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.
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.
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.
Pakistani British writer Kamila Shamsie is an adept chronicler of how politics impact families in both England and Pakistan. In 2013, she was recognized as one of Granta‘s “20 best young British writers,” and her most recent novel, Home Fire, won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her eighth book, Best of Friends, delves into how relationships formed in childhood affect our adult selves, and speculates about whether even the most cherished friendships could have an expiration date.
It’s 1988 in Karachi, Pakistan, and teenagers Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since elementary school. Zahra is the studious daughter of a schoolteacher and a cricket commentator, and she dreams of a world beyond Karachi. Maryam is the privileged child of a wealthy family that splits its time between England and Pakistan, and she hopes to inherit her family’s lucrative leather-goods business.
Adolescence brings changing bodies and a new interest in boys. The girls’ growing sense of freedom is compounded by the election of Benazir Bhutto, whose unexpected win brings hope for a more equitable future for all Pakistanis. But when a ride home from a party with their friend Hammad goes horribly wrong, Maryam and Zahra face the limits of their freedom—as well as the ways their differing upbringings shape their reactions to trauma.
Decades later, both friends have found considerable success in London, where Zahra is a famous lawyer turned political advocate for refugees, and Maryam is a venture capitalist funding the development of facial-recognition software. They are still close, yet certain subjects remain off-limits. When Hammad comes to London, the two women argue over how to handle the situation, and their conflicting approaches put their lifelong friendship at risk.
Shamsie excels at balancing the personal and the political, and she artfully reconstructs the tense political environment of 1980s Pakistan and the rise of the surveillance state in 2019 London to provide ample opportunities for Maryam and Zahra to find themselves on opposite sides of such issues as privacy, privilege and refugee rights. For any reader who finds themselves at odds with an old friend, Best of Friends rings true in its honest, unvarnished portrayal of friendship strained by politics and ideology.
Kamila Shamsie's eighth novel speculates about whether even the most cherished friendships could have an expiration date.
Sooner or later, every thoughtful person who cares about making a difference is likely to wonder whether younger generations will view them as a dinosaur, stuck in the past, tethered to an outdated worldview. While they’re being thoughtful, they could also spare a moment to consider the plight of other species, or to investigate the effect of their behavior on others. Lydia Millet has addressed these questions before, and she does so again in her novel Dinosaurs.
Gil is a 45-year-old bachelor whose soft-spoken manner belies a life of extremes. He’s filthy rich, but the reason for his inherited wealth, as the novel slowly reveals, is not one that anybody would desire. A sense of noblesse oblige leads Gil, who has never had to work, to accept a series of volunteer jobs, such as helping out at a center for refugee families.
It’s the late 2010s, and Gil is tired of his Manhattan life, where he “had nowhere to be and no one who needed him.” He moves to Phoenix, which he does by walking there over five months. Next door to his Arizona property is a house whose side is made entirely of glass, affording him a clear view of the neighbors: financier Ted, psychotherapist Ardis and their two children, Tom and Clem.
Millet blends the stories of Gil’s friendship with the family next door, particularly with younger child Tom, with tales of acquaintances from Gil’s past. Among them are Van Alsten, a gleefully foulmouthed friend from New York days whose formerly carefree life has changed in profound ways; Lane, a scheming ex-girlfriend who dumped Gil for a cyclist; and a man connected to Gil’s inheritance who unexpectedly emerges after decades of no contact.
Other present-day events further complicate Gil’s life, from the relationships he forms through his volunteer work at a women’s shelter he’s funding, to the mystery of who is killing birds late at night outside his home.
A couple of later scenes go on too long, but even if, like Millet’s other works, this novel is like a delicious meal that doesn’t quite fill you up, it’s still a feast worth tucking into. Millet makes critical points about American aggression, destructive attitudes toward wildlife and the American concept of freedom, “that sacred cow that was always invoked as an excuse for bad behavior.” Dinosaurs is a bracing if subtle reminder that, in the absence of changes to old-fashioned ways, some people are just one good volcanic eruption from going the way of the dinosaur.
Dinosaurs is a bracing if subtle reminder that, in the absence of changes to old-fashioned ways, some people are just one good volcanic eruption from going the way of the dinosaur.
Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has written more than a dozen books and screenplays, but The Twilight World (3.5 hours) is his first novel. Translated by Michael Hofmann and short enough to qualify as a novella, it’s the fictionalized story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the real-life intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who defended Lubang Island in the Philippines for decades, unaware that World War II had ended. By zeroing in on Onoda’s singular pursuit, the novel explores the process and impact of globalization through one man’s story.
Herzog narrates the novel in his iconic German accent—pronounced yet easy to understand, with an exacting, measured delivery that captures Onoda’s fierce, calculating character. The tension is highest when Onoda finds items in the jungle, such as a newspaper or supplies, and he approaches them with suspicion and an investigator’s prowess. Herzog’s lifelong fascination with the jungle serves him well here, as he captures the cricket sounds, humidity and overall density of the setting.
Werner Herzog narrates his debut novel with an exacting, measured delivery that captures Onoda's fierce, calculating character.
Comedy is rarely granted the same measure of literary recognition or respect as works that are tragic, epic or historic, so Andrew Sean Greer’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his comic novel, Less, was a welcome surprise. It didn’t hurt that the contemporary satire unapologetically skewered the literary community as it chronicled the midlife breakdown of “minor American writer” Arthur Less. Greer tapped his singular skill for blending multiple tropes to amusing effect: the life-in-crisis travelogue, the quirky gay love story, a mysterious Bronte-esque narrator whose identity is kept under wraps until the end of the book. (The snazzy red suit Greer wore to the Pulitzer Prize ceremony won him even more fans.)
As the title suggests, Greer’s new novel, Less Is Lost, is a sequel, picking up the misadventures (and misdirected travels) of the hapless Arthur Less. Arthur is facing both emotional and literal upheaval: His former lover and mentor, Robert Brownburn, has died, leaving a hole in his heart and revealing the startling fact that Arthur owes 10 years in back rent for the home where he believed he was living rent-free. Arthur has recently acquired an affectionate pug and a converted camper van from a much-lionized novelist with three initials in his name—so to stave off homelessness, he embarks in the camper van on a bizarre itinerary of marginally literary events that take him to, among other places, a hot springs retreat in the Arizona desert (which he proceeds to flood), the Navajo reservation, an antebellum plantation in Georgia and an island off the coast of Savannah where his long-estranged father is dying.
Enroute across the country, Arthur fields abrupt, stress-inducing phone calls from his fast-talking literary agent. As he discovers the America that lies between the coasts, he also sort of—though not too definitively—discovers things about himself, most of them having to do with our need for love and human connection. As with Less (but no longer a secret), the narrator is Arthur’s beloved partner, Freddy Pelu, who has a magical capacity for seeing into Arthur’s heart and soul in ways Arthur himself cannot. And Freddy, it turns out, proves a third-person narrator in the manner of Nick Carraway, discovering things about himself as he ostensibly serves as Arthur’s Alice B. Toklas.
Greer writes with an offbeat, gentle humor, and his narrative, in the voice of the somewhat enigmatic Freddy, is peppered throughout with well-observed irony and occasional profundity. Arthur Less himself, no doubt, would be stymied at the prospect of following up the success of a Pulitzer, but Greer clearly is made of sterner stuff than his fictional creation. And if Less Is Lost lacks some of the snap of the prizewinner, it admirably transports eager readers into the world of Arthur and Freddy with tenderness and wit.
Less Is Lost, the companionable sequel to Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning novel, Less, traces a hapless writer’s further misadventures.
All families are dysfunctional, but some raise it to an art form, as Amanda Svensson so deftly outlines in her admirable novel A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding, winner of Sweden’s Per Olov Enquist Literature Prize, awarded annually to a young writer poised for a breakout.
It all starts with the birth of triplets in 1989. Mama’s a little hazy on the details, but what she does remember is that one of the children is whisked from the delivery room due to “what the doctors would later call spontaneous asphyxia neonatorum with no lasting complications.” That may seem like a trivial detail; it’s not. During this chaotic moment, Papa decides to reveal his recent infidelity with his dental hygienist, hoping that its emotional impact will be blunted by the frenzied environment. As it turns out, confessing his dalliance is among the least consequential of his actions that day.
Fast-forward to 2016: Papa has moved out, Mama has decided to make her life right with Jesus, and the semi-estranged siblings have cast themselves across the globe, each embroiled in their own individual expressions of dysfunction. Sebastian has joined a secretive biomedical research institute in London whose purpose is opaque even to him. Clara has joined what might or might not be a doomsday cult on Easter Island. And Matilda is the stepmother in a nuclear family unit in Berlin.
Of the three, Sebastian has the most interesting career. Among his charges at the London Institute of Cognitive Science (LICS) are a monkey with a defined moral compass; a client who dreams of giving birth in a toilet and awakens to find she suddenly has world-class artistic skills; and a woman who has begun to lose the ability to see the world in three dimensions.
Then their mother drops a bombshell: One of the three might have been switched out at the hospital, but she doesn’t want to say who until they can all get together face-to-face. This, as you might expect, causes a fair amount of consternation among the might-not-all-be-kinfolk.
How they aim to mend their estrangement and cope with their possible nonfamilial ties occupies the majority of A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding, which straddles science fiction, whodunit and soapy drama. While all of the main characters are deeply—really deeply—flawed, Svensson has you rooting for them through their highs and lows. “Nothing ever ends, but everything ends,” she writes. “That’s why soap operas are the only true narrative form, and the soap bubble the only true art form.”
While all of her main characters are deeply—really deeply—flawed, Amanda Svensson has you rooting for them through their highs and lows.
What does it mean to write a novel in a world defined by the violence of colonization and white supremacy—a world that can’t be saved with mere words? What does it mean to want to write a novel at all, especially as you doubt yourself and recognize the contradictions in your desires and intentions? And what does it mean to be a queer Indigenous man living through these questions and their consequences?
These are the quandaries at the heart of Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s extraordinary debut novel. A Minor Chorus is a slim, sparse book with a breathtaking structure, a genre-defying blend of fiction, critical theory and oral history that holds seemingly endless layers of stories in its mere 176 pages.
Belcourt’s unnamed narrator is a 20-something queer Cree man fed up with the overt and insidious racism of the academic realm. He abandons his dissertation, leaves his Ph.D. program and returns to his hometown in northern Alberta, Canada, to write a novel. While there, he speaks with various people from his past: an old classmate, a closeted gay elder and his great-aunt. Between these conversations, he recounts childhood memories of his cousin, another Cree man who’s just been arrested on a drug charge.
It’s hard to describe just how moving and unusual this novel is. It is intensely interior, sometimes dizzyingly so. The narrator is a scholar who constantly analyzes his own experiences, philosophizing and interrogating, but he’s painfully aware of the limits of academic thought. This tension sizzles and spits at the center of the book, and while the narrator never resolves that tension, he begins to dissect the rigid binaries between living in the world and thinking about it, creating experience and feeling it.
Belcourt crafts sentences like only a poet can, each one precise and shimmering. He writes with ferocious intensity and beauty about Grindr hookups, queer Indigenous friendship, police violence, the open wounds of Canada’s residential schools, loneliness and longing. The narrator frequently invokes the work of other poets and writers—Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Carl Phillips—and in doing so, firmly places himself in a lineage of struggle and resistance, artistic rigor and poetic thought.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value. It is a slippery, scholarly work, rooted in the layered complexity of Indigenous life. Belcourt has established himself as one of Canada’s leading contemporary poets. Now, with his first work of fiction, he cements his place as both writer and world builder, his words creating portals from the past and present into the queer Indigenous future.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value.
In 2019, Ann Mah published an article in the New York Times about 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier’s year in Paris as a college junior. As Mah traced Jacqueline’s days up and down the streets of Paris and into its museums and cafes, she revealed a new side of both the American icon and the postwar city. The article was the inspiration for Jacqueline in Paris, Mah’s novel about this formative year.
Mah shares a closer look at the process of fictionalizing this story—and the incredible moment when Jacqueline’s own voice began to come through.
A couple of years ago in Paris, I walked by a stately art nouveau building in the 16th arrondissement. On the wall hung a plaque that proclaimed: “Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis née Lee-Bouvier (1929–1994), widow of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States of America, lived in this building as a student from 1949 to 1950.” It stopped me in my tracks.
By this point I’d lived in Paris off and on for a few years, and I had a pretty good sense of the famous Americans who had lived in and loved the City of Light—but I hadn’t realized they included the former first lady. As I gazed at the apartment building, which was large and elegant, with a limestone facade that blended seamlessly with its neighbors, I tried to imagine her as a student, 20 years old, pushing open the heavy wooden front door, buying a newspaper at the corner kiosk, dashing down the steps of the metro. Suddenly I was overcome with a desire to know more about this young woman who had decided to study in France only five years after World War II. What had drawn her to Paris? With whom—and how—did she live? And how had her junior year abroad affected the rest of her life, if at all?
I began writing a travel article, retracing Jacqueline’s footsteps in Paris. At the library, I checked out a stack of biographies, scouring them for details about her year abroad, which were few and far between. I re-created some of her adventures: sipping cocktails at the Ritz Bar, riding horses in the Bois de Boulogne and visiting Reid Hall, the Parisian center of American study abroad since the 1920s.
“The bright, adventurous young woman I had gleaned through snippets had her own voice, and in this novel I have tried to let her speak.”
I interviewed Jacqueline’s French host sister, Claude du Granrut, who spoke of the bitter cold of the winter of 1950, describing the earmuffs, scarves and sweaters they wore at home to keep warm. Their rambling apartment lacked heat: “It was broken,” she said. “Jacqueline put on gloves to study. I remember her always being covered up.” She told me that she and Jacqueline never spoke a word of English together, which I found especially touching, because it illustrated how deeply Jacqueline cared about learning the French language.
In du Granrut’s memoir, Le piano et le violoncelle, I read more about her mother (and Jacqueline’s host mother), the Comtesse de Renty. She and her husband had been Resistance spies during the war; in the final days before the liberation of Paris, they were captured and sent to concentration camps, where her husband died. The war left her widowed and impoverished, with two daughters and a grandson to support, and as a result she had taken in boarders, including Jacqueline and two other girls studying abroad through Smith College.
Piecing together these details of Jacqueline’s time in France felt both thrilling and painstaking. And yet my original questions about her still lingered. It occurred to me that the story of Jacqueline’s junior year abroad in Paris reached far beyond the scope of a travel article. How could I learn more? Famously guarded, Jacqueline did not grant many interviews, and most of her personal letters remain private. As a result, her story has largely been told through the memories and observations of others. But the bright, adventurous young woman I had gleaned through snippets had her own voice, and in this novel I have tried to let her speak.
At first I heard her voice like a whisper, perhaps her famous little half-whisper. But after listening to the French radio interviews she gave as first lady—in which she spoke fluent French with clear precision—I realized she must have deployed that girlish tone as a guise, a protective cloak. Perhaps such subterfuge was necessary for a young woman of her milieu, one socially poised but financially precarious, dependent on her looks, charm and ability to please. Her self-assured voice in French challenged the caricature of Mrs. John F. Kennedy and allowed me to glimpse a quick, clever side of her. I couldn’t forget it, and in the end it guided me, even in moments of doubt and frustration, until Jacqueline seemed to be talking to me directly.
Much of this book was written during the early days of the pandemic, which meant I couldn’t visit France—my family and I barely left home—but every afternoon I retreated to my car, which was parked in the underground garage of my apartment building, opened my laptop and traveled to Paris. I tagged along with Jacqueline to museums and jazz nightclubs, country chateaux and cafes, and on long brisk walks through narrow cobblestone streets, until history started coming to life on the page and in my senses. I smelled the heavy smoke of her cigarettes, swallowed the icy brine of a raw oyster at Christmas, soaked up the delicate warmth of an early spring day in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I wept with her, too, when she left Paris and came to accept that she would never live there again.
Yes, Jacqueline left France in the end. I don’t think that’s a spoiler, right? Most of us are familiar with the triumph and tragedy of the rest of her life, playing out as it did upon a global stage and recorded in history. But it was her year in Paris, the academic year of 1949 to 1950, that she called ‘the high point in my life,’ and it has been an honor and a privilege to accompany her there and allow her voice to guide this story. I don’t pretend to know the woman who was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, but I do feel a kinship with the 20-year-old American student in Paris named Jacqueline—and she is young, and happy, and carefree.
Walk the streets of postwar Paris with travel writer and novelist Ann Mah, whose new book reveals a transformative year in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean’s debut, is a dark, haunting fantasy that follows Devon Fairweather, a Book Eater who subsists on ink and paper and the knowledge it provides her. The Book Eaters, or ‘eaters, live on the fringes of human society, and were it not for the special, fang-like teeth that they unsheathe before a literary meal, they would look like ordinary people. Devon has always detested the staunch traditions of her isolated clan, and The Book Eaters jumps back and forth in time as she tries to forge her own path.
One of the most memorable and haunting elements of Dean’s world is how Book Eater society is structured around elements of Arthurian legend that are used to justify patriarchal, tyrannical rule. The young Devon lives a sheltered life as a Princess. Female Book Eaters are rare, and she is expected to marry early and promptly give birth to more of their kind. While her brothers eat books about politics, history and academics, she is limited to the same old fairy tales time and time again. Knights maintain order and govern the Dragons, who are born as Mind Eaters, unpredictable individuals who constantly crave human souls. Drugs keep their hunger at bay and force them to submit to their handlers’ orders.
Devon has always seen through the facade of the happily ever afters she consumes, and when she gives birth to a Mind Eater son, Cai, she realizes she is the only person who can save him from becoming a Dragon. In the present timeline, Devon and the now 5-year-old Cai have escaped the ‘eaters, but Devon is struggling to keep him under control and out of the Knights’ grasp while she searches for a way that they can both be free for good.
Dean fully invests readers in Devon’s struggles, both as a girl attempting to prise tiny snatches of freedom from a patriarchal society and as an adult mother frantic to protect her son. The Book Eaters‘ depiction of the sacrifices and joys of motherhood is particularly nuanced, grounding the fantasy elements of the story in the relationship between Devon and Cai. And Dean expertly expands the scope of the story to explore even more characters’ experiences, such as the other ‘eater women’s oppression and loneliness, Devon’s friend Yarrow’s isolation as an asexual person in the procreation-obsessed ‘eater society and Cai’s pain at being viewed as a monster.
The Book Eaters is a far cry from the fairy tales Devon consumes: It is a winding, harrowing, deliciously nightmarish story of people taking control of their bodies and destinies after generations of repression and abuse.
In Sunyi Dean's debut, beings who consume books to survive hide on the fringes of society. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it's actually a nightmare.
Christian mystics are a point of obsession for the hero of Tess Gunty’s debut novel. “They were spectacularly unusual,” Blandine gushes early in The Rabbit Hutch. They loved suffering, she says. “Mad for it.”
She’s especially interested in Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess, polymath, composer and doctor who constantly played up her femininity to make herself less of a threat to male members of the clergy. As the novel opens, we learn that Blandine, inspired by her 12th-century hero, will “exit her body.”
But before readers fall in step with Blandine’s miraculous, possibly ominous ascension, Gunty first draws us into the years leading up to this event, and into the world of the Rabbit Hutch (officially called La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex), an apartment building in Vacca Vale, Indiana.
A Midwestern crossroads that’s limping along after the collapse of the Zorn Automobiles empire, Vacca Vale is a fictional stand-in for South Bend. In a matter of decades, Midwestern gloom has slipped into doom, and like many small towns, Vacca Vale (which is Latin for “goodbye, cow!”) has been earmarked for a heavily marketed “revitalization plan,” which everyone knows translates to “demolishing your town’s one great thing and replacing it with luxury condos.”
Blandine is our guiding light as we navigate this darkening mood. A former foster kid who’s now living in the Rabbit Hutch with three roommates, Blandine is a daring, defiant young woman who’s searching for divinity with scorching ferocity. Despite her persistence, she has not gone unscathed: She dropped out of high school after a complicated, crushing relationship with her charismatic theater teacher, and Gunty’s navigation of this trauma is one of the novel’s quietest strengths. Blandine’s experience is nothing less than a catastrophe hemmed in on all sides by the forces of normalization. After all, as she points out, a 17-year-old girl is considered to be within the age of consent by the state of Indiana.
Blandine is the core of The Rabbit Hutch, but if she were a cathedral, her two flying buttresses would be Joan and Moses. Joan, a lonely older woman who also lives in the Rabbit Hutch, is employed by an obituary website. Her job is to delete comments that disparage the dead, so she must remove a response from Moses on his mother’s obituary. (“THIS WHOLE #OBITUARY IS A BOLD-FACED LIE,” his comment begins.) To punish Joan for this act of censorship, Moses flies to Vacca Vale to exact his special form of retribution: He will cover himself from head to toe in the goo found in glow sticks, break into Joan’s apartment and dance around in the dark to frighten her.
Alongside these three characters, we hear from a bunch of additional folks, and as Gunty introduces each new voice, she makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have. She draws us along with rapturous glee while layering her symbolism so thick that the story should, by all rights, drown in it. But The Rabbit Hutch never loses focus thanks to Blandine, who has a kind of literary superpower: She’s aware of her place in the story, points out Gunty’s metaphors, arches a brow at the symbols and has something to say about all of it. This isn’t to suggest that the novel’s fourth wall is broken, but it does feel wafer-thin, just as the veil between the divine and the corporeal seem as gauzy as a worn T-shirt.
“We’re all just sleepwalking,” Blandine says to Joan. “I want to wake up. That’s my dream: to wake up.” As she moves toward wakefulness, Blandine becomes no less than a bona fide contemporary mystic, cultivating her own sense of belief and solidifying her existence as vital enough to subsist. Redemption is possible, and Gunty’s novel consecrates this noble search.
Despite its doomed Midwestern setting, Tess Gunty’s debut novel makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say which books we’ll look back on in 50 years as the ones that defined a generation, but Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut, a close-to-perfect coming-of-age romp, is surely a contender. Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, it’s one of those rare novels that feels just like life, its characters so specific in their desires and experiences that you’re sure you’ve met them—or maybe you’re about to. Yet Mathews also captures some unnamable, essential thing about being a 20-something struggling through work and love and late-stage capitalism in the United States in the mid-2000s. In the manner of books that stay with you forever, All This Could Be Different is a singular story that extends beyond itself.
At 22, Sneha graduates from college into a tanked economy. She immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, but her parents have since returned to India, leaving Sneha alone. She lands an entry-level job at a consulting firm in Milwaukee and starts fresh in a new city, where she encounters financial successes and catastrophes, makes friends and falls into a heady romance. She relates these experiences in an unforgettable narrative voice: dryly funny, self-analytical, a little sarcastic and full of heart.
Though Sneha is preoccupied with her girlfriend for much of the book, this is actually a story about friendship. Sneha’s new friend Tig, a slightly older Black genderfluid lesbian, tells her that friendship takes a lot of work, and over the course of the novel, we get to see Sneha and Tig do that work. It’s breathtaking to witness this slow and painful process. Over dinners and phone calls and meltdowns, long drives and impromptu parties, Sneha, whose past traumas have made her unwilling to trust others, who longs for love even as she shies away from it, learns what true intimacy requires: to see and be seen.
Lives are made up of so many ordinary moments, so many conflicting emotions, so many messes—some world-shattering, some mundane. It’s all here in this funny, vibrant, heartbreaking book: the ache of new love and the pleasures of good food, what it’s like having money and what it’s like losing it, microaggressions and casual racism and radical politics. There are drunken mistakes, childhood wounds, good sex, bad sex, the American dream, queer love, an explotitive economy and the bite of Midwestern winters. And of course, the pressures and expectations of being a first-generation Asian American immigrant.
Through it all, there’s the steady pulse of friendship and the quiet work of building a family—all the beautiful details that unfold along one woman’s journey to wholeness and home.
Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life.
When considering the history of what is now known as Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico, there is a saying among Mexican Americans: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” It’s a reminder that claims to territory and citizenship rights predate the current boundary between Mexico and the U.S. It’s a rallying cry to tell the true history of American lands and the people who originally belonged on them. With the rise of Indigenous voices in the mainstream, that history is finally beginning to be recognized for its complexity and vitality, its literary power and potential.
Oscar Hokeah’s debut, Calling for a Blanket Dance, tells the story of Ever Geimausaddle through generations of his family. Before the novel even begins, Hokeah provides readers with a family tree, preparing them for the importance of blood ties in the story ahead. Each chapter belongs to a different leaf on the tree, and from these many perspectives, we see Ever grow from an infant into a man, eventually raising his own kids in the strange double bind of Indigeneity. After all, when your heritage and ancestry are the reasons for your oppression, to whom can you turn in order to survive, but to family?
As Ever comes into his full self, we see the impact that his family members have on each other, shaping the ways they live and love. In the opening scene, for example, Ever’s mother, Turtle, takes Ever’s father, Everardo, and their 6-month-old son across Texas and into Mexico in an attempt to rescue her husband from his addiction to alcohol and remind him of his heritage. From the love languages of food and manual labor, to the easy manner in which Everardo tells lies, this scene is the foundation for Ever’s life and his later abilities to parent his own children.
Hokeah’s prose is punchy and descriptive, filled with Native American phrases and words that come naturally to the characters. This blending of languages is still uncommon in contemporary fiction, but the current Indigenous literary and cultural renaissance promises that more and more voices will grow this singularity into a rich multitude. With television shows like “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls” attracting critical and popular attention, it seems that this resurgence is only getting started.
But of course, renaissance and resurgence are the wrong words to use here. Hokeah, who is of Mexican heritage as well as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, shows that this tradition has been here the whole time, evolving and surviving. It’s the lines in the sand—what we call borders—that are new. Why should we act like these lines are valid and the people are not? Calling for a Blanket Dance proves that the people are more real than anything.
When your heritage and ancestry are the reasons for your oppression, to whom can you turn in order to survive, but to family? Oscar Hokeah’s exceptional debut novel follows a Native American man’s life through the many leaves of his family tree.
Isaac Fitzgerald grabs readers’ attention with the title of his memoir—Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional—and never lets go. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller who deploys unexpected delights from his very first line: “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” Not only that, but they “met at divinity school, which is a pretty funny way to start an affair.”
Fitzgerald’s raucous life started in low-income housing in Boston’s South End. In the soup kitchen that he frequented, he was “surrounded by stories of the highest comedy and the deepest tragedy, by the sounds of pealing laughter and suffering silence.” True to that upbringing, he fills the 12 essays in Dirtbag, Massachusetts with heaping helpings of humor, joy, pain, sorrow, grace and insight. Throughout, Fitzgerald writes in carefully chosen prose that reveals “just enough that you know it wasn’t pretty.” The topics range from his upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church to life in an old mill town in central Massachusetts where he endured his father’s violence and his mother’s mania. Despite all of this, his parents instilled him with a deep love of literature, and his education continued when he applied to a nearby boarding school as a means of escaping his home life.
Throughout his gritty life, Fitzgerald has filled an incredible variety of roles: an often drunk, high, shoplifting teenager; a biker who found happiness working in a San Francisco bar; a relief worker in Myanmar; an actor in porn movies. More recently, he has talked books on the “Today” show and written the children’s book How to Be a Pirate. Indeed, this is a man who writes equally well about Sara Crewe, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the neo-fascist group Proud Boys.
With Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald joins the ranks of some of the very best memoirists, including Tobias Wolff, Tara Westover and Dani Shapiro. This entertaining and thoughtful book reveals Fitzgerald’s talents as a master craftsman of unusual insight and will leave readers eager for more.
The 12 essays in Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts offer heaping helpings of humor, joy, pain, sorrow, grace and insight.
A brilliant and wildly creative young woman with sharp corners and a sharper tongue discovers the softer side of life in Bolu Babalola’s dazzling debut romance, Honey and Spice.
Kikiola “Kiki” Banjo is a Nigerian British undergraduate student at Whitewell, a fictional university in England. Among the Black community of Whitewell, known as Blackwell, she looms large. She leads FreakyFridayz, the standing Friday night hangout, and hosts a popular relationship advice radio show, “Brown Sugar.” But few people truly know her. After her mother’s near-fatal illness and a falling-out with her best friend over a manipulative guy, Kiki has withdrawn into herself, only letting her “ride or die” roommate into her private life.
Meanwhile, a new transfer student named Malakai Korede has abandoned his economics degree to study film, his first love. His girlfriend broke up with him over this decision, and he subsequently decided not to get overly involved with the girls he dates at his new university. Kiki calls him out on her radio show for his lack of commitment, warning the Black female students against going out with him.
But then Kiki and Malakai realize they could both achieve their dreams—hers of winning a prestigious internship, his of winning an esteemed film competition—by working together to create a film and a radio show focusing on relationships. The only problem is that Malakai’s commitment phobia, Kiki’s lack of a dating life and her derision toward Malakai are common knowledge on campus. So they decide to start fake-dating in order to give themselves credibility. True trust is slow to grow between them, but Kiki’s and Malakai’s vulnerabilities and innate integrity, not to mention their sparky chemistry, deftly portrayed in Babalola’s banter-filled prose, draw them closer and closer together.
Sprinkled with Yoruba words and British slang, Honey and Spice hums with Babalola’s unique voice, which is full of energy and sensitive insights, often punctuated with laughter. Kiki and Malakai are multilayered, complex characters who approach life with thoughtfulness, passion, maturity and courage. Readers will especially appreciate how they are not afraid to tackle problems head-on, trusting that their instincts and intellectual abilities will be able to solve any issue. Honey and Spice is a deeply romantic story of two souls who grow closer as they recognize the generosity and humanity in each other. They each have their faults, but their individual imperfections make them perfect together.
Honey and Spice, an enemies-to-lovers romance set on a British university campus, hums with author Bolu Babalola's energetic, intelligent voice.
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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a welcome disruption, both to literary trends and in her own publishing career. In a time of immense social upheaval, when many African American writers are foregrounding issues of race, economics and oppression in their books, Sexton chose to write a novel that centers on Black ambition and resiliency.
“With [my previous two novels], it felt like most of my interviews were sociological conversations,” Sexton says from her California home, “but I wanted to be talking about the work.” So for On the Rooftop, she didn’t have a rigid agenda. Instead, her novel emphasizes “the endurance and the joy of a community . . . while also drawing attention to the history of the issues and the fact that they still continue to exist.”
Set in 1950s San Francisco, On the Rooftop focuses on the multifaceted yet endearing Vivian, who has complicated relationships with her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe. The widowed Vivian dreams of stardom for her musically gifted daughters, who sing together as the Salvations. The young women are popular performers at a local spot called the Champagne Supper Club, and Vivian has hooked the attention of an enigmatic talent manager.
However, just as the Salvations are on the cusp of fame, Vivian’s aspirations are challenged by personal trauma and their neighborhood’s changing landscape. Her daughters are also beginning to prioritize their own desires over their mother’s prescribed plan. Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof and told from multiple perspectives, On the Rooftop is a masterful examination of family and community that celebrates the legacy of Black dreams and determination.
“The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism.”
Readers of Sexton’s previous historical novels will recognize On the Rooftop‘s exploration of the often-complex relationships between mothers and daughters. “I can’t escape it,” Sexton says. “There is just so much to be mined. They are such primal relationships, and even the best ones are fraught.”
In the novel, Sexton describes Vivian’s feelings about motherhood with care and nuance, successfully avoiding tropes and instead creating a character who embodies very specific personal and cultural dynamics. Vivian is a Louisiana transplant who lost her husband, Ellis, long ago, and whose own musical dreams were stunted by her difficult life. This is not, however, your typical parent-living-through-their-child story. “I feel like Vivian has some challenges around when to let go, but I think she ultimately does learn to do so,” Sexton says. “At her best level, she has learned when it’s time to step aside, and I think that’s what parenting is—surrendering to the child’s metamorphosis into an adult.”
The distinct relationships between Vivian and each of her daughters reflect their divergent personalities, histories and ambitions. Vivian puts much of her faith in Ruth—the eldest, the quintessential rock, the de facto leader of the sisters. Ruth has a strained relationship with middle sister Esther, who dreams of making an impact but has conflicting ideas about how to do so. Chloe, the youngest daughter, yearns for her mother, sisters and community to recognize her gifts.
Sexton notes that despite their differences, all four women are ultimately searching for the same thing: security. “I love that through each of the girls, you get a different window into what security means,” she says. “The goal is for all of them to feel safe in their own separate worlds.”
The past is ever-present for each of them, and nodes of memory function as creative forces, influencing the women as they navigate generational trauma, interpersonal violence and grief. Vivian, for example, grapples with recollections from her Louisiana homeland and the aftermath of Ellis’ death. As Sexton notes, these memories catalyze Vivian’s goals for her daughters, her self-esteem and her ability to love again.
“I feel like honoring the memories that you hold is a symbol for the entire book,” she says. “For Vivian . . . she has these painful memories of segregation in the South, of humiliation in the South and of her father’s tragic death in the South. She can’t forget those memories. She can’t erase them, and she can’t bury them. She has to somehow continue to hold those memories and almost transform them into something educational for herself in order to allow this new world to enter into her space.”
Vivian’s memories were also an important factor in Sexton’s writing process. After setting her previous two novels in her hometown of New Orleans, the author wanted to explore the Bay Area, her home of 15 years. The former lawyer, who has a degree in creative writing from Dartmouth College, was cautious, however, feeling that she had yet to possess the cultural authority to imagine her adopted home. “It made sense to me to make Vivian someone who had been born in Louisiana, so we were both coming from the same place,” Sexton says. “She was basically a visitor. Her lens and my lens are not any different.”
During the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District was considered the “Harlem of the West,” a nod to its similarity to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The Fillmore’s Black community began to emerge during what is known as the Great Migration, a national trend of northern and western movement as many African Americans left the South in search of new residential and occupational opportunities and to escape the horrors of Jim Crow. The predominantly Black neighborhood became the center of San Francisco’s vibrant jazz scene, where transcendent legends collaborated with local musicians in the many clubs that lined the streets.
“Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this.”
Sexton has a personal connection to the Great Migration. Similar to her characters, members of her own family moved from Louisiana to California in the 1940s and ’50s. When Sexton arrived in the area decades later, these family members welcomed her with open arms, allowing her to immediately feel a sense of community in her new home. She inscribes this sentiment into On the Rooftop.
“I love that they brought Louisiana to the Bay Area,” Sexton says, “and that they created this mini-community that was an echo of their own that they had left back home, [where] they could access all of the sources of comfort. . . . They founded the same churches that they would have gone to back home.”
In the novel, Vivian and her daughters dream of musical stardom as a way to secure liberty in the face of racial and economic oppression, and as the Salvations channel their existential angst into jazz and blues numbers performed at Black-owned Fillmore clubs, they share stages with iconic musicians such as Dinah Washington and Lena Horne. While brief, these cameos ground the story in very real historical dynamics. From blues to jazz to gospel and hip hop, music has been the lifeblood of Black people in America, conveying emotion, building community and offering pathways to freedom. Music feels like its own character in On the Rooftop, a vibrant entity that seems to breathe, occupy space and impact social activity.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop’
“Setting [On the Rooftop] in the jazz era really enlivens the book,” Sexton says. “The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism and so much hope, you know, to work in the shipyards. They had more money than they ever had before. They re-created this community so it felt like home. And this musical scene was part of this.”
In the book, the community’s camaraderie and stability are undermined by white businessmen who begin buying up property in the area. For these businessmen and their partners in government, the Fillmore was a blight, despite being a strong Black residential and business base. Some property owners sold out for a quick windfall, while others resisted until the seemingly benevolent offers turned into harassment. Some continued to fight, as Esther does in the novel.
This process, known as “urban renewal,” affected African American communities across the country in the 1950s and ’60s and is an antecedent to present-day gentrification. While some Black neighborhoods were wiped out through this process, others were able to persist and still exist in some form. With On the Rooftop, Sexton hoped to present a portrait of community resiliency for contemporary neighborhoods resisting gentrification.
“I want people to be aware of the fact that it’s been around for a long time and that it continues,” Sexton says. “We need to start having conversations, and we need to start creating policies that preempt it, right, that abolish it. And I want people to experience the joy and the endurance of a community that has undergone it and still continued to flourish.”
Sexton’s work entertains and inspires at the same time, and with On the Rooftop, she urges us to find comfort in the triumphs of our past. “I hope that it will relay the security of knowing that we’re not all alone in this,” she says. “Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this. We kind of have a blueprint for how to fix it and how to heal ourselves in the process.”
Photos of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton by Smeeta Mahanti
In the third novel from the author of A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners, the sweetest song comes from the heart of San Francisco's 1950s jazz scene.
Soon after it was announced in October 2021 that Tanzanian British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah had won the Nobel Prize in literature, a New York Times headline asked, “Why Are His Books So Hard to Find?” Though Gurnah had received acclaim in Britain, including being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, his books had never sold well in the United States, and few American readers were familiar with his work. The Nobel, of course, changed that—not just in our country, where the handful of his novels that were in print in the U.S. quickly went out of stock, but around the world. The belated arrival on our shores of Gurnah’s 10th novel, Afterlives, is a full-fledged literary event—and rightfully so, for it is a captivating, engrossing and edifying work of fiction.
Set in what is now Tanzania during and after the First World War, Afterlives, like much of the Zanzibar-born writer’s work, excavates the colonial and postcolonial history of East Africa. Gurnah offers a rare glimpse into an often-overlooked period at the beginning of the 20th century when Germany flexed its imperial muscles in the region. The narrative takes a pretty quick sweep through the relatively brief history of Deutsch-Ostafrika, providing a backdrop for the masterful portraits Gurnah paints of arresting, interconnected characters. There’s Khalifa, a good-natured clerk whose father was Indian and mother was African, and his less good-natured wife, Bi Asha. When Khalifa’s friend Ilyas goes off to fight with the Germans during the war, the couple takes in his little sister, Afiya, who has endured brutality but remains fearless. There are also German soldiers and missionaries, wealthy and unscrupulous merchants, generous and churlish neighbors—a panoply of life.
Most of all, there is Hamza, one of nature’s pure of heart. The wanderings and fate of this princely young man, whose life trajectory provides the spine of the narrative, are comparable to those of a Dickens faux-naif, akin to some of literature’s greatest picaresque lives—albeit without the roguish aspects. Meanwhile, the persistent mystery of what has happened to Ilyas, revealed only in the final pages, pointedly underscores the fates of myriad displaced victims of colonialism and war, then and still.
In the deceptively gentle texture of its depiction of everyday life among seemingly inconsequential people (who, of course, are anything but), Afterlives may remind readers of the work of another African Nobelist: Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz. Yet Gurnah has his own incomparable, distinctive voice. He is a writer who wraps his anger at historical injustice in a misleading cloak, as his characters seem to acquiesce to the inevitable but repeatedly push against what history has prescribed for them. For the many readers coming to Gurnah’s novels for the first time, Afterlives seems the perfect introduction, supplying the impetus to explore much more of his work.
The engrossing new novel from Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah is filled with human compassion and historical insight.
First we met Evelyn Hugo in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Then came Daisy Jones of Daisy Jones & The Six, followed by Nina Riva from Malibu Rising. Author Taylor Jenkins Reid brings her quartet of novels about fictional female celebrities to a close with the highly anticipated Carrie Soto Is Back, about a tennis player’s major comeback. In anticipation of its release, we volleyed over a few questions about the author’s favorite bookstores and libraries.
What are your bookstore rituals? I seem to have a habit of hitting up the front fiction shelves, then making a beeline for the cookbooks and then hitting up fiction again. It’s very hard for me to leave a store without a novel or a cookbook. Not sure it’s ever happened.
What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack? A very fancy—perhaps even artisanal and overpriced—flavored black iced tea.
“I love literature but also deeply love architecture. Libraries are such a beautiful way of exploring both.”
What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore? One of the volumes of the Bad Guys series by Aaron Blabey. My daughter absolutely loves that series, and it is such a treat to take her to the store and let her buy a new one. I love watching her come home and go right to her bedroom so she can devour it cover to cover.
Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs? I love all animals, but my heart belongs to dogs!
How is your own personal library organized? By color and sections that make sense only in my brain. To me, the organizing principle of a home library is “How will you best remember where the book is?” and so I do that by color of the book and a general “vibe” that defies logic but works every time for me.
While writing your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful? When I first started writing, I was trying to absorb as many of my contemporaries as I could. I was voracious. At the Beverly Hills Public Library, they had a Friends of the Library store, and that store would have a used book sale two times a year. I used to go in there and ask the volunteer behind the desk what books I should get and come home with a stack of 20. It was such a lovely way to read outside of my own taste, picking those used books up for a dollar or two each.
Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child. The library at my elementary school felt like such a special place. We only really went there during specific free periods or during the coolest, most magical time of the year: the Scholastic Book Fair. That sense I still get in a library or bookstore, that there are so many books I want to read and so little time, started right there.
Do you have a favorite library from literature? I’m forever intrigued by Jay Gatsby’s library—all real books and none ever read.
Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? Oh, absolutely. I love literature but also deeply love architecture. Libraries are such a beautiful way of exploring both. I was blessed to go to college near the Boston Central Library, which may have formed my taste in libraries. It is such a gorgeous building.
I hope one day I get to see some of the libraries at Oxford, the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Spain and the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.
Photo of Taylor Jenkins Reid by Michael Buckner.
So many books, so little time! The bestselling author of Carrie Soto Is Back discusses bookstore rituals, her devotion to cookbooks and more.
From the Greek isle of Corfu to Washington’s Whidbey Island, hope can always be found in friendship.
★ Where the Wandering Ends
The latest novel from bestselling author and three-time Emmy Award-winning producer and journalist Yvette Manessis Corporon is a work of incredible depth, brimming with turmoil, compassion and remarkable historical detail.
Set on the gorgeous Greek island of Corfu, Where the Wandering Ends is a multigenerational, decades-spanning story that begins in 1946, when Greece appears to be on the verge of civil war. Despite the brewing unrest, life in Katerina’s village of Pelekito remains calm. She even has the opportunity to go to school, unlike provincial girls in older generations.
As the conflict between communists and monarchists escalates, the war eventually reaches Pelekito, and the villagers are forced to flee. Katerina is separated from her best friend, Marco, but they both promise to someday return.
Corporon’s characters are indelible and authentic. Katerina’s father, Laki, is horrified by the divisions in his country: “Greek killing Greek. Cousin killing cousin. Brother killing brother. . . . Laki never would have imagined that his own people would turn against each other the way they had.” Meanwhile, Marco’s mother, Yianna, holds fast to the stories told by her own mother, who was a maid to Princess Alice, wife of Prince Andrew, both of whom were exiled from Greece after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922.
Written with a perceptive eye, Where the Wandering Ends considers the challenges faced by people during wartime and highlights the determination to survive despite painful circumstances. Corfu’s beauty, which Corporon describes in sumptuous detail, is juxtaposed against the turbulence and devastation caused by war. Fascinating historical facts and references to mythological Greek tales intertwine with moving scenes, tension-building plot points and surprising revelations to create a powerful, soaring story. This is a spectacular novel about the enduring devotion of family and the steadfast loyalty between friends.
★ Heirlooms
Bestselling author Sandra Byrd blends romance, laughter, community and family secrets in her novel Heirlooms, a delightful story of uplifting female friendships.
After her husband’s death, Choi Eunhee, a Korean woman living in the United States, turns to Helen Devries for help. It’s 1958, and both women are Navy widows. While living together in Helen’s farmhouse on Whidbey Island, Washington, the women assist each other through their losses and develop a lifelong friendship.
In the present day, Helen’s dying wish is that her granddaughter Cassidy Quinn will pack up the attic at the Whidbey Island house with help from Eunhee’s granddaughter Grace Kim. While going through Helen’s hope chest, Cassidy and Grace discover a family secret.
Meanwhile, Cassidy must work to save her grandmother’s property from foreclosure, so she turns to her ex-boyfriend Nick for help. Helen’s house was the setting of many beloved summers for Cassidy, and she dreams of reinstating her grandmother’s garden to its former glory.
Helen and Eunhee’s friendship is much like the garden, tended with loving care over many years. As the women draw faith and strength from each other, their bond becomes akin to sisterhood. From this foundation grows Cassidy and Grace’s own connection, and the two young women learn to lean on each other throughout Cassidy’s fight for her grandmother’s house and garden and as Grace begins to doubt her chosen career path.
With warmth and sensitivity, Heirlooms examines the challenges faced by immigrants living in the United States, and the difficulties for women seeking health care and financial security for both themselves and their children throughout American history. As friends become family, readers will marvel at the strength found in community and the deep connections that can exist between generations.
Authors Yvette Manessis Corporon and Sandra Byrd intertwine past and present in two stories of love, courage and survival.
We remember some books because they remind us not to take life too seriously, and others because they overwhelm us with unforgettable portrayals of life’s darkest moments. A wonderful example of the latter is When You Get to the Other Side, written by Mariana Osorio Gumá and translated to English by Cecilia Weddell. It’s a story of great poignancy that was originally published in Mexico in 2019.
Siblings Emilia and Gregorio are raised by their grandmother, Mamá Lochi, a curandera (psychic healer) who teaches them all about the spiritual world as they travel up and down the mountains of Amatlán, Mexico. When Mamá Lochi dies, her grandchildren are left with nothing but a metal box full of cash and contact information for their father and uncles, who all live in the United States. Emilia and Gregorio use the money to pay smugglers, known as coyotes, to take them to the U.S. They begin to trek across the vast, merciless desert, encountering a human trafficking operation along the way.
Gumá’s language is beautiful, her writing style unceasingly bold, but her novel’s literary merit is best embodied by its introspective imagery and symbolism. The chapters alternate between memories of Mamá Lochi’s life and the present story of Gregorio and Emilia’s journey, building a lovely, lyrical congruence between the two narratives. Weddell’s translation is excellent as well, her attention to detail evident in every sentence.
Mamá Lochi’s teachings manifest in her grandchildren’s behavior: Emilia foresees future events, and Gregorio becomes invisible to avoid his pursuers. It can be a challenge to incorporate magic into a story without unbalancing it, but Gumá does so magnificently, blending in the paranormal so seamlessly that the novel’s world feels neither wholly different from ours nor quite the same. The characters aren’t always so realistically wrought—sometimes acting inconsistently with their age or prior behavior—but Gregorio’s and Emilia’s experiences are so horrific that even the most subtle moments of magic are striking.
When You Get to the Other Side is a short but dense read, best suited for readers with the patience for a slow-moving plot. They’ll be rewarded with a breath of fresh air and new perspectives on immigration and the supernatural.
It can be a challenge to incorporate magic into a story without unbalancing it, but Mariana Osorio Gumá does so magnificently, blending in the paranormal so seamlessly that her novel's world feels neither wholly different from ours nor quite the same.
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.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
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.
