Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, devised by the appalling Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was catastrophic for most of the people caught up in it. Children were separated from their families and sent to work farms to get a taste of proletarian life. Educators were targeted as agents of capitalism or the bourgeoisie. Dissidents were incarcerated in forced labor camps, and many people were arrested, denounced and disappeared for displaying even a hint of disagreement with government policy. The really bad news, as is seen in Belinda Huijuan Tang’s splendid A Map for the Missing, is that for some, the Cultural Revolution never quite ended.
In January 1993, Tang Yitian receives a call from his mother in China, which is startling in itself because she must travel to even find a phone. Yitian’s father is missing, she says. No one knows where he is or why he was taken—if indeed he was taken at all. Heeding the call of duty, Yitian, who has lived in the United States for nearly 10 years, flies home to investigate.
The operative word for Yitian is duty, not so much love. He and his father never got along, and the older man always disparaged Yitian’s desire for a better education and an easier life than the hardscrabble one his family endured in their little village. Tang gives a beautiful sense of Yitian’s fear, sorrow and unspoken resentment—toward both his father, for his bullying nature and the favoritism he showed toward Yitian’s late older brother, and his mother, for her seemingly endless subservience.
At times, A Map for the Missing brings to mind George Orwell’s 1984, though unlike that novel’s dystopian England (called Airstrip One), the chilling and deeply sad China depicted here is real. Yitian’s search for his father makes Winston Smith’s life on Airstrip One seem like a holiday in a warm climate. Even Winston’s love interest, Julia, has a counterpart in Yitian’s story: a woman called Hanwen, whose hunger for education and betterment is as strong as Yitian’s. She hails from the big city of Shanghai, but she’s been sent to the provinces for her edification, and her desire to help Yitian is prompted as much by the trauma of this forced relocation as it is by her not-so-secret love for him.
Along with Yitian, Hanwen and Yitian’s parents, Tang brings additional secondary characters to life, such Yitian’s beloved, broken grandfather and the unhappy girls who labor on the farm with Hanwen. The novel’s many teachers, police officers, clerks, shopkeepers and other bureaucrats are individuals and never interchangeable.
It’s astonishing that A Map for the Missing is Tang’s debut novel. This 400-page book, whose protagonist navigates a purgatory of twists and turns, red herrings and dead ends, is gripping from its first page to its last.
Belinda Huijuan Tang’s splendid debut novel follows a Chinese American son through a purgatory of twists and turns, red herrings and dead ends, in the search for his missing father.
In Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s seventh novel, Our Gen, four well-off 60-something characters bond in an exclusive and privileged environment.
Located just outside Philadelphia, the Gen (short for “sexagenarian”) is a leafy suburban community named for the sexy seniors who live there. In addition to its luxury concierge services, spa amenities and high-tech smart homes, the Gen is a uniquely intense social environment in which residents experience a kind of renewal and second wind. It’s also a place of transition that inspires contemplation, and sometimes those reflections are painful.
The events of the novel pivot around Cynthia, a new resident grieving the loss of the cherished West Philadelphia mansion and the life her attentive (and pushy) son is convinced no longer suits her. A wealthy Black Ivy League graduate and divorc’e, Cynthia bonds quickly, yet not without reservation, with an existing clique that includes the “tall and golden” Tish, an attention-grabbing, light-skinned African American socialite; Bloc, the only Black man at the Gen and a retired NASA scientist with three ex-wives; and the mysterious Lavia, a retired financier, who may or may not be South Asian. Cynthia and Bloc share an instant attraction that threatens the group’s equilibrium. There’s also a wrongful arrest of a beloved community employee, but that ends up being a small part of why Cynthia’s first few months at the Gen are a time of great change for the clique.
In the novel’s present, life revolves around dinners and cocktail receptions. Cynthia, Tish, Bloc and Lavia fill their time with political debate and conjecture about other residents’ political leanings, as well as recreational drinking and smoking that greases the wheels of interpersonal disclosures and sex. There’s a college-campus feel to the intensity of their sharing. However, the majority of the novel’s drama is interior, occurring in contemplative flashbacks as the foursome reckons with the worst parts of their personal histories.
McKinney-Whetstone presents these revelations in a striking and compelling style, frequently dipping into metaphor to describe the characters’ interiority through comparisons to their environment. The soapy melodrama and artistic presentation of the flashbacks are a powerful blend, if at times a little uneven in their effect.
Complex characters and relationships are the heart of the novel, and overall, the combination works well. The premise is creative, focusing on a group of people who aren’t often at the center of stories filled with love, sex and laughter. Our Gen is warm and smart, accessible yet meaningful, a beach read with strong writing and emotional heft.
Focusing on a group of people who aren’t often at the center of stories filled with love, sex and laughter, Our Gen is warm and smart, accessible yet meaningful, a beach read with strong writing and emotional heft.
In a searing early scene of Mercury Pictures Presents, 12-year-old Maria Lagana and her father enjoy the coolness of the cinema one Sunday morning in Rome. As father and daughter watch The Monster of Frankenstein, Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts storm the theater and set it on fire. Soon after this terrifying event, Maria betrays her anti-Fascist father during a misguided attempt to protect him, and he’s sent into exile.
Maria’s misstep and guilt define her life and the lives of her family, setting the stage for the rest of this cinematic sweep of a book. Over time, the Frankenstein story becomes symbolic for Maria, who sees herself as “a monster at the window of a house where she did not belong, trying to find her way to the lighted room within.”
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, The Tsar of Love and Techno) has created an energetic, wildly comical tale that’s bursting with copious historical details. Amid all the action and plot twists, it’s also a serious examination of immigration and xenophobia, identity and impersonation, and art, propaganda and censorship. As Maria and Artie make films and try to get them past the censors, readers learn a cavalcade of intriguing movie-making facts. Another major plotline involves Vincent Cortese, an Italian immigrant and photographer, and includes flashbacks to his daring, vividly described escape from Italy that will leave readers on the edges of their seats.
Marra glides effortlessly between a number of characters and their pasts, presents and futures, all of which are complicated by World War II. Maria and Vincent escape Fascist Italy only to find themselves classified as “enemy aliens” by the United States, with their movements and actions severely restricted. Maria’s boyfriend, Eddie Lu, is a Shakespearean actor who is typecast into roles of “Fu Manchu villainy,” his characters “either entirely emasculated or entirely predatory, living at the lurid limits of deviancy.” Hungarian American actor Bela Lugosi also makes several appearances, adding further real-world context to Marra’s exploration of immigration and impersonation through the lens of 1940s Hollywood.
While Marra’s many threads are intricately woven, they can occasionally be overwhelming, and the novel is at its strongest when focused on Maria, Vincent and their immediate families. Despite some meandering, Mercury Pictures Presents is full of passion, energy and exuberance, just like the Hollywood world it portrays.
Anthony Marra’s second novel is a wildly comical tale that’s bursting with copious historical details. It’s full of passion, energy and exuberance, just like the Hollywood world it portrays.
Somewhere out in the fictional desert between “Breaking Bad” and No Country for Old Men, death is stalking its next victim in Gabino Iglesias’ spellbinding third novel, The Devil Takes You Home. The word spellbinding is used advisedly here, because the novel’s interweaving of fantastical elements with sudden and savage violence will leave unwary readers stunned.
It’s a story as old as Job: A good guy, beset by horrible circumstances, tries to preserve his faith and sanity in the face of unrelenting misery. In the biblical tale, Job holds fast to his soul; in this one, Mario goes down a darker road. Overwhelmed by medical expenses and offered a chance to make some quick money as a hit man, Mario hesitates only for a moment before packing heat and becoming an avenging angel.
It’s not uncommon for those who live in the shadow of criminality to dream of one big score that will put them on easy street, and Mario’s friend Brian offers him a piece of this dream: They will claim one cartel’s shipment of money for a different cartel and thus receive a handsome chunk of the reward. When Brian and Mario meet Don Vázquez, the baddest of the bad and the head of the Juárez Cartel, they try to exchange pleasantries: “Thank you, Brian,” Don Vázquez replies, “but I was just telling your friend Mario that meeting me is never a pleasure; meeting me is something that happens to people because they have made a bad decision.”
As with most noir narratives, this one is rife with bad decisions, many of them lethal. Iglesias does masterful work with Mario’s internal narration as he puzzles over which of his partners poses the greatest potential threat. Much of the novel switches back and forth between Spanish and English, and both languages are integral to the story, making them all the more worthwhile to comprehend.
The world of The Devil Takes You Home is harsh and unforgiving, its desert the most treacherous terrain. Iglesias does such a place justice in his brawny, serpentine and remarkably poignant novel.
The desert can be treacherous terrain, harsh and unforgiving. Gabino Iglesias does it justice in his brawny, serpentine and remarkably poignant crime novel.
Many of us have an aversion to novels that claim to be the next American epic in the tradition of John Steinbeck, particularly when they’re about World War II. These novels, purporting to be the next necessary heart-wrenching tale of wartime heroism, are seemingly everywhere, but rarely do they live up to expectations. Properties of Thirst defies, dispels and demolishes those expectations and biases in the best way. Read our review.
Sister Mother Warrior by Vanessa Riley
The complexity of Sister Mother Warrior suits the complicated, difficult history of the Haitian revolution, which Vanessa Riley brings to life through the stories of a soldier and a future empress. Read our review.
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford
Exploring the bonds that transcend physical space, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is an enthralling, centuries-spanning tale, a masterful saga that’s perfect for fans of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain. Read our review.
Best ancient tale for acolytes of Madeline Miller:
Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane
Some prior knowledge of the Iliad will maximize the enjoyment of this novel, if only to provide some context for Maya Deane’s beautifully realized Mediterranean landscape and her depiction of the Greek gods as vivid, often malicious beings. Wrath Goddess Sing is a mythic reinvention for the ages that asks questions about topics such as trans identity, passing and the politics of the body. Read our review.
Best perspectives on the American West:
Fire Season by Leyna Krow
Leyna Krow plays fast and loose with the tropes of the frontier novel, leaning in to the notion of the unsettled West as a place where people could reinvent themselves. Read our review.
Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Woman of Light retains a mythic quality while following the stories of five generations of an Indigenous North American family, from their origins, border crossings, accomplishments and traumas to their descendants’ confrontation and acceptance of their family history. Read our review.
Best for book clubs:
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks returns to themes she explored so well in previous works, such as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March, which chronicles many of the injustices that occurred during America’s Civil War. Loosely based on a true story, Horse involves a discarded painting and a dusty skeleton, both of which concern a foal widely considered “the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.” Read our review.
Most glamorous subterfuge:
The Lunar Housewife by Caroline Woods
Caroline Woods’ historical thriller, set in the final days of the Korean War and the onset of the Cold War, spins a tale of big-city intrigue as it follows a promising young waitress-turned-writer and the increasingly disturbing secrets she uncovers. The result is an addictive binge of a read that’s equal parts intelligent introspection and nail-biting suspense. Read our review.
The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin
Madeline Martin is known for her deeply researched historical fiction and romance novels, and The Librarian Spy is a delight as we follow the World War II adventures of an endearing, quiet bookworm. Read our review.
Last Call at the Nightingale by Katharine Schellman
Vivian Kelly, the protagonist of this Prohibition-era mystery, is a seamstress in what we would now consider a sweatshop, and by night she is a regular at the Nightingale, a Manhattan speakeasy of some note among Jazz Age cognoscenti. When Vivian stumbles upon a dead body in the alley behind the club, the speakeasy’s hitherto bon vivant ambiance begins to melt away, revealing something altogether more sinister. Read our review.
Best love stories in historical settings:
A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall
Alexis Hall takes on the Regency with his angsty new historical romance. Following the Battle of Waterloo, Viola Carroll abandoned her previous identity, as well as her aristocratic title, to finally embrace life as a trans woman. But Viola’s dearest friend, Justin de Vere, the Duke of Gracewood, is not coping so well. He drowns himself in alcohol and opium to cope with his despair over Viola’s death, the lingering pain of a war injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. The term “slow burn” doesn’t begin to capture the agonized pining of this romance, which is absolutely suffused with yearning. Read our review.
The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian
Cat Sebastian returns to the Georgian-era setting of 2021’s The Queer Principles of Kit Webb with The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes, a charming story about two chaotic bisexuals who cross each other’s paths while pursuing their criminal endeavors. Read our review.
Best picks for Hilary Mantel fans:
Joan by Katherine J. Chen
This Joan of Arc is hungry, earthy and scrappy—a natural fighter. For readers who love Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy or Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Joan offers similar pleasures with its immediacy and somewhat contemporary tone. It’s an immersive evocation of a character whose name everyone knows, all these centuries later, but whom, perhaps, none of us knows at all. Read our review.
Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel
Sure, it’s a little on the nose, but these seven stories, arranged chronologically, offer an unusual and ultimately fascinating amalgam of fact and fiction as two-time Booker Prize-winning British author Hilary Mantel sorts through the puzzle pieces of her past. As Mantel reflects loosely on her English childhood, she explores, as she writes in the preface, “the swampy territory that lies between history and myth.” Read our review.
Best supernatural or magical touches:
Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens
In 1838, the French novelist George Sand (pen name for Aurore Dupin) decided that a winter away from Paris would be good for her, her two children and her ailing lover, Frédéric Chopin, who had tuberculosis. This is where the debut novel from Nell Stevens begins, and she quickly reveals an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. Her ghostly narrator is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place. Read our review.
Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro
The first in a planned trilogy, Ordinary Monsters traverses 19th-century America, England, Scotland and Japan before eventually landing at the Cairndale Institute outside of Edinburgh, where Talents are learning to control and hone their powers. J.M. Miro (the pen name of a literary novelist) plays off the well-loved and well-worn tropes of chosen ones and magical institutions for children, but freshens things up with a large, sweeping scope and a likable, diverse cast of characters. Read our review.
Summer reading allows us to get away from it all—and with transportive historical fiction, we can go really, really far away. Discover the season’s best historical novels!
Young witch Marlinchen and her sisters live under the iron thumb of their father, a wizard intent on preserving the old ways and keeping his daughters safe from the degradations of the rapidly changing outside world. But when Marlinchen falls in love with ballet dancer Sevas, she begins to chafe against her father’s rule. We talked to Ava Reid about her unique Eastern European-inspired world and the gruesome fairy tale that inspired her sophomore novel.
Juniper & Thorn is inspired by the “The Juniper Tree,” one of the more obscure stories from Grimms’ Fairy Tales in which a woman murders her stepson and the father eats him. What drew you to this story? I was always beguiled by its unofficial moniker of Grimms’ darkest fairy tale. There are a lot of horrific and grisly stories in the Grimms’ repertoire, many with the same themes. There’s cannibalism in “Hansel & Gretel,” murder and bloodshed galore in classics like ‘Red Riding Hood’ and “Snow White.” So what sets “The Juniper Tree” apart?
One thing I noted is that there are very few quintessential fairy-tale tropes in “The Juniper Tree.” It’s a strangely quiet, intimate story about domestic violence within a single family.
Once I came to that realization, it seemed most honest to make this retelling a gothic horror novel. It did not feel sweeping in scope or appropriate for an epic fantasy setting. I wanted to maintain this thread of bleak, almost claustrophobic violence, which is the core of the gothic genre. That unnaturalness and upending of a foundational expectation—that parents should love and care for their children—is what makes “The Juniper Tree” so horrible, and what makes Juniper & Thornfirmly a horror novel.
Despite the fact that Juniper & Thorn and your debut novel, The Wolf and the Woodsman, are set in the same universe, they feel like very different stories. Did your writing process or sources for inspiration change between the two? I like to think of The Wolf and the Woodsman and Juniper & Thornas fractured mirror images: If Woodsman is about the pain of being excluded from the narrative, then Juniper & Thornis about the pain of being forced into the narrative, acting out the same rigidly defined role over and over. So while they are very different books that span different subgenres, the common threads are, I think, what makes an “Ava Reid book.”
As for the writing process, by dint of the fact that Juniper & Thornwas the second book in my contract, I had to write it fairly quickly and did so in a month. It changed very little from its initial draft. I had a much stronger sense of my identity as a writer and a very clear idea of what I wanted this book to be from page one.
“I like to set books during periods of upheaval, uncertainty, transformation and violence . . .”
While Juniper & Thorn is set in a fictional world, it’s obviously influenced by Eastern European culture and especially the conquest of parts of the region by Russia. Why did you set your story in this context? Eastern Europe is the setting of many major contemporary fantasy novels, but with few exceptions, these books present an Eastern Europe that is bleak, wintry, remote, forested and very culturally homogeneous. I was intrigued by writing an Eastern Europe that was different: wind-chapped steppes, black sand beaches, boardwalks, smoke-chuffing factories, vibrant with urban life, diverse and dynamic. Early 20th-century Odesa, Ukraine, the city upon which Oblya is based, was considered the jewel of the Russian empire. It was an entirely planned city that became a regional hub of immigration, export and industry. It is also a city where a large number of Ashkenazi Jews lived, including my own family.
Enormous change—industrialization, urbanization, immigration—was disrupting traditional lifestyles, often violently. This setting was fundamental to the story I wanted to tell. I like to set books during periods of upheaval, uncertainty, transformation and violence, where what has always been is not synonymous with what will always be.
The conflict between modernity and magic bleeds into the sisters’ lives in a lot of different ways. Do you think the kind of magic you depict in Juniper & Thorn can coexist with modernity as we think of it? Magic in Juniper & Thornrepresents the old world, a world that is regressive and stubbornly resistant to change. When Marlinchen gives examples of her father’s transformations, they are always instances in which he turns something dynamic or technologically advanced into something lifeless or outdated: a swan into a swan-vase, an electric lamp into a candle. His transformation is reaching backward while the city around them leaps forward. I think it’s inherently anti-modernity. It parallels the way a lot of contemporary European ethnic nationalists imagine their countries’ mythic pasts’magical, in touch with the natural world and of course devoid of any ‘foreign’ or ‘corruptive’ element. Is there a place for this way of thinking in the modern world? Unfortunately, yes, but ideally, these prejudicial, violent attitudes would go the way of the spinning wheel.
Eastern European names are all about diminutives, a nickname formed by adding -sha to the initial syllable of a name. In a book that draws from those cultures, why did you make the majority of your characters’ names defy this custom? I wanted to set the Vashchenko family apart from the rest of society as much as possible. They live an outmoded and traditional lifestyle, and the rigidity of their names, which eschew diminutives, represents this attitude of isolation.
Surnames with the suffix –enko are uniquely Ukrainian, first recorded in the 1400s. Unlike most other Russian and Ukrainian surnames, they do not change with grammatical gender. Ordinarily a father whose surname is Sorokin would have a daughter surnamed Sorokina. But I chose the name Vashchenko specifically because it doesn’t change with gender, to further represent the total dominion Zmiy has over his daughters.
Despite the fact that this is ostensibly a book about witches, there is precious little magic of the wand-waving variety. Instead, your magic is at turns visceral (Marlinchen’s divining ability is all about touch) and existential (Zmiy’s curse). What inspired you to make a magic system that is so sparse and yet so threatening? I often think about what separates dark fantasy from horror, because while The Wolf and the Woodsman is a dark fantasy novel, Juniper & Thornis very clearly horror. And I always return to the idea that fear is different from horror. Fear is staring down a man with a knife; horror is staring down a monster made of knives. Horror shifts your view of the world, your view of yourself. It is something beyond comprehension. So the magic in Juniperis—by intention—a bit blurry around the edges. And I think that’s what makes it frightening.
There are very few physical demonstrations of Zmiy’s magic, even though he makes plenty of threats. Marlinchen begins the book convinced that her father is all-powerful. The fear that he instills in her is real, but whether it is the result of physical, tangible magic is uncertain. This uncertainty is the nature of horror, and it’s also the nature of abuse. Marlinchen is gaslighted and manipulated into a state of bewilderment and insecurity, unable to trust herself or her perceptions. A more ambiguous and elusive form of magic felt fitting for a book that’s so much about psychological abuse.
“Fear is staring down a man with a knife; horror is staring down a monster made of knives.”
Whilethe characters (Sevas in particular) insist that they are not in a fairy tale, there are a lot of elements of Juniper & Thorn that use the mechanics of such stories. How did you toe that line between being inspired by a fairy tale and creating something completely new? Fairy tales remain essential parts of our culture because they contain themes or lessons that feel universal, even aspirational: Strangers are dangerous (“Red Riding Hood”), beauty is goodness (“Cinderella”), justice is always done (take your pick). These beliefs are so fundamental that they are rarely ever questioned or even remarked upon. I wanted to write a book that dismantled as many of these foundational assumptions as I could. Sevas, a stranger, is in fact Marlinchen’s savior. Marlinchen, plain-faced, unremarkable, is the story’s heroine. The world of Juniper & Thornis by design deeply cruel and unjust. Once I had my list of tropes and mechanics, I began trying to take them apart. So while I was obviously inspired by fairy tales, my goal was always to turn them on their heads.
In several scenes, Marlinchen talks about her storybook-infused views on family, such as the dangers of having sisters or the fact that you can have a kind mother or a mother who’s alive but not both. Why do you think these themes are so ubiquitous in fairy tales? Folklorists and anthropologists have had hearty debates on this subject. One defining element of fairy tales is their simplicity: There are archetypes, not characters, the settings are always vague, and the plots are straightforward. As Marlinchen says, they are stories that aren’t meant to be questioned. They are answers in and of themselves. Italo Calvino defines a fairy tale by its brevity and concision of language. They occupy a strange space in our culture that seems to be outside the realm of logic or realism—yet they have their own logic that is seductively easy to swallow.
Juniper & Thornis a recrimination about how fairy tales are weaponized as instruments of oppression and abuse, and I do believe that is often true. At the same time, I’m not ready to surrender fairy tales entirely, to give them over to the Zmiy Vashchenkos of the world. I think certain motifs occur and remain because of our common humanity. It’s easy to see the strains of misogyny, patriarchy, antisemitism, etc., as nefarious—and they are—but they are also evidence of a shared past. Reminders of this common humanity can be powerful, restorative and brimming with hope.
Your descriptions of the ballet, in particular of Sevas’ skill as a dancer, are breathtaking. What drew you to the imagery of dance? Ballet is an important part of Russian culture and Russian national identity, particularly in the early 20th century, when the book is set. Iconic ballets like ‘The Firebird’and ‘Swan Lake’draw from Russian folklore and fairy tales, and of course, both feature imagery of birds and themes of transformation’so it seemed deeply fitting.
I also thought a lot about ballet as both an art form and a sport; it requires incredible physical strength and an almost ascetic level of dedication, especially to achieve the success that Sevas has. But unlike many other sports, aesthetics are crucial to its performance. Ballet’s emphasis on beauty, fluidity and effortless grace while camouflaging the physical toll it takes on the dancers knits together very well with the larger themes of the book.
Do you think that Marlinchen would have eventually rebelled if she hadn’t met Sevas? Where would they both be now if they hadn’t met each other? It’s honestly impossible for me to conceive of these two characters apart from each other, because I wrote them to be soulmates: They understand each other instantly to the deepest possible degree, and even though they appear quite different on the surface, they are perfect mirror images. They have been trapped, misused and pushed to the bleakest point of desperation, and that’s when they find each other. I think it’s easy to see Sevas as Marlinchen’s knight in shining armor, but she rescues him just as much as he rescues her.
Photo of Ava Reid courtesy of the author.
The author's gothic horror novel, Juniper & Thorn, is inspired by Grimms' most gruesome tale.
The orphan son of Chinese immigrants, Ming Tsu is brought up to be an assassin by a California bandit in Tom Lin’s one-of-a-kind Western, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Ming hopes for a better future after he elopes with Ada, the daughter of a railroad mogul. But when Ada is abducted and Ming is forced to go to work for the Central Pacific Railroad, he’s determined to seek retribution. Supernatural elements blend seamlessly with the epic plot, which makes room to note the prejudices of the 19th century.
Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse looks at the life of an orphaned Ojibway boy in 1960s Ontario, Canada. Saul Indian Horse attends a bleak Catholic boarding school. A professional sports career becomes a possibility for Saul after he joins an Ojibway hockey team, yet he faces prejudice and hostility due to his heritage. As he comes of age, he must also come to terms with his past—and prepare for an uncertain future. Wagamese draws upon Ojibway language and lore as he traces Saul’s remarkable personal journey, and the result is a starkly beautiful neo-Western novel.
Set in the American West during the gold rush, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells the epic story of a Chinese American family. When their father, a hardworking miner, dies, orphans Sam and Lucy decide to give him a traditional Chinese burial. After being forced to leave their home, they embark on a quest to find the right place to lay their father to rest, traveling through harsh terrain with his corpse carried on horseback. Zhang plumbs myths about the American West as she dissects themes of nature, home and immigration in this rewarding book club pick.
Anna North reimagines the traditional Western with Outlawed. In an alternate 1890s, happily married Ada finds that she’s unable to bear children. Afraid that she’ll be charged with witchcraft—a typical occurrence for childless women—Ada flees her home and eventually joins the Hole in the Wall Gang. A collective of female and nonbinary fugitives, the gang hopes to establish a town where marginalized people can flourish. Ada’s adventures with the gun-toting band make for great reading, with gender, community and identity being but a few of the novel’s rich discussion topics.
These innovative takes on the Western breathe new life into the genre and will spark enthralling group discussions.
Every writer has to start somewhere. Maggie Shipstead’s bestselling 2021 novel, Great Circle, earned a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, but the road to such success is often long. In Shipstead’s case, as she explains in the acknowledgments of You Have a Friend in 10A, her path began with stories written while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University.
This collection of 10 works of short fiction, all previously published, gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America’s finest authors. Most impressive is the book’s range of perspectives, from the chilling “La Moretta,” in which a couple on their European honeymoon slowly realizes their marriage may have been a mistake, to “Souterrain,” a tale of a dying Parisian man and his housekeeper’s son, who believes the man to be his father.
In a few pieces, it’s clear that Shipstead was still discovering what her words could do, but the best are exceptional portraits of characters unaware of the effects of their actions. Highlights include “The Cowboy Tango,” in which a Montana man who runs a ranch for tourists becomes smitten with the teenage girl he hired as a wrangler and joins “in the silent chorus of the unloved” when she falls for his divorced nephew; and the story “Acknowledgments” (not to be confused with the author’s own acknowledgments), in which a pompous author uses hilariously Nabokovian sentences like “Let us skip that Rabelaisian era known as adolescence and hop jauntily to my twenty-fifth year.”
In one story, a character reflects that “even a life lived properly, lived better than she was living, could bring so much grief.” The finest stories in You Have a Friend in 10A show that perpetual grief may not necessarily lead to great lives, but it can produce scintillating fiction.
Maggie Shipstead's collection of 10 short stories, all previously published, gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America's finest authors.
It’s impossible to predict how, exactly, you’ll fall in love with Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but it’s an eventuality you can’t escape.
Sadie Green and Sam Masur might never have crossed paths as kids in Beverly Hills, California, were it not for personal tragedies. For Sadie, it is her older sister’s cancer. For Sam, it is a broken leg from an accident that takes his mother’s life. Forced to spend an inordinate amount of time at the hospital, Sadie and Sam meet in the drabby game room, and they are comfortable with each other from the start. Born from their shared love of video games, their friendship seems written in the stars and is devoid of the sadness that otherwise surrounds them.
Years later as college students—Sam at Harvard and Sadie at MIT—the two are thrust back into each other’s lives on a subway platform. Their reunion on that winter day is completely serendipitous yet somehow fully anticipated, as if each were patiently waiting for destiny to do its thing. It’s the 1990s, and gaming is on the cusp of something big. Almost instantly after meeting again, Sadie and Sam decide to collaborate on a video game that is unlike anything they’ve seen before. Powered by friendship, naivete and youth, they seem to pull it off, too. The game, Ichigo, becomes a worldwide hit, turning Sam and Sadie into gaming celebrities. Success follows, but not without a cost.
The latest novel from Zevin, a lifelong gamer and internationally bestselling author (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry), is spellbinding and layered with details. Her artistic, inclusive world is filled with characters so genuine and endearing that you may start caring for them as if they were real. Above all, her development of Sam and Sadie’s relationship is pure wizardry; it’s deep and complex, transcending anything we might call a love story.
Whether you care about video games or not is beside the point. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the novel you’ve been waiting to read.
Whether you care about video games or not is beside the point. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the novel you've been waiting to read.
Albert Einstein is frequently—falsely—attributed with having said, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” It’s quite the line, but it does beg the question: How do you tell how smart a fish is?
That’s the problem facing animal cognition scientist Karin Resaint in Venomous Lumpsucker, the fifth novel from award-winning British novelist Ned Beauman. In the novel’s dystopian near-future, Earth’s climate is in free fall, and species are disappearing faster than beers at a frat party. When Chiu Chiu, the final giant panda, chomps on his last tiny bamboo shoot, the outrage is so great that 197 nations, “acting basically at economic gunpoint, [sign] up to the newly formed World Commission on Species Extinction.”
“The giant panda will be the last species ever driven to extinction by human activity,” proclaims a Chinese official at the WCSE’s founding. Of course, that’s not what happens; instead comes the extinction industry.
Everybody in the free market world knows that if you want to make an economic omelet, you’ll have to break a few environmental eggs. In this future culture, extinct animals’ DNA is digitally stored in biobanks, and the disappearance of a species is treated like carbon emissions, with taxes offsetting the habitat destruction that goes hand-in-wallet with surging profits.
As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, though, some animals are more equal than others. It costs a lot more under this scheme to snuff out a sentient species, so Karin has been charged with evaluating the intelligence of the venomous lumpsucker, and she’s feeling pressure from Brahmasamudram Mining, who’s funding the analysis. When a mid-level executive shows up aboard Karin’s research vessel with a special plea, the stakes suddenly leapfrog into the stratosphere and set the two on a frantic hunt for the last living lumpsucker.
If all this sounds heavy for a summer read, not to worry. Beauman’s acerbic outlook breezes through what could otherwise be a portentous plot; think Smilla’s Sense of Snow as percolated through an Andy Borowitz filter, a mid-apocalyptic comic thriller ideally suited for a post-pandemic audience.
The fifth novel from award-winning British novelist Ned Beauman is a mid-apocalyptic comic thriller ideally suited for a post-pandemic audience.
“There is no wealth but life,” wrote John Ruskin near the end of his 1860 book, Unto This Last. The unnamed narrator of Andrew Holleran’s doleful fourth novel, The Kingdom of Sand, cites Ruskin midway through, by which time readers know the reason this quotation is on his mind. A gay man in his 60s, the narrator is living alone in conservative North Florida, surrounded by dying neighbors and contemplating the harsh reality of impermanence.
A nonlinear, episodic novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Holleran’s thoughtful, poetic treatment makes this material deeply moving and an important contribution to the literature of mortality. It’s one of the most beautiful novels of the year.
Each of the book’s five chapters touches on aging and the adjustments a person must make as they get older. Among the characters are the narrator’s 84-year-old father, who sees no reason to avoid having “four fried eggs and a rasher of bacon every morning” while his wife lies paralyzed in a nursing home after a fall.
Now that the narrator is closer to the end of his life than to the beginning, he has found many ways to take his mind off the inevitable, from visiting a Gainesville boat ramp where men congregate for sex to watching gay porn on his laptop. A more meaningful connection is his friendship with Earl, 20 years the narrator’s senior. After decades of teaching accounting in South Florida, Earl moved north to a house big enough to hold his books and opera records. He and the narrator share a platonic friendship that revolves around meeting at Earl’s house to watch old movies, and as the years pass, the narrator becomes Earl’s caregiver.
The novel gains considerable power from its recognition that no attempt at immortality, whether through art or other means, guarantees success. Classical radio stations change their format to all-talk, azaleas and camellias eventually droop, and every life, no matter how privileged, comes to an end.
The Kingdom of Sand is not for readers interested in lighthearted fare, but it’s a stunning meditation on what happens, as the narrator says, “when old age gets its claws in you.” Around the same time he cites Ruskin, the narrator reads a book on dying that offers sobering advice: Live a good life, because you’re not going to have much control over your ending. This exquisite novel offers similar counsel: The final destination may be grim, but with luck and a good set of directions, one can at least enjoy the ride.
A nonlinear novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Andrew Holleran's thoughtful, poetic treatment makes The Kingdom of Sand one of the most beautiful novels of the year.
Even in the dawning years of the 21st century, there are women and girls who would give up anything for a man. That man doesn’t have to be good. His needs and wants, no matter how fickle, would be prioritized over everything, including a woman’s happiness, safety and the well-being of her children, if she has any. This is the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ debut novel, The Girls in Queens.
The story unfolds from 1996 to early 2007, beginning in an era in which egregious misogyny and slut shaming are rampant, and ending just after Tarana Burke launches the #MeToo movement. Of course, the protagonist, Brisma, and her best friend, Kelly, who live across the street from each other in Woodside, Queens, have no inkling of the changes to come. In 1996, the girls are 11 years old and lack political consciousness, though they know that puberty is making boys and even grown men notice them in ways they don’t particularly like. Neither girl is a wallflower, especially Kelly, who’s not above getting physical with a neighborhood ignoramus. But for the two friends, being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life. It’s like taking your life in your hands to cross Queens Boulevard, or rooting for the hapless Mets: Now and then, you have to cross the street, and cheering for the Yankees is never an option. So what can be done?
Handsome and suave Brian is one of Kelly and Brisma’s childhood friends. As they enter adolescence, he takes a liking to both girls, which causes them to fall out (but just as quickly fall back in; they’re sisters from different mothers). Then in 2006, Kelly and Brisma discover something about Brian that pushes their tolerance of male misbehavior to the limit. At first the women support him instinctively, until Brisma, a budding journalist, can’t any longer. This causes a rupture between her and Kelly that threatens to become permanent.
Kandic Torres’ way with her characters is superb. Kelly’s toughness hides an almost sickeningly intense fear and vulnerability, which few but Brisma see. Another neighbor, an Iraq War veteran that readers are initially wary of, becomes a voice of wisdom. Brisma’s mother, who first modeled female deference for her daughter, blesses Brisma’s ambitions to both write and leave their neighborhood behind. The Girls in Queens is a moving debut from a writer to watch.
Within the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ The Girls in Queens, two girls find that being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life—until one of them can’t take it anymore.
If it were possible to sum up Jess Walter’s The Angel of Rome and Other Stories in a word, it would be humane. In the 12 wide-ranging, consistently empathetic stories that compose his second collection, he creates a memorable assortment of characters who bump up against life’s inevitable obstacles, large and small, then stumble through or surmount them.
The collection’s titular novella embodies all these qualities. Its protagonist, Jack Rigel, is an unhappy 21-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, who improbably receives a scholarship from the local Knights of Columbus to study Latin in Rome in 1993. After he arrives, he inadvertently encounters an Italian actress he’s idolized and an American TV star whose career is on a downward trajectory, setting his life on an unexpected new course. The story of Jack’s coming-of-age is both wistful and often comic.
Walter makes use of his hometown of Spokane, Washington, as the setting for several of these stories, among them “Mr. Voice,” selected for Best American Short Stories 2015. The eponymous character, who’s a ubiquitous presence on local radio whose “rumble narrated our daily life,” turns out to be more than a set of well-tuned vocal cords. In “To the Corner,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 2014, an aging widower contemplates the end of his life as he watches the young boys hanging out across the street from his house, never imagining the role they might play in giving him a reason to live.
The collection’s concluding story, “The Way the World Ends,” is representative of Walter’s light touch and ability to expose his characters’ flaws with a combination of candor and sympathy. Two climate scientists interviewing for the same position at Mississippi State University spend an alcohol-drenched evening with their faculty hosts, bemoaning the rapidly approaching demise of the planet. Jeremiah Ellis, a Black student manning the desk at the university guest house where they’re carrying on their revels and who’s recently come out of the closet, overhears their grim musings. His reaction in the bright light of the morning is both chastening and a reminder of the persistence of hope.
The tales in The Angel of Rome aren’t easily categorized, but each one, in its own way, provides a refreshingly honest glimpse into what it means to be alive.
The tales in Jess Walter’s The Angel of Rome and Other Stories aren’t easily categorized, but each one provides a refreshingly honest glimpse into what it means to be alive.
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
