman who offers spiritual and psychic guidance—an appealing offer for the narrator, whose life has become a wormhole of pills, bad decisions and confusion about her sister’s disappearance. Together Sasha and the narrator embark on a sexual, psychological and emotional awakening.

The tensions of the narrator’s life and the persistent sense of searching that permeates her brain make All-Night Pharmacy hum with energy from the very first page, imbuing Madievsky’s narrative with a sense of darkly comic unpredictability that never overwhelms the emotional beats of her character’s journey. Along the way, the novel touches on the scar tissue of growing up in the former Soviet Union, the trauma of European Jews in the 20th century and the calculated risks that come with opioid addiction and selling drugs. Madievsky is also a poet, and her knack for crafting imagery is on full display, merging the mundane and the profound to ensure her novel is thrilling all the way down to a sentence level.

Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.

Debut novelist Ruth Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Bellies

Review by Laura Sackton

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is the best kind of queer love story: not a dramatic tragedy but an expansive exploration of intimacy, desire and queer family-making. Dinan refuses to adhere to the expected beats of mainstream narratives about straight relationships, but she also also brashly and bravely rejects the standards of moral perfection that queer and transgender characters in fiction are too often required to live up to. Instead, she honors what is uncomfortable and hard about trans life right alongside what is sacred.

Tom and Ming meet in their early 20s at a drag show put on by their university and immediately hit it off. Tom is a white Brit whose good-natured cheerfulness masks his insecurity. Ming is an aspiring playwright who has come to England from Malaysia; her mother died when she was a teenager, and she’s still looking for a place or a group of people that feel like home. Tom and Ming fall in love easily, but their relationship is thrown into turmoil when Ming decides to transition. The narrative switches between their two perspectives as they navigate their changing relationships to each other and to themselves. 

Ming finds freedom, relief and joy in finally being herself, but being a nonwhite trans woman in the U.K. also brings new challenges. Tom struggles to accept that while his love for Ming hasn’t changed, his desire for her has. They are both grieving imagined versions of themselves and their futures. This kind of heartbreak, which is as much a part of queer and trans life as anything else, is not something that queer fiction often makes space for. 

Bellies is fraught with all the messes of growing up and into identity. Dinan’s prose is fresh and immediate and full of tension. There’s drunken revelry, heart-pounding fights, tender moments between lovers, strained long-distance phone calls with family and awkward support group meetings. Every page of this novel feels alive and thrumming; even the introspective sections have a momentum that pulls the reader along. Ming, Tom and their group of friends have quirks and flaws that make them immediately recognizable. They are selfish and petty, confused and clueless, loving and impatient. Sometimes they love one another generously, but sometimes they fail to love one another at all.

This is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest book about trans life, first love, art-making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home—in a new country, with another person and inside yourself. Bellies celebrates a hundred different kinds of transformation and, like the very best novels, has the power to transform its readers in unexpected ways.

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is a vulnerable, moving, riotously funny and deeply honest story about trans life, first love, art-making, friendship, grief and the hard, slow process of building a home—in a new country, with another person and inside yourself.
FictionHistorical FictionCrime Fiction

Crook Manifesto

Review by Carole V. Bell

Crook Manifesto, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead’s elegant and pulse-pounding sequel to his tour-de-force heist novel, Harlem Shuffle, may exceed the original. 

After 15 years as a Harlem businessman, Ray Carney, son of a career criminal, has become a pillar of the Black community. A property owner and merchant, he’s expanded his landmark furniture store on 125th Street, and his family lives in a brownstone he bought on the famed Strivers’ Row. His illicit side hustle as a fence seems firmly in the rear view. 

And yet, four years after the close of the previous novel, Ray is both prosperous and twitchy. Temptation stalks him, and when his daughter, May, begs him for sold-out Jackson 5 tickets, he jumps at the opportunity to reach out to his less savory contacts, trading favors with a dirty cop for VIP seats and the chance to be a hero to the hard to impress teenager. 

Still, though Ray frames this reentry to fencing as “the things you do for your kids,” it’s obvious that part of him misses the excitement of life off the straight and narrow. “Crooked stays crooked” is a silent mantra, and Ray is constantly tempted. When the best he can claim is that “sometimes whole hours passed where he didn’t have a crooked thought,” it seems so easy to do something he’s good at—just fence some stolen goods, and everyone’s a winner, right?

Whitehead’s acerbic, stylized and rhythmic storytelling voice is stronger than ever, but it’s his precise evocation of a fraying 1970s New York City that really makes Ray’s story compelling. Crook Manifesto replicates its precursor’s episodic, three-part structure and unsurpassed blending of social history and crime fiction, starting in 1971 and continuing to 1973 and 1976. The historical touchstones are fascinating and relatively less-storied compared to the ’60s signposts of Harlem Shuffle. The year 1971 includes the New York Police Department corruption scandal starring whistleblower detective Frank Serpico (played memorably by Al Pacino in the movie Serpico), the Black Liberation Army breaking off from the Black Panthers and that historic Jackson 5 concert. In 1973, it’s Blaxploitation film and counterculture, and in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial is the political spark that may finally burn it all down.

Colson Whitehead headshot by Chris Close
Read our interview with Colson Whitehead: “I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?”

These pieces of history are inextricable from the spectacularly evocative atmosphere. Through Ray’s eyes, we’re immersed in a city in the midst of a slow-moving crisis. Crime is surging, trash is piling up, and the wealthy are fleeing to the suburbs and skyscraper fortresses. Even the wealthy Upper East Side is looking a bit shabby. The city’s story alone would be worth the price of admission, but the characters are equally strong, especially Ray, a study in contradictions. Between the muggers and police rousting Black men on the streets in higher numbers than usual, it seems a precarious time to be getting mixed up with a crooked cop who’s gone to seed. It’s even worse to be walking around Manhattan with a hundred thousand’s worth in stolen jewels; and yet as well as Ray is doing, and as much as he has to lose, he quite convincingly can’t resist the siren call of danger.  

With that knockout interplay between context and character, Crook Manifesto more than matches the finely hewn psychological tensions that haunted its (anti) hero in Harlem Shuffle. The combination makes this sequel soar.

Photo of Colson Whitehead by Chris Close.

Crook Manifesto more than matches the finely hewn psychological tensions that haunted Colson Whitehead’s main character in Harlem Shuffle. The interplay between context and character makes this sequel soar.
FictionFamily Saga

Family Lore

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Trust a poet to know the power of words. And Elizabeth Acevedo is not just any poet: She’s a National Poetry Slam champ as well as a highly acclaimed writer of young adult novels. (Her debut work of fiction, The Poet X, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2018.) Now Acevedo delivers her first work of literature aimed at adults, a magical family saga revolving around a fantastic group of Dominican American women.

All but one of the four Marte sisters and their daughters were born with special gifts, but it is the ability of second-eldest daughter Flor that has always been the most unsettling. From an early age, Flor has foreseen people’s deaths in her dreams. So when Flor announces that she’s throwing a living wake for herself, it sends the family into an escándalo. Even as they band together to prepare for Flor’s big day, they can’t help but worry that they’ll be losing one of their own very soon.

Elizabeth Acevedo headshot
Read our interview with Elizabeth Acevedo: “I write what haunts me.”

Told in various styles and from the perspectives of each of the sisters as well as Flor’s daughter and niece, Family Lore chronicles the tumultuous days leading up to the celebration, slowly unearthing the secrets and private pains each of these women has held tight over the years. The narrative flits back and forth in time, hopscotching through the women’s girlhoods and current struggles, heartbreaks and triumphs, while also shuttling readers between New York City and the Dominican Republic. Initially, the shifts between places and perspectives are discombobulating, but it doesn’t take long to settle into the rhythm of the narrative, thanks to Acevedo’s playful yet admirably honest prose and her skillful balancing of character introspection with plot.

This deeply personal work blurs fact and fiction in the most exquisite way. Although its inspiration comes from her own family and experiences, Acevedo stresses in her author’s letter that Family Lore is neither autobiographical nor based in fact, but that doesn’t mean that what’s contained within its pages is not profoundly true. Tricky construction and magical realist elements aside, Acevedo has laid herself bare in Family Lore as both a creator and as a person, which makes this not just her bravest book to date but perhaps also her best.

Photo of Elizabeth Acevedo by Denzel Golatt.

Elizabeth Acevedo has laid herself bare in Family Lore as both a creator and as a person, which makes this not just her bravest book to date but perhaps also her best.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Mobility

Review by Michael Magras

Most lives contain their fair share of contradictions, but nowhere is this more striking than among people who work in politics or the oil industry, where compromises and rationalizations are standard practice. And few conflicts in contemporary literature are as stark as those competing for dominance within Bunny Glenn, the protagonist of Mobility, Lydia Kiesling’s smart, complex follow-up to her 2018 debut, The Golden State. 

To see contradictions play out to their fullest, one needs to view a life over many years. Kiesling does a generous service to Bunny by dramatizing her event-filled life over more than five decades, from the late days of the Clinton administration to a cautionary epilogue set in 2051. 

In 1998, Bunny—her real name is Elizabeth—is a well-traveled 15-year-old living in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where her father, Ted, is a diplomat in the foreign service. This could be an exciting experience for a teenager, but Bunny’s an old hand after her father’s previous postings in Yerevan, Armenia, and Athens, Greece. She’s more interested in reading Cosmopolitan, drinking vodka and performing “ministrations to her face and teeth that would increase her odds of driving a man, any man, a particular man, wild.”

Bunny gradually figures out her place in a complex world, from her relationship to her Texas family, including mother Maryellen, who gave up her flight attendant career; to her interactions with classmates at her prestigious boarding school; to finally her own career, which begins in 2009 with a temp job at an engineering firm and progresses to more substantial positions at a consultancy dedicated to investing in clean forms of energy—decisions that have professional as well as personal ramifications. 

At times, Kiesling is more interested in verisimilitude than narrative momentum, with long passages on the politics of the day. But readers in the market for a present-day mix of droll political insight reminiscent of the British sitcom “Yes Minister” or Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels will warm to the book’s style. And Kiesling does a nice job of highlighting rationalizations that sometimes define American life, such as for people who work for oil companies despite their conflicted feelings because they need the health insurance, or environmentalists who vacation by flying in airplanes that burn leaded fuel. Mobility is a forward-thinking book about old-fashioned themes of money, politics and family. And that’s no contradiction.

To see contradictions play out to their fullest, one needs to view a life over many years. Lydia Kiesling does a generous service to her fictional protagonist by dramatizing her event-filled life over more than five decades, from the late days of the Clinton administration to a cautionary epilogue set in 2051.
FictionSpeculative FictionFamily Drama

Shark Heart

Review by Melissa Brown

Thirty-somethings Lewis and Wren fall in love in a promising meet cute as he endures a bad date with someone else and she watches and eavesdrops upon it all unfolding. Idealistic Lewis is an aspiring actor and playwright turned teacher, and careful Wren, born to a teenage single mother, works in finance for stability and security. In due course, Wren and Lewis get married, and like any couple, they share and grow together while keeping some thoughts to themselves. 

The “normal” trajectory of their relationship is interrupted by a startling diagnosis: A Carcharodon carcharias mutation has befallen Lewis, causing him to transform into a great white shark before their first anniversary. As her new husband morphs more and more rapidly, Wren buys scuba equipment and installs an aboveground pool. Lewis eats cans of tuna and boiled shrimp around the clock while still trying to teach and write for as long as he can.

The knowledge of their imminent separation forces decisions and conversations they didn’t plan to tackle so early in their marriage. As Shark Heart winds through both their pasts (Wren’s especially), poignant and meaningful moments abound as they search their memories and experiences to help them navigate an uncertain future. 

Debut novelist Emily Habeck has crafted a story that is surprisingly moving, oddly heartwarming and deeply contemplative beyond its tragicomic premise. Habeck, who has a background in theater and theology, has a real dramatic flair, capturing her characters’ conflicts and buried longings in the face of undesired transformation. The “ever illusory margin between human and animal” is a key element of the novel’s world, one where people can become pregnant with birds or turn into zebras or Komodo dragons.

The short chapters and stylistic changes (some sections are formatted with only dialogue, while others are just a few sentences) do occasionally distract, but the depth of visceral emotion helps offset any affectation. Interspersed with Wren and Lewis’ story is the history of Wren’s mother, Angela, revealing much about who Wren is and why this parting with Lewis is so hard for her. 

This story of love and connection—between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and friends that are like family—vividly explores both the fragility and tenacity of humanity. Shark Heart’s questions are universal: How do we let go of the ones we love? How do we move on after loss? And how do we—can we—open ourselves up to joy again? Like Wren, we survive, exist and begin again in the “terrifying and sublime journey” that is life.

Debut novelist Emily Habeck has crafted a story that is surprisingly moving, oddly heartwarming and deeply contemplative beyond its tragicomic premise: a new husband’s transformation into a great white shark.
FictionComing of Age

Small Worlds

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s a strange and fraught time, that space between the end of high school and the rest of your life. You’re caught on the border between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal agency. In Small Worlds, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s follow-up to his award-winning debut novel, Open Water, musician Stephen is right on the cusp of adulthood, but he is also straddling two cultures: London, his home; and Ghana, from which his family emigrated.

At the novel’s outset, Stephen has feelings for longtime gal pal Del, but he can’t find the words to express his love. He dances around his emotions, quite literally. Whether in a spontaneous two-step with his brother, swaying in the pews at church or feeling the rhythm in Peckham dance halls blaring Rick James, J Dilla and D’Angelo, Stephen sees dancing as an escape, a safety net and salvation. 

His father doesn’t exactly share the sentiment and is concerned that his son is adrift. Pops encourages Stephen to drop the idea of pursuing a music degree and study business instead, which Stephen does, to little success. And when he drops out of college and returns home, a rift opens between father and prodigal son that seems irreparable. Harsh words are exchanged, and Stephen departs for a new phase of his life.

Over the next few years, Stephen takes tentative steps toward being his own man, explores his Ghanaian roots and discovers the joys of preparing and sharing food with others. He bonds with a friend who has suffered a beat-down at the hands of a racist gang and muses on what it means to be a Black immigrant in modern-day England. He tentatively expresses his love for Del and extends an olive branch to his father.

The book’s action, such that there is, unfolds slowly, and when we take our leave of Stephen at the story’s end, he’s still a work in progress. But even small worlds take time to build, and  Nelson leaves us with the impression that this one will be bountiful—with a dance floor at its center.

Whether swaying in the pews at church or feeling the rhythm in Peckham dance halls, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s young protagonist sees dancing as an escape, a safety net and salvation.

Trending Fiction

FictionDebut Fiction

Two turtledoves

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

more info

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.

read more
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

more info

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.

read more
All Fiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features