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All Literary Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Many voices, one story

Feature by Julie Hale

Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s powerful debut, focuses on eight teenage boxers—all women—who are contending for a title at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. Bullwinkel skillfully shifts points of view throughout this dramatic, often funny novel, developing a unique identity and personal history for each fighter, as she recounts their boxing bouts in wonderful detail. Against the backdrop of competitive sports, Bullwinkel probes the aspirations and inspirations of an unforgettable group of young women. Their differing motivations and struggles with self-determination will stimulate lively conversation among readers.

The Family Izquierdo by Rubén Degollado chronicles the lives of members of a close-knit Mexican American clan in McAllen, Texas. The novel follows the family across three generations as they contend with a curse they believe has caused the physical decline of Papa Tavo, the head of the family, and the marriage woes of Gonzalo, the eldest son. Narrated by different members of the Izquierdo clan, the novel examines family ties and traditions as well as life on the Texas-Mexico border. Degollado creates a rich chorus of voices in this moving, compassionate novel.

Intricate and enthralling, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning takes place in Kolkata, India, following a terrorist attack. Jivan, a Muslim woman, is implicated in the attack and jailed. Lovely, a trans actress, could clear Jivan’s name, but is reluctant to speak up. Jivan’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has been increasingly drawn toward right-wing politics, is also involved in the case. Each character provides a different take on the events at hand, and the result is a nuanced, multilayered tale. The tough questions it raises about justice make Majumdar’s novel a rewarding choice for book clubs.

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange continues the mesmerizing family saga that started with his acclaimed novel There There (2018). He resumes the stories of Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Bear Shield in modern-day Oakland, California, while also detailing the lives of their forebears, including Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Told from the viewpoints of multiple characters, the book weaves together varied voices to create a complex narrative tapestry. Throughout the novel, Orange explores long-standing family conflicts and the enduring legacies of American Indigenous history.

Book clubs will have plenty to debate with these multiperspective and polyvocal novels.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The Strange Case of Jane O.

Review by Matthew Jackson

Sculpting a novel that conveys vastness through inner lives alone is a tremendous challenge. Making that same novel a page-turning mystery that’s simultaneously moving and often nail-biting is another challenge altogether. With The Strange Case of Jane O., Karen Thompson Walker rises to meet both of these challenges head-on, and succeeds. 

The title character is—externally at least—an unremarkable woman, a single mother who works at the New York Public Library. Alarmed by potential hallucinations, blackouts and a feeling of lingering sadness and dread, she seeks the help of a psychiatrist, who takes an interest not just in Jane’s case, but in the way the woman sees the world. Told through a combination of the psychiatrist’s reflections on his sessions with Jane, and Jane’s own diary entries addressed to her infant son, The Strange Case of Jane O. seeks to excavate a particular human mind in such a way that the minds of everyone around her, and the very nature of their reality, might turn on what becomes of this fascinating protagonist.

Though this engrossing book often moves with a thriller’s pace, there is little sensationalism in Walker’s writing. She approaches Jane’s story through spare, deliberate prose, keeping each chapter lean and, when narrating from the psychiatrist’s point of view, sometimes clinical. But it’s not cold prose. In fact, as the psychiatrist discovers the nature of Jane’s unique memory, her hallucinations and the source of her dread, the precision of Walker’s word choice becomes key to deciphering the mystery. This is not a book that holds the reader’s hand through every revelation, but one that asks something of us, wanting us to decipher along with its characters a mystery that is bigger than psychiatry, bigger than crime, bigger than a single strange incident. 

Slowly, elegantly and with tremendous grace, Walker starts to draw parallels between therapist and patient, between mother and father, between woman and child, and The Strange Case of Jane O. becomes an emotional journey into the heart of what drives us, what breaks us and what keeps us walking the line of mundane daily life.

The very nature of reality might turn on what becomes of the fascinating lead character in Karen Thompson Walker’s The Strange Case of Jane O.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Stone Yard Devotional

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is something rare: a jewel-like, introspective novel in which not all that much happens, yet worlds are revealed. Set in a sparsely populated abbey in rural Australia, the story unfolds through the diary-like ruminations of an unnamed woman who has come seeking spiritual retreat from personal turmoil. After separating from her husband, who has gone to England, this self-described atheist was drawn to the circumscribed religious life of a small community of nuns near the provincial town where she was a girl. This sudden proximity to her childhood feeds her deepest thoughts, reviving specific memories and recasting truths about her loving, nonconforming parents, who shaped her worldview and whose deaths left a hole in her heart. 

The first driving episode of this gentle novel is a plague of mice that infests the abbey. Depicted in all their relentless, squirming vehemence, the vermin are the consequence of a regional drought that brings home the inescapable environmental threat hovering over the wider world (the novel is also set during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, although Wood is careful not to make that the focal point of the story). The second event that rattles the otherwise isolated community is the discovery of the remains of a nun who disappeared in Thailand decades ago. The planned repatriation and burial of Sister Jenny’s bones triggers a third incident: the arrival of Helen Parry, a globe-trotting, celebrity activist nun whose presence is taxing for all, but most particularly upsetting for the narrator. As the second half of the novel plays out, the reason for this nettlesome friction, and the emotional hold Helen has over the narrator, deepens our understanding of her need for redemption.

Grief and forgiveness are undeniably the central tent poles propping up the novel, but Wood takes things further and deeper—wrestling with timeless human questions of faith (even among the faithless), mortality and kindness, parsing them with bare-bones clarity. With its absorbing and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential and living a life of intention.

With its absorbing and deceptively simple narrative, Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful testament to the rudiments of shedding the unessential and living a life of intention.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Dream State

Review by Alice Cary

From the very first pages of Dream State, Eric Puchner draws readers right into the seemingly charmed world of a multigenerational summer lake house in the imaginary town of Salish, Montana—a house graced with outdated carpet, board games, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, Adirondack chairs, apple orchards, raspberry bushes and cherry trees. “Fingers stained red,” Puchner writes, “bloated with fruit, you’d run across Route 35 and jump into the lake to clean off, whooping lustily at the cold, feeling like a character in a Russian novel.” The year is 2004, and the cottage belongs to the Margolis family, who are ready to celebrate the wedding of anesthesiologist Charlie Margolis and his fiancée, Cece, a medical school dropout who “was sure she had something great to offer the world, something big and pure-hearted and indispensable. If only she could figure out what it was.” 

Into this scene walks Charlie’s best friend, Garrett, an airport baggage handler who is hiding from life, tending to his dying father and struggling with the fallout from the accidental death of their mutual college friend, for which he feels responsible. This is a packed saga of the very best kind, spanning from the characters’ college days through their old age, examining a multitude of themes that include friendship, betrayal, marriage, parenting, aging—and also the road not taken, climate change and addiction. Not many authors could successfully pull off such a sprawling, multifaceted chronicle, but Puchner excels at both the big picture and the small details, creating funny, believable dialogue throughout and using characters’ expertise to enrich the plot (such as Charlie’s medical knowledge or Garrett’s later career as an environmental scientist specializing in wolverine protection). 

“If you look for a meaning, Tarkovsky once said, you’ll miss everything that happens,” a character says near the end of the novel, citing the Soviet filmmaker. Happily, however, this novel overflows with both meaning and intriguing plot, layer by layer, year by year, and even doubles back on itself in an artful way, returning to the Margolis wedding at the very end. 

Although very different books, Dream State shares remarkable similarities with Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red: They both skillfully and humorously center on a wedding and a young love triangle, a tragic accidental death, and concerns about climate change and the ways humans damage the environment. Don’t miss Dream State, whose memorable characters leave readers with plenty to contemplate about life’s most vital aspects.

Dream State is a packed saga of the very best kind, full of funny, believable dialogue and memorable characters who will leave readers with plenty to contemplate about life’s most vital aspects.
FictionLiterary Fiction

How secrets fray the ties that bind

Interview by Sarah McCraw Crow

In Mothers and Sons, Adam Haslett offers a family story, though it’s a fraught one. Peter Fischer, a gay immigration lawyer, is haunted by a secret he carries from his teen years. His mother, Ann, left behind her life as an Episcopal priest to build a women’s retreat center in Vermont. Their struggle to reconnect after years of estrangement unfolds as a closely observed character study. Haslett shares with BookPage how being a lawyer has impacted his writing, and what it was like to write about the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic.

 

Though the novel is set in 2011, both Peter’s work—the often-hopeless work of trying to help asylum seekers—and his isolation feel very timely. How did you decide to write about that moment in time?

I think I needed, for my own reasons, to describe in fiction the social isolation that is so common now, and which so many of us respond to by burying ourselves in work. Of course, the causality runs in the other direction, too: Capitalism and precarity force people to overwork, which creates isolation. But either way, it’s a defining fact of contemporary life, which was true before the COVID-19 pandemic and has only been exacerbated by it. And then, if you look around the world, you can’t help but see that mass migration caused by war and climate and oppression, and the demagoguery that enshrouds it, is controlling our politics. Rather than trying to chase headlines, it seemed right to set the novel at a time when these forces were beginning to emerge.

You have a law degree and have done legal volunteer work with asylum seekers. Many novelists are former lawyers, turning to fiction later in their careers, but you went to law school after you’d begun writing fiction, and after earning an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How did going to law school affect your outlook as a writer?

I got into law school and then ended up deferring to go to Iowa, so going to law school wasn’t as much a swerve as just me in my 20s trying to figure out how to put together a life where I could write as well as support myself. As for the effect of law school on my writing, for a long time I thought it hadn’t had any, that it was simply learning a foreign language. But over time I realized it did instill a kind of hypervigilance about accuracy. When you write a contract, you’re trying to write impregnable sentences, ones that no one can disagree about the meaning of. There’s value in that for a fiction writer—to be precise—but also a danger: You tighten up when what you really need to do is be open.

Ann, Peter’s mother, is a former Episcopal priest who let her pastoral work take over her life when her kids were younger, and who now runs a spiritual retreat in Vermont with her longtime partner, Clare. When did you know that Ann was going to be a main character? 

I knew Ann would be central from the beginning, but for a long while I thought she could be described and encountered through Peter’s point of view. Yet, however hard I tried to make those scenes work, they just didn’t, because there was so much Peter couldn’t see about his mother that I wanted the reader to see. So eventually I just started writing scenes from her point of view, which was a huge relief, and ultimately a pleasure.

“There’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need.”

This novel is in part about the stories we tell ourselves, the secrets we keep and how those narratives can keep us apart from others. Can you talk about those stories we tell ourselves, often about ourselves? 

My interest in fiction has always been about getting at the interior lives of my characters, and so much of that interiority consists of barely conscious thoughts, judgments, desires, aversions, etc. that together add up, as you say, to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—for better, or all too frequently, for ill. No doubt, this “interest” was driven by my own need to make peace with some of the less than charitable stories I told myself about myself. In that, I’ve been immeasurably helped by meditation, something I’ve done a lot of over the last 25 years, which has become integral to my writing practice.

Both Peter and Ann are ministering to the world, in their own ways. But both have failed each other, and they’ve failed others. As a parent, I couldn’t help but think about the ways we fail our children even as we’re trying hard to help them. Can you talk about this paradox?

The more I wrote each of Peter’s and Ann’s scenes, the more I came to realize I was trying to get at what you might call the psychic economy of liberalism—the way helping others can so often involve a kind of condescension and distance, and also be a place for the person helping to avoid themselves. Which is just to say that there’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need. That’s the paradox.

While Peter’s sections are written in first-person present tense, which seems suited to his stalled place in his life, Ann’s sections are in a different mode: third-person past tense. How did you arrive at these two styles for these two characters?

I’m usually suspicious of first-person present tense because it’s a straitjacket for the writer in terms of moving the narrative forward, but in this case it was the only tense and point of view that made sense for Peter. Precisely because he is so buried in his work, and in many ways doesn’t even realize that he is, he can’t see into the future, or much into the past either. He spends his days assembling other people’s narratives—his clients’—but is inattentive to his own. His mother, Ann, is in many ways the opposite. She prizes intimacy, fellowship and spiritual discernment, and so has the kind of settled quality that lends itself to the more knowing voice of third-person past tense.

Ann and Peter are the novel’s main mother and son. But there are others, as the title suggests, like the young Albanian immigrant Vasel and his mother. Can you talk about them?

Vasel is the client of Peter’s who features most prominently in the novel, and his mother’s actions and decisions are central to him getting to the U.S. in the first place. Like a lot of asylum seekers, he feels guilt about his mother still being caught in the situation he fled. Peter has another client, Sandra Moya, whose son Felipe is very anxious at the prospect of his mother being deported. Finally, there is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose son Charlie is just a toddler. To be honest, I didn’t realize just how many sets of mothers and sons I was writing about until about halfway through the novel, but once I saw the pattern that was apparently drawing me forward, I got to play with the patterning more consciously.

The novel’s scenes of Peter’s teen years in the late ’80s vividly evoke teenage uncertainty, and Peter’s anxiety and shame about his sexuality. How did you access the young Peter and that time period?

That’s simple! I lived it—not in the details of this particular plot, but in the sense of having been a teenager at that time, when the virulence of homophobia and the specter of AIDS were so deeply ingrained in American culture that it was next to impossible for a young person to experience desire without fear and loathing. In my first two books, You Are Not a Stranger Here and Union Atlantic, I wrote about some of this, but Mothers and Sons is the first time I’ve allowed myself to write about its long term sequela, as it were. Its effects on adult life.

You’ve written both short stories and novels. Are you continuing to write in both forms? What do you like and dislike about each?

I enjoy them both, and admire anyone who does either of them well. Of late—as in a couple of decades—I’ve been mostly drawn to novels because they let me explore characters and the worlds they inhabit at length. But I have missed the lyric concision short stories allow, and in writing Mothers and Sons, part of me was aiming for that tightness of construction, that close holding of the reader’s anticipatory attention, which made it harder to write but in the end more satisfying to complete.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

Alas, I’m a very slow writer. Ideas take a long time to germinate and develop. So mostly what I’m doing is allowing that process to unfold by reading widely, taking notes and paying attention to the world. Technology companies have quite deliberately addicted us to speed in nearly every aspect of our lives, so for me the first real task is to disenchant myself from that forced distraction regularly enough to sense my own intuitions.

Read our starred review of Mothers and Sons.

Adam Haslett’s emotionally complex third novel, Mothers and Sons, examines the way past pain hovers over our closest relationships.
FictionLiterary Fiction

We Do Not Part

Review by Alden Mudge

Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.

Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.

It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.

We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued. 

For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.

In Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, narrator Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a friend and artistic collaborator before Inseon asks her to travel to her remote house on snowbound Jeju Island to save the life of her bird.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Waiting for the Long Night Moon

Review by Cat Acree

Amanda Peters’ bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023), which received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is a story of significant tragedy, about Indigenous family separation in Nova Scotia. Similar abuses appear throughout Peters’ book of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which opens with a dedication “to all those who have shared their stories and planted the seed of imagination.” 

The 17 stories that follow are, for the most part, seeds. Many were practice exercises while Peters was working toward The Berry Pickers, and she had no intention of collecting them into a book. Because of their origins, some are little more than fables to be told around a fire, with guidance passed down from matriarchs, and simple axioms like town is a bad place, forest is good. Other stories explore plot elements, like how to deliver a shock of horror: a water cannon used by American government forces to assault the bodies of Standing Rock protesters; a girl’s tongue pierced with a steel pin at a Christian residential school; women jumping to their deaths or being murdered in the woods.

All of Peters’ first-person narrators speak similarly, as if each voice—no matter the age, era or gender—were the same storyteller. But despite this, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world. Read individually, a few stories stand on their own. “The Virgin and the Bear” is a stunning piece about a woman learning her grandmother’s tragic history while placing it within the context of other genocides. The titular story is tender, lyrical and lovely, with forest scenes so lush that you can feel the earth underfoot, and the sharp pain of memory as an older man recalls his late sister. And the Dakota Access Pipeline story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” is the freshest premise in the collection, following a young woman who heals her grief through resistance.

When it comes to contemporary Native fiction, the majority of readers—and likewise, the publishing industry—still focus on stories that whittle down the history and present life of American Indigenous people to colonization and trauma. As Terria Smith, editor of Heyday’s News From Native California, wrote in Publishers Weekly in 2023, “There is a real possibility that a lot of our own literature is unwittingly perpetuating the narrative that tribal people are tragic, but there is much more to us than this.” Peters’ best stories probe the possibility of venturing beyond those tropes.

In these 17 stories from Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Too Soon

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Hope and laughter animate Betty Shamieh’s debut, Too Soon, which revolves around three generations impacted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a subject so weighty, the novel feels surprisingly effervescent thanks to the witty and resolute women who make up the three main characters—Zoya, Naya and the central protagonist, Arabella.

Stretching from 1948 to 2012, the story takes us from Jaffa to New York. We follow Zoya, a mother of nine, who is forced to abandon her seaside villa to start again as a refugee in Michigan; Naya, Zoya’s youngest daughter, who grows up in the changing Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s; and Arabella, Naya’s outspoken daughter, a Yale graduate who, at 35, has achieved a version of the American dream as a theater director in New York City. These three women, each shaped by their times, have more in common than they would like to admit.

Too Soon begins in New York in 2012 with Arabella, who has just been invited by the Royal Court Theatre of England to direct Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Arabella is lukewarm about the opportunity, but she decides to go for it after her grandmother Zoya sets her up with a boy named Aziz, who is volunteering as a medic on the Gaza border.

In her great-grandfather’s one-room house in Ramallah, Arabella confronts her family’s history and her place in it, while dating Aziz and directing her radical gender-swapped production of Hamlet. Dispersed among Arabella’s angsty chapters are chapters telling Zoya’s and Naya’s stories, recounting their memories of girlhood, lost love, marriage and motherhood. Together, they spin a resonating tale of hope’s potential to survive through terrible atrocity.

Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, and is a founder of The Semitic Root, an Arab and Jewish American theater collective. In her first novel, she has crafted a page-turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.

In her first novel, playwright Betty Shamieh has crafted a page turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Mothers and Sons

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There are sound reasons that Adam Haslett’s debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. With Mothers and Sons—a story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories—he demonstrates once again his ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting fiction whose characters’ struggles seem as real as those of people we know in our own lives.

At the center of Haslett’s novel are Peter Fischer, a New York City immigration lawyer who specializes in representing clients seeking asylum, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopal priest who abandoned both the church and her husband 20 years earlier to establish a women’s retreat center—a “ministry of hospitality”—in Vermont with her romantic partner, Clare, and her friend Roberta. Peter and Ann’s relationship, even on its best day, is a cool one.

Peter’s stressful but predictable law practice mostly involves representing victims of political violence, and it’s upended when he takes on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old man from Albania, as a client. Like Peter, Vasel is gay, and his asylum claim is based on his fear that he’ll be persecuted for his homosexuality if he returns to his homeland. As Peter struggles to persuade a reluctant Vasel to help him gather the evidence Vasel will need to secure a judge’s permission to remain in the United States, his client’s predicament surfaces Peter’s painful memories of his own attraction to a charismatic fellow high school student, Jared Hanlan, and its tragic end two decades earlier.

Deliberately, and with consummate skill, Haslett braids these stories until, in the final third of the novel, he reveals the devastating event that lies at the heart of the emotional gulf Ann and Peter must span. Though it anchors the book, theirs is not the only story of maternal love he explores, layering depth and complexity over an already rich novel and illuminating its plural title. Haslett’s prose is simultaneously efficient and evocative, so that the pleasures of this touching novel extend well beyond those that flow from engaging with a psychologically astute and well-told story. In his capable hands, Mothers and Sons is an exemplar of realist fiction.

Read our Q&A with Adam Haslett about Mothers and Sons.

Mothers and Sons is a touching story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories, once again demonstrating Adam Haslett’s ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting realist fiction.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Going Home

Review by Alice Cary

Téo Erskine is a Londoner in his 30s with an orderly, if somewhat aimless, life. As Tom Lamont writes in his smart, warm-hearted debut, Going Home: “He had been careful to arrange a life in which he could leave obligations at the door of his flat, next to the coins he saved for Ben’s poker nights and his shoes that were comfiest for driving.” Téo’s life is completely upended, however, during a weekend back home in his North London neighborhood. He offers to babysit the toddler son, Joel, of his childhood friend Lia, a single mom for whom he has longed for ages, in hopes that his chivalry might gain him favor. Instead, however, an unimaginable tragedy occurs, and Téo suddenly finds himself Joel’s reluctant, bewildered guardian.

The novel focuses on the ongoing question of Joel’s permanent guardianship while showing how the young boy changes the lives of those in his orbit. There’s Téo, of course, who blunders his way through car seat and nappy issues, wondering, “Was it water you did give small children or never gave them?” Téo’s father, Vic, whose life is now shrinking due to the advancing effects of Parkinson’s disease, quickly becomes smitten with Joel, especially since he himself grew up in an orphanage. Téo leans on his best friend, Ben, for support, but because of Ben’s wealth and self-centeredness, they don’t always see eye to eye—especially after Ben informs Téo that he had a brief fling with Lia. Rounding out this exceedingly well-drawn cast is rabbi Sibyl Challis, who is on probation with her congregation, and questioning her faith in the wake of Lia’s tragedy.

Comparisons to Nick Hornby’s About a Boy are inevitable and well deserved. Going Home overflows with heart, and its characters feel real with their multitude of dreams, fears, serious self-doubts and fierce loyalties. Over the course of a year, Lamont paces events with precision and humor, asking life’s big questions regarding family and friendship, duty and devotion. Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.

Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Gliff

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It would be hard to find a writer whose sensibility is better suited to unsettling times than British novelist Ali Smith. Unsurprisingly, her novel Gliff neatly matches the dominant sentiment of the 2020s. This brief, dystopian tale is both an evocative story of siblings in peril and a glimpse at where some of the trends roiling our world may be taking us.

Set in an unnamed country in an unspecified future time, the novel follows two children forced to navigate a threatening environment without the benefit of an adult presence. After their mother departs to care for her ailing sister, the narrator, known variously as Briar, Brice and Bri, is abandoned with younger sister Rose by the friend whose care their mother placed them in. 

Before long, the sisters are at large in a society marked by environmental degradation, omnipresent surveillance focused on a category of dissidents known as “unverifiables,” and an ominous machine called a supera bounder that randomly paints red lines around properties to mark them for destruction. Setting themselves at odds with the oppressive ethos of this culture, Briar and Rose quickly learn to survive using their wits and a handful of opportunistic alliances.

As in much of Smith’s work, there’s a pleasing fascination with language and wordplay. “It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,” says Briar. That curiosity extends to the eponymous word, gliff, whose meaning apparently encompasses everything from “a transient glance” to “an early AI tech tool used in the development of healthcare.” It’s also the name Rose gives to a horse that’s one of several she liberates from their corral and then makes her own.

The feeling one experiences reading Gliff is similar to that evoked when standing before an abstract impressionist work of art. Smith’s novel is less about creating fully fleshed-out characters or a meticulously structured plot than it is about summoning up a mood, one of “Unbelievable believable hope. . . . Impossible, possible.” That attitude offers what might serve as Smith’s paradoxical benediction over life in an increasingly anxious age. 

In Gliff, Ali Smith offers a paradoxical benediction over life in our increasingly anxious age: “Unbelievable believable hope. . . . Impossible, possible.”
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Casualties of Truth

Review by Freya Sachs

What happens when the past does not resolve, does not leave? In Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth, Prudence Wright’s seemingly peaceful present is interrupted by a figure from her past who reminds her of the events of a summer she’d long buried in memory.

As the novel opens in 2018, Prudence and her husband, Davis, are out to dinner, joined by a new colleague of his whom Prudence has never met—except, she has met him before. In fact, Matshediso is well known to Prudence from the time she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996, in the midst of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings. Moving between Prudence’s present with her husband and son in Washington and her summer in Johannesburg, each tense scene brings secrets Prudence had hoped to leave behind closer to the surface. 

Fast-paced, engaging and surprising, Casualties of Truth has some elements of a thriller, while examining whether truth is enough, whether the past can be escaped and whether the personal and political are ever separate. For Prudence, the legacies of racism and apartheid have shaped her own path as well as the intertwining histories of the U.S. and South Africa. The life she’s made in Washington is a dynamic layer of the story, too, as she considers her choice to suspend her career to spend more time raising her autistic son, and as pressure from Matshediso complicates her relationship with Davis.

Emerging connections between the past and present keep the novel unpredictable, and the big questions it raises will stay open well after it closes. 

Fast-paced, engaging and surprising, Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth examines the legacy of apartheid through the life of a lawyer whose long-ago summer in Johannesburg comes back to haunt her.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Death of the Author

Review by Laura Hubbard

Fired from her lackluster job as an adjunct professor of writing, and on the verge of needing to move back in with her parents, Zelu has lost control of her life. Because she’s disinclined to pick up the pieces in a way that will satisfy her family, a Nigerian American dynasty for whom being exceptional is considered merely ordinary, she turns instead back to her writing. What comes out of those dark moments is a piece of science fiction set in the aftermath of humanity’s extinction. Upon publication, the novel captures the entire world’s imagination, quickly becoming a bestseller and almost immediately being optioned as a movie. But the consequences of Zelu’s meteoric rise aren’t all so dreamy. As they ripple out, they change her life forever, causing her to rethink her relationship to her writing, her family and even her own body.

Death of the Author, by acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), is comfortable straddling the line between genres. Okorafor explores the dynamics Zelu experiences as a disabled Nigerian American author from the south suburbs of Chicago, rendering familiar experiences with remarkable specificity, pulling us in so that we understand Zelu’s truth, warts and all. As the book shines on a literary level, so, too, do its science fiction elements. In a metafictional twist, Okorafor peppers in chapters from Zelu’s bestselling novel with increasing frequency as the story progresses. Beyond being interesting in their own right, the chapters give us a lens through which to see Zelu more clearly—and influence the course of her journey. A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.

Read our interview with Nnedi Okorafor about 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.

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