Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Death of the Author

A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
Previous
Next

All Fiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFiction

13 writers to watch in 2022

Feature by the editors of BookPage
Maud Newton

Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble
Random House | March 29

Maud Newton made a name for herself back in 2002 as one of the very first book bloggers, drawing a large audience with her blend of cultural criticism and personal writing about her family tree. Now her first book, Ancestor Trouble, will develop those early musings into their fullest forms, using the lens of Newton’s family (including her Confederate heritage-obsessed father and a grandfather who got married 13 times) to examine the wider world of genetics, intergenerational trauma and family secrets, both buried and spilled. Her approach is sweeping, even exhaustive, but Newton is a master at taking a complex, far-reaching topic and making it magnificently intimate.

M.E. Hilliard

M.E. Hilliard, author of Shadow in the Glass
Crooked Lane | April 5

A working librarian who grew up on the Connecticut coast, M.E. Hilliard brings her professional and personal expertise to bear in the Greer Hogan mysteries, the rare cozy series that can be legitimately described as “edgy.” The standard elements are all there—a beautiful small-town setting in New England, a clever and resourceful heroine—but there’s a pleasing strain of darkness running through the proceedings. Hilliard’s debut, The Unkindness of Ravens, won rave reviews across the board, and Shadow in the Glass is bound to lure even more readers to her chilly, ceaselessly clever take on the classic cozy. 

Bonnie Garmus

Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry
Doubleday | April 5

California-born, London-based author Bonnie Garmus’ first novel, Lessons in Chemistry, made waves when it sold in a 16-publisher auction, and now Brie Larson is set to star in and executive produce the Apple TV+ series adaptation. That’s a whole lot of hype, but the great news is that Garmus’ novel delivers on its promises in depicting the ups and downs in the life of chemist and cooking show host Elizabeth Zott. Plus, Garmus seems like someone we’d like to be friends with: copywriter, creative director, open-water swimmer, rower and mother with a background in tech and science and a real knack for naming dogs. (The dog in Lessons in Chemistry is named Six-Thirty, and the author’s own is named 99.)

Kris Ripper

Kris Ripper, author of Book Boyfriend
Carina Adores | April 26

The extremely prolific Kris Ripper became one of the genre’s rising stars with The Love Study series, a charming, nuanced look at modern love that boasted an enviable and highly entertaining friend group. Ripper’s next book, Book Boyfriend, offers a charmingly meta wrinkle to the always popular subgenre of romances set in the literary world. PK is a writer who has been in love with his best friend, Art, for years. He pours all of his feelings into his work, creating a novel in which a fictionalized version of himself is the perfect partner (aka a “book boyfriend,” a romance term used to refer to characters that readers would love to date in real life). 

Shelby Van Pelt

Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures
Ecco | May 3

First-time novelist and Pacific Northwest native Shelby Van Pelt arrives with the year’s most anticipated animal narrator: Marcellus, an Ove-style curmudgeon that just so happens to be a highly observant giant Pacific octopus living in an aquarium. Van Pelt has combined My Octopus Teacher with a drama involving an elderly woman’s search for her missing son, resulting in a novel that aims for the book club sweet spot.

Putsata Reang

Putsata Reang, author of Ma and Me
MCD | May 17

When journalist Putsata Reang was less than a year old, she spent 23 days on a crowded boat with her mother as refugees fleeing Cambodia. Sanctuary was eventually offered in the Philippines, where Reang’s mother rushed her sick baby to a military doctor, who saved Reang’s life. This is the debt Reang owes her mother—and this is the reason Reang felt her mother’s disappointment so acutely when Reang came out as a lesbian and her mother severed the relationship. Ma and Me is an important new entry in the growing body of American refugee and immigrant literature, shining a light on the experiences of queer people whose families have survived the trauma of war. 

Kirstin Chen

Kirstin Chen, author of Counterfeit
William Morrow | June 7

Award-winning author Kirstin Chen’s first two novels, Soy Sauce for Beginners and Bury What We Cannot Take, received several “best books” nods and plenty of critical love, but her third novel, Counterfeit, is her first from a traditional publisher, which means that a whole new section of the reading public will finally get the chance to discover her. To tell the story of two Asian American women who band together in a counterfeit handbag scheme, Chen undertook a research trip to Guangdong, China, to witness the industry of luxury brand “superfakes.” It’s a juicy premise, so of course TV rights have already been sold, with Chen set to executive produce. Born and raised in Singapore, Chen currently lives in San Francisco, and she teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light
One World | June 7

No doubt about it, Colorado-based author Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s star is rising. Her 2019 short story collection, Sabrina & Corina, won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize and the Story Prize, which means that her first novel, Woman of Light, is really exciting in a “if you know, you know” sort of way. It’s a multigenerational epic set in the American West from 1890 to 1935, following an Indigenous Chicano family throughout five generations. Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and is the 2022/2023 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Nekesa Afia

Nekesa Afia, author of Harlem Sunset
Berkley | June 28

It’s hard to write a good historical mystery. Authors must manage all the spinning plates of a good whodunit (premise, red herrings, pacing of clues, etc.), while also wrestling with the knotty questions of historical fiction. Can they evoke the feeling of an era while still making it accessible to modern readers, and successfully highlight both the fun and glamour and the inequalities and issues of the day? In her roaring ’20s historical mystery debut, Dead Dead Girls, Nekesa Afia succeeded at all of the above and introduced a complicated, perfectly crafted sleuth to boot. No surprise the book became a word-of-mouth hit. We expect that Harlem Sunset will introduce even more readers to Afia and her fashionable heroine, Louise Lovie Lloyd.

CJ Hauser

CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife
Doubleday | July 12

Novelist CJ Hauser (Family of Origin, The From-Aways) struck it big in 2019 with her Paris Review essay “The Crane Wife,” which has since been read by over a million people. Now her debut work of nonfiction will take the eponymous viral essay—about traveling to Texas to study whooping cranes 10 days after calling off her wedding—and enlarge its scope with 17 additional pieces that explore how to cultivate an unconventional life, from robot conventions, to weddings, to John Belushi’s grave. As a fiction writer, Hauser’s work is smart, surprising and irresistibly weird—and now, as an essayist, perhaps doubly so.

Isaac Fitzgerald

Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
Bloomsbury | July 19

Isaac Fitzgerald has been a man about book-town for years: He’s the founding editor of Buzzfeed Books, a bestselling children’s book author, an essayist, a co-author of art books about tattoos and a frequent “Today” show guest. Dirtbag, Massachusetts marks his grand entry into one of the few book-town neighborhoods where he hasn’t yet set up shop: prose books for adults. Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays will chart his rough-and-tumble upbringing in Boston and rural Massachusetts and the choppy waters of his West Coast adulthood, learning to navigate the pitfalls of masculinity, body image, class and family strife. There will be tough stops along this journey—including discussions of violence, homelessness and trauma—but we suspect Fitzgerald’s signature tenderness, humor and generosity will carry readers gently the whole way.

Alexandra Rowland

Alexandra Rowland, author of A Taste of Gold and Iron
Tordotcom | August 30

Fantasy romance is absolutely huge right now, to the point that it can be hard to stand out among the flood of gorgeously crafted tales of star-crossed lovers or rival princes. But standing out has not been a problem for Alexandra Rowland. Their Conspiracy of Truths duology was funny, moving and profound in equal measure, thematically ambitious but still deeply rooted in the personal experiences of its characters. We expect even more from A Taste of Gold and Iron, a standalone fantasy romance set in a world inspired by the Ottoman Empire. This tale of a prince and his bodyguard falling in love while untangling a plot that threatens their kingdom and promises to be a feast that satisfies both emotionally and intellectually.

Maya Phillips

Maya Phillips, author of Nerd
Atria | October 11

Poet and New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips will breathe new life into the ever-popular subject of fandom in her prose debut, Nerd: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse. Growing up in the 1990s, Phillips cut her teeth on narrative greats such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, “Doctor Who” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” As she teases apart how these franchises and others formed her identity, worldview and media appetites, her experiences as a Black woman and chops as a professional film and TV critic elevate each essay above the typical fandom fray. Nerd will lend weight to a sometimes-flighty sector of cultural criticism and establish Phillips as a true contender.

Newton author photo by Maximus Clarke. Garmus author photo by Serena Bolton. Van Pelt author photo by Karen Forsythe. Reang photo by Kim Oanh Nguyen. Chen photo by Sarah Deragon. Fajardo-Anstine photo by Estevan Ruiz. Afia photo by FizCo Photography. Hauser photo by Shannon Taggart. Fitzgerald photo by Maddie McGarvey. Rowland by Charles Darrel. Phillips photo by Brian Goldfarb.

From debuts to breakout books, this year promises to be a big one for these 13 authors. Keep them on your radar!
FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Lincoln’s legacy lives on Abraham Lincoln was born in February of 1809, in humble surroundings. When he was assassinated 56 years later, he was one of the most famous human beings on earth. Even Uncle Sam himself had gradually evolved into a Lincolnesque figure. To this day Lincoln is the supreme deity in American mythology, and his profile on the penny is the most frequently reproduced portrait in the world. In an author’s note at the front of Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 0684855151), Jan Morris offers respectful and apologetic gratitude to the living and dead scholars upon whose work she built her own. Perhaps they should thank her instead. Many historians have written about Lincoln, but few have brought the man and his times alive so vividly as Morris does in this 200-page book. She waves her imagination across the dry old facts and they stand up and dance.

Jan Morris first visited the United States during the 1950s, when Lincoln idolatry was at its peak. Over the years Morris remained skeptical but intrigued. Finally, in the late 1990s, she visited contemporary Springfield, researched the city as it was in Lincoln’s time, and wrote about both experiences. She did the same with Gettysburg and Washington and the prairie countryside. The result is this splendid book.

Lincoln rose above his humble origins by becoming a lawyer and a legislator. According to Morris, Lincoln, like many ambitious politicians, made shady deals, rewarded patronage, and made empty promises. Only later, as president, when he had nowhere else to climb and his perpetual melancholy and Shakespearean outlook grew into a sense of destiny, did he rise to the occasion and become an Emersonian great man. Morris’s account of this personal growth is riveting. Although Lincoln never lost his taste for cheap jokes, gradually he replaced the stilted rhetoric of his early years with sinewy prose of almost Elizabethan grandeur.

Morris’s description of slavery also helps bring to life the era and its issues, from the horrors of punishment to the appeal of the genteel slave-based culture of the South. Although in time he opposed slavery, Lincoln considered blacks decidedly inferior and dreamed of their repatriation to their native lands or segregation in a separate colony. Skeptical at first, always objective, Morris nonetheless grew to like her subject. Ultimately she decides that the contradictory aspects of Lincoln’s personality may be resolved by accepting that he was by nature as much an artist as anything else. The moods, the contradictions, the evasiveness, the questioning of accepted truths, the playacting, the sexual complexity, the sad resolution, and the power to move the spirit, all made a poet of this consummate politician. Two other new books address Abraham Lincoln in ways dramatically different ways from Morris’s approach. Historian and novelist Richard Slotkin has written a novel about Lincoln’s upbringing and early years, titled simply Abe. It is an adventurous, violent, and yet thoughtful melodrama based in historical research but not strangled by it.

Usually Slotkin has a light touch that brings the man alive without dressing him up as the myth. This skill shows especially in such scenes as the teenage Abe working on his reading skills, even when he pores over a book that contains the Declaration of Independence. After all, reading really was Lincoln’s salvation, and his first inklings of the power of language and the language of power came from the already sacred American gospels. Slotkin nicely renders the requisite Huck Finn scenes, such as Abe’s momentous journey down the Mississippi. However, there are moments when the author’s admiration for his hero gets out of hand. At one point Slotkin’s teenage Abe is mistaken for a high yaller octoroon and actually quotes Shylock’s Hath not a Jew eyes? speech with references to slaves replacing those to Jews. Jan Morris is skeptical about the mythological Abraham Lincoln, and Richard Slotkin’s narrative urge is inspired by both the myths and the facts. Another new book examines the ways in which Lincoln’s powerful figure captured the imagination of Hollywood and other purveyors of popular culture. Abraham Lincoln: Twentieth-Century Popular Portrayals, by Frank Thompson (Taylor, $26.95, 0878332413), is a curious labor of love. Thompson has thoughtfully examined every movie about Lincoln, including silents, and also the many portrayals on television. After all, the cinematic Lincoln ranges the spectrum from Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln to comic appearances in Police Squad and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Through this surprisingly entertaining tour, Thompson evaluates the popular status of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently the myth is alive and well.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Lincoln's legacy lives on Abraham Lincoln was born in February of 1809, in humble surroundings. When he was assassinated 56 years later, he was one of the most famous human beings on earth. Even Uncle Sam himself had gradually evolved into a Lincolnesque figure. To…

NonfictionFictionChildren's & YA

When rereading leads to love

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Rereading our favorite books is such a comforting practice, but this month, we’re celebrating the special occasion when you get to reconsider a book that you merely appreciated in the first go-around. With some time and a new perspective, a second reading can lead to love.

Interior Chinatown

Experimental or unusual literary structures can be pretty polarizing; either you’re up for a novel told in Slack messages (Several People Are Typing) or as an interview transcript (Daisy Jones & The Six and The Final Revival of Opal & Nev), or you’re just not. But here’s a well-known secret: Sometimes, the great equalizer is audiobooks. Charles Yu’s satirical masterpiece Interior Chinatown is structured partially like a TV script, which is intriguing in print but, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes for the best audiobook I’ve ever listened to. Narrator Joel de la Fuente balances caustic humor with the painful reality of Hollywood racism as he gives voice to Willis Wu, a Taiwanese American actor who dreams of ascending beyond the role of “Generic Asian Man” and achieving the much-coveted role of “Kung Fu Guy.” Willis’ internal monologue alternates with scenes from the crime show “Black and White,” about a white detective and her Black partner, culminating in a brilliant indictment of pop culture stereotypes. Genuinely satisfying satire is rare, but when it’s good, it’s really, really good.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Rereading a book can lead to a discovery of something new about that book. Other times, to revisit something you read in another part of your life is like stepping into your own past and witnessing all the ways you’ve changed. When I first read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe in 2012, I was in my mid-20s and finishing my library science degree. I hadn’t really been in love yet. I was still, in many ways, not yet grown. Late last year, as I once again picked up this award-winning YA novel, I was struck by how removed I felt from Ari’s earnest adolescent musings. The paradox of children’s and YA literature is that it’s created by and introduced to young readers by adults. Somehow, it seems I’ve become one of those adults, but the simple, stunning beauty of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s prose still makes this raw, heartfelt story of teen boyhood transcend the boundaries of age or time.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey can seem like the silly kid sister of Jane Austen’s other novels. As a teenager, when I first read the story of gothic novel-obsessed Catherine Morland, I thought it was frivolous fluff and nothing more. It wasn’t until I reread the novel in college, armed with a much richer understanding of the gothic and what a pop culture juggernaut the genre was during the Regency, that I was able to understand how funny it was; imagine someone approaching their life as if it were a twisty thriller a la Gone Girl. But beyond its success as a culturally specific rom-com, Northanger Abbey should be mentioned in the same breath as early meta narratives like Don Quixote. Austen tracks Catherine’s growing maturity with enormous fondness: Her leaps of logic may be outrageous, but her warped impressions of the people around her are often shockingly astute. It’s a hilarious coming-of-age story that’s also a meditation on how fiction can both blind and guide us. (Also, kind but sassy Henry Tilney is one of Austen’s best heroes, full stop.)

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Hiroshima

I first read Hiroshima in my high school history class. Personally, as an 18-year-old student at an Alabama public school, I still had a ways to go in the appreciation of great books—even one so groundbreaking as John Hersey’s 1946 account of six individuals who survived the atomic bomb that America dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Luckily, I got the chance to revisit it in my master’s program, when I was better equipped to savor Hersey’s precise reporting and vivid, compassionate writing. (One description of a man who jumped into a river after the bomb exploded still haunts me.) Originally published in The New Yorker, this slim book packs a narrative and historical punch. Chapters alternate among the six subjects’ experiences, beginning with the morning of the bomb and continuing through the following year. (An additional chapter was added later, revisiting the six survivors after 40 years.) What emerges is a breathtakingly intimate portrait of atomic warfare’s inhumanity, especially the way it fuses suffering to survival.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Normal People

As a college freshman in March 2020, I found myself back at home after only one day on campus following spring break, and I turned to audiobooks to occupy myself. As I listened to Sally Rooney’s second novel, narrated by Aoife McMahon, I enjoyed hearing the characters’ Irish accents and piecing together their lives between time jumps. Still, the characters’ actions didn’t make sense to me at many critical points, and finishing the book left me with a funny feeling. I didn’t dislike it, but I felt like I was missing an essential component of what made it special, even after a conversation with the friend who’d originally recommended it. My recent second listen revealed how naive my initial evaluation was. The subsequent years of my college experience haven’t been like Marianne’s and Connell’s, but I now viscerally relate to their feelings of being lost in emerging adulthood. After updating my Goodreads rating to five stars, I called that same friend with my new revelations.

—Jessie, Editorial Intern

A great second date can really turn things around.
FictionAudio

Olga Dies Dreaming

Review by Mari Carlson

In Xochitl Gonzalez’s novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (11.5 hours), successful wedding planner Olga navigates the world of wealthy New Yorkers while pursuing answers about her Puerto Rican heritage, her mother’s history and her own future love.

Olga attends her cousin’s wedding while in love for the first time, but the ominous reappearance of her mother’s presence clouds the possibilities laid before her. Meanwhile, Olga’s congressman brother holds big stakes in a bill that addresses Puerto Rico’s debt to the United States.

Opposing forces—Puerto Rican and American identities, wealth and poverty, religion and activism—rule the narrative. Three bilingual actors of Puerto Rican descent—Almarie Guerra, Armando Riesco and Inés del Castillo—give voice to Olga, her brother and mother, their stories unfolding through a multifaceted plot layered with political, financial and personal dramas. The narrators’ accents and code-shifting create a vibrant auditory experience. In particular, Guerra’s luscious voice conveys Olga’s transformation from fighter to a compassionate woman as she overcomes dualities and finds wholeness within herself.

Xochitl Gonzalez unpacks her striking debut, ‘Olga Dies Dreaming.’

Three bilingual actors give voice to Xochitl Gonzalez’s multifaceted novel, which is layered with political, financial and personal drama.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Ken Wells’s first novel, Meely LaBauve, portrays a young man’s coming of age in the Cajun country of lower-Louisiana during the 1960s. Though the coming-of-age novel has been done many times over, it’s never been done quite this way and seldom has it been done this well. Meely (short for Emile) relates his story to the reader and is as likable and funny as a latter-day Huckleberry Finn. Even the various adventures Meely gets into, with his friends Chickie Naquin and Joey Hebert, alternately playing Tom Sawyer to his Huck, are reminiscent of Mark Twain, and like much of Twain’s fiction, Wells’s book works on more than one level. Like Twain, Wells uses humor to pull the reader in as he confronts the issue of race relations.

Since losing his mother, Meely has been forced to do for himself. He hunts and fishes the Catahoula Bayou for food he alone prepares and even grows a tiny garden on the crumbling old homeplace he shares with his father, who is more often hunting alligators and drinking than home raising his son. Meely is small for his age and rarely attends school. When he does, he gets picked on by many of the bigger boys, especially Junior Guidry a longtime eighth grader too big for his age. Junior and his gang have it in for Meely, labeling him with the derogatory name Sabine (on his father’s side, Meely is descended from wild injun blood, a group as equally despised by Junior as the black families who work the cane fields). Though Meely is not afraid to fight, he is also not above running away.

Meely becomes friends with Cassie Jackson, a beautiful young black woman. Then they become more than friends the discovery of sexuality being another necessary staple of the coming-of-age novel, though here it is sweetly rendered. Through their relationship, Wells is able to contrast the racism Meely is victim to with that felt by the African-American characters.

Soon Meely, set up by Junior, is in trouble with the police, but rather than run, he decides to take a stand.

Though the book is often laugh-out-loud funny, Meely LaBauve is no less poignant because of its honed sense of humor. Wells, an award-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, has carved a sincere and courageous portrait of a boy becoming a man under uneasy conditions from what might have seemed hackneyed material in less capable hands.

R. Todd Smith is a writer in Macon, Georgia.

Ken Wells's first novel, Meely LaBauve, portrays a young man's coming of age in the Cajun country of lower-Louisiana during the 1960s. Though the coming-of-age novel has been done many times over, it's never been done quite this way and seldom has it been done…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Even aside from Sylvia Plath’s literary output, there’s always been intense interest in the writer’s short, tragic life, which ended in 1963 with her suicide at age 30. Debut novelist Lee Kravetz’s The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is a fascinating fictional re-creation of Plath’s final decade, a paean to the allure of poetry and an investigation of the mysterious sources of literary inspiration, as told by three women close to Plath.

When Plath enters the coveted Boston poetry workshop run by famed poet Robert Lowell, her arrival ignites the professional and personal jealousy of Agatha Gray, a contemporary who publishes under the pseudonym Boston Rhodes. Plath is the Mozart to Rhodes’ Antonio Salieri, “a success in all the ways I was not,” as Rhodes bitterly summarizes it. As she describes in a lengthy, anguished letter to Lowell, Rhodes is convinced that Plath is the only thing standing between her and the status of “Major Voice” in the confessional poetry movement emerging in the 1950s.

Estee, a master curator at a struggling Boston auction house, also has her own personal connection to Plath’s story. In 2019, three spiral notebooks containing a previously unknown draft of Plath’s posthumous semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, are discovered in the attic of an abandoned home. As Estee supervises the sale of the notebooks in her final auction before retirement, she wrestles with her misgivings about allowing this literary treasure to pass into private hands.

In addition to the voices of these fictional characters, Kravetz introduces Ruth Barnhouse, the real-life psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts who treated Plath with several unconventional therapies following the poet’s first attempted suicide in 1953. Ruth describes her difficult work with Plath’s persistent depression in a series of candid journal entries: “Miss Plath is no longer chasing literary prizes, top marks, or perfection,” she writes. “I fear she is chasing death itself.”

Rotating between the three voices, Kravetz skillfully orchestrates a chorus of regret and longing that swirls around Plath. The women, each of whom has been touched by Plath in markedly different ways, try to make sense of their lives and their relationship to hers. Into this narrative Kravetz cleverly inserts a subplot that pursues the mystery of how Plath’s notebooks fall into the hands of a pair of aliterate Boston house flippers. The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. will intrigue admirers of Plath’s work and likely introduce her to a new group of readers.

Lee Kravetz’s novel is a fascinating fictional re-creation of Sylvia Plath’s final decade and a paean to the allure of poetry.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

From Bertice Berry comes this inspiring debut novel, both a modern love story and a tribute to the power of the written word.

Josephine Fina Chambers and Ross Buchannan meet in Black Images, a small, unique African-American bookstore both in search of Children of Grace, a slave woman’s book of memories. But there is one problem: There is only one copy of this rare book in the store. So the owner of the store, Miss Cosy, insists that the book is not for sale, but agrees to let them both read it on two conditions: They must read it aloud together, and the book cannot leave the store.

I don’t know when I was borned, but now I know why. I was put here to tell a story. A story of love. Cause love is powerful and can’t nothing stop it. Not even the place I’m in can stop my love. They call it slavery. I call it death. And so begins Iona’s story, her heart-breaking story of slavery, and a whole new world is opened to Fina and Ross. They enter the world of chains and of forbidden love. Iona tells of her intense, real love for the slave man Joe, a love which is not recognized within the bonds of slavery. They are torn from each other as Joe is sold to another plantation, and Iona comes to see what bitterness and pain life can hold.

Iona’s story holds important lessons for Fina and Ross. They come to understand the importance of the connections between people even when painful, love is worth fighting for. They begin to cherish their heritage, and to learn from the past and the experiences of others. They see that people before them lived through tough times, and they can too. Finally, they come to recognize the power of books, their ability to influence people and change lives.

As Iona writes to conclude her story, Learn from this past that’s yours. Take the gift of what I done seen and use it to love. This is the Recipe of Life, the road to freedom. Freedom just ain’t about living free its about being free. The chains on our wrist ain’t as strong as the ones on our mind. The only thing that can win over evil is love. Learn to love, strive to love, cause we ain’t got time for nothing else.

From Bertice Berry comes this inspiring debut novel, both a modern love story and a tribute to the power of the written word.

Josephine Fina Chambers and Ross Buchannan meet in Black Images, a small, unique African-American bookstore both in search of…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Swimmers

Review by Laura Sackton

Julie Otsuka’s first novel in 10 years is a quiet and startling masterpiece about memory, aging and the indelible experiences that define a life. The slim novel reads like a much longer one, its mere 192 pages giving rise to the possibility of infinite stories. The effortlessly musical prose will be familiar to readers of Otsuka’s previous novels, especially her 2011 bestseller, The Buddha in the Attic. But The Swimmers is even more structurally bold.

The novel begins with two chapters told in the collective second person. A group of amateur swimmers, all of whom belong to the same community pool, speaks about their obsessions, grievances and small triumphs. When a mysterious crack appears in the bottom of the pool, some are curious, but some begin to panic. Soon they all wonder if this means that their swimming days are numbered.

The third chapter, told in the second person, narrows in on one particular swimmer: an elderly Japanese American woman named Alice, who is in the early stages of dementia. As her memory slips away and the past and present lose their distinct boundaries, Alice struggles to hold onto her sense of self. She still exists in the world, still has opinions and fears and desires, but everyone around her—her fellow swimmers, her husband, her daughter—views her as someone fading, incapable, a danger to herself.

The Swimmers seems to continually reinvent itself as each section reframes everything that came before it. Reading something so inventive and playful is a bit like being inside an architectural blueprint as it’s being drawn, or watching an acorn grow into a massive oak in only a few minutes. This is not a simple, orderly, linear novel. It unfolds in a messy chorus of contradictory, unpredictable voices that each bring something different to the whole.

With nuance, grace and deep tenderness, Otsuka ponders the questions that define our lives: Who are we without our memories? What does it mean to truly see someone else, to see ourselves? What is knowable about the world, and what do we do with the mysteries no one can solve? Funny, moving and composed of sentences that read like small poems, The Swimmers is a remarkable novel from a writer with an unparalleled talent for capturing the stuff of the world, whether mundane, harrowing or bizarre.

Funny, moving and composed of sentences that read like small poems, The Swimmers is a remarkable novel from an unparalleled writer.
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

E.

L. Doctorow’s City of God is a novel about almost everything imaginable: New York, the Holocaust, the 20th century, apocalypse, love, religion, and the universe.

The namesake for this novel is St. Augustine’s book of the same title, which responded to those who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. Augustine saw human history as a struggle between an Earthly City and the City of God with the holy city winning in a final apocalyptic battle.

In Doctorow’s novel, the city is New York, the time 1999, and the apocalypse at once personal, psychological, social, and theological.

The novel revolves around an odd occurrence: A cross disappears from behind the altar at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, eventually reappearing on the roof of the synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. Everett, a novelist, decides to investigate the mystery and in doing so befriends the priest at the church and the couple who are rabbis at the synagogue.

Always in the background of this novel’s tale lies the Holocaust, both its historical reality and its effect on the present. Thus, as he investigates the mystery of the moving cross, Everett also finds himself investigating the Holocaust.

To tell the tale, Doctorow peppers his novel with a multitude of voices speaking directly from the pages of Everett’s notebook including an ex-reporter for the New York Times, a Holocaust survivor, a World War II veteran, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Albert Einstein.

In its postmodern use of many voices strung together in a stream-of-consciousness style, City of God resembles the convoluted work of James Joyce, and like Joyce’s novels, Doctorow’s requires close attention from the reader. What the reader gives to this novel, however, the novel returns tenfold. It is a tale of depth and passion, humor and pain. It is a novel about apocalypse, yes, but it is also about finding hope, love, and some measure of faith amidst the ashes of the 20th century.

Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio.

E.

L. Doctorow's City of God is a novel about almost everything imaginable: New York, the Holocaust, the 20th century, apocalypse, love, religion, and the universe.

The namesake for this novel is St. Augustine's book of the same title,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

This book’s a carrier.

No, not the Typhoid Mary kind, but the kind you carry around with you from place to place, the kitchen to the bedroom, the car to the dentist’s office, just in case you might have an empty minute somewhere to check out the next event in the lives of the complex and troubled Blau clan.

Thirteen-year-old Stefan Blau triggers the multigenerational saga in 1894 when he runs away from Burgdorf, Germany, and emigrates to the United States, eventually settling in Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire. From a rented rowboat, he sees on shore the image of the Wasserburg, a magnificent apartment house he will build, six stories of pillars, marble fireplaces, beveled mirrors, and wrought-iron sconces. Dancing around the fountains and courtyards, a small girl whirls in his vision. Later he will recognize her as his own granddaughter, sharing his passion for this water fortress which, for better or worse, will dominate the lives of the next century of Blaus.

Ursula Hegi, author of six other books, and herself an immigrant from Germany at age 18, has covered this territory before, most notably in Stones from the River, a contender for the PEN/Faulkner Award and an Oprah book club selection. Picking up characters from the fringes of that novel, she follows them through four generations of relationships with each other and the beautiful, sometimes obsessive, building.

Hegi writes with a German accent. Her work is strong and teleological, driving to an end that is telegraphed from the beginning ( many years later when Robert would . . . ). Because so much ground must be covered, her characters here are sometimes seen from a distance, their actions and thoughts described more than lived on the page. For all that, The Vision of Emma Blau grabs that soap-opera hook in every reader’s brain and hangs on for dear life, serving up a prime collection of mildly and majorly dysfunctional souls.

Metaphorically, it has always been the sin of the fathers that is visited upon the children. Hegi takes the idea into another dimension. In this book, it’s the dream of the father that is visited upon the children. Maude McDaniel reviews for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers.

This book's a carrier.

No, not the Typhoid Mary kind, but the kind you carry around with you from place to place, the kitchen to the bedroom, the car to the dentist's office, just in case you might have an empty minute…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

It all began with the idea of writing a story about a school assignment. It blossomed into the remarkable novel Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, an extraordinary tale that, like its young protagonist, just might change the world. When social studies teacher Reuben St. Clair writes on the blackboard, Think of an idea for world change, and put it into action, 12-year-old Trevor McKinney takes the assignment seriously and comes up with the concept of Paying Forward. His plan is fairly simple: He’ll do something really good for three people who, instead of paying him back, will be asked to pay it forward by aiding three more. Hard as he tries, Trevor’s initial attempts seem to fail. Time after time, the recipients of his good deeds let him down. But just when Trevor thinks his entire project has been for naught, things take a turn for the better and his efforts slowly snowball into a national phenomenon. Pay It Forward is Hyde’s second novel and, 20 years in the making, it is truly a labor of love. Telling the story of Trevor’s remarkable project from the alternating perspectives of Trevor’s diary and the people who are touched by the young boy’s vision, Hyde grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go until the novel’s passionate surprise ending.

Big things are expected of this book (there was already a movie deal in the works before its release), and with good reason. Pay It Forward is a delightfully uplifting, moving, and inspiring modern fable that has the power to change the world as we know it which would be a wonderful phenomenon indeed.

Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.

It all began with the idea of writing a story about a school assignment. It blossomed into the remarkable novel Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, an extraordinary tale that, like its young protagonist, just might change the world. When social studies teacher Reuben…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

John Jakes, author of The Kent Family Chronicles and The North and South Trilogy, began a new cycle of historical novels with the best-selling Homeland, “to tell what happened” in America, and the world, during the last one hundred years. Now, for all those readers who followed the stories of Pauli Kroner, Herschel Wolinski, Joe and Ilsa Crown and their children Fritzi, Carl, and Joe Junior and who have since bombarded the novelist with requests to tell what happened next Jakes has completed the long-awaited second novel of the Crown family dynasty. American Dreams is aptly named. Against a panoramic view of American life and culture in transition between 1905-1917, it continues, in vivid detail, the stories of three dreamers previously introduced in Homeland: Fritzi, her younger brother, Carl, and their cousin, Paul. For each one of these protagonists, the American dream is tinged with the same Apollo-like promise a bittersweet blend of happiness and loss. Fritzi achieves the public acclaim she has longed for, but only at the cost of abandoning her dream of a stage career and becoming engulfed in the burgeoning motion picture industry.

Carl, fascinated with machines, pursues a turbulent, out-of-control course that brings him into conflict with Henry Ford in Detroit. He plunges into the maelstrom of the racing circuit with speed king Barney Oldfield and is eventually sent skyward, first as a pilot for a flying circus, then as a mercenary for the Mexican Federalists, and, finally, as a fighter pilot in war-torn Europe.

Paul, the acclaimed author of I Witness History, a book about his experiences as a newsreel filmmaker, loses his job when he defies British law by making public his footage of atrocities committed by the German army. Toward the end of the novel, back in Europe to obtain more war footage, Paul, in a moment of supreme despair, senses that the deaths he is recording are a harbinger of the end of an era that the nightmare of war has “enveloped Europe’s golden summers of peace and confidence, turning them to winters of despair and ruin.” But in the midst of this darkness, the novel like America, and like the giddy century which the world is still experiencing rises above despair. The real American dream, perhaps, is emblemized in the rhapsody of hope spoken by music maestro Harry Poland (once known as the immigrant Herschel Wolinski) about Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty: “She says so much, that great lady. She says, ÔWelcome, whoever you are. You needn’t be rich, or renowned, there is a place for you anyway.’ To me especially, she says, ÔThis is the land where you can realize your wildest dream if you work hard. So go forward, for that’s where the future lies . . . ahead of you. You will never find it by going back.'” Reviewed by Robert C. Jones.

John Jakes, author of The Kent Family Chronicles and The North and South Trilogy, began a new cycle of historical novels with the best-selling Homeland, "to tell what happened" in America, and the world, during the last one hundred years. Now, for all those readers…

FictionPopular Fiction

The Cartographers

Review by Stephenie Harrison

It can be hard to remember just how important paper maps used to be. More than just a way of assisting travel from point A to B, a map was meant to depict the world, revealing a location’s form and significance to anyone who gazed upon it. But what if, rather than being mere reflections of what already exists, maps had the power to shape the world they represented? This intriguing idea forms the foundation of Peng Shepherd’s ingenious and exhilarating second novel, The Cartographers.

Cartographer Nell Young is called in to the New York Public Library after her estranged father is found dead in his office in the map division. While looking through his desk, she finds a secret compartment containing a tatty dime-a-dozen gas station map—the same map that sparked a fiery argument between the two of them several years previously. He dismissed the map as worthless, and their disagreement ended with Nell being branded an outcast in the world of cartography.

Nell can’t begin to understand why her father would have held onto the map he sabotaged her career over, but it soon becomes frighteningly clear that things are not quite as they seem. Despite the map’s unremarkable provenance, it’s actually incredibly rare and highly coveted. In her attempt to understand why, Nell finds herself ensnared in a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game, one that could turn deadly if the other party hunting for the map finds Nell before she uncovers its secrets.

As fans of Shepherd’s 2018 debut novel, The Book of M, would expect, The Cartographers is wildly imaginative and totally mind-bending in the best possible way. Shepherd has crafted a juicy mystery masquerading as a grown-up scavenger hunt filled with astonishing twists and revelations. The result is a romp that’s pure pleasure to read and will keep readers guessing—and gasping—as the map’s true power and beguiling history are brought to light.

Fans of Peng Shepherd’s 2018 debut novel, The Book of M, will love The Cartographers, a juicy mystery masquerading as a grown-up scavenger hunt.

Trending Fiction

FictionDebut Fiction

Two turtledoves

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

more info

Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.

read more
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

more info

Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

read more
All Fiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features