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An exhilarating work of experimental metafiction, The Unfortunates is a novel masquerading as a senior thesis (complete with footnotes) meant to unmask the injustices, microaggressions, hypocrisy and racism experienced by nonwhite students at an unnamed upper-tier college in the Midwest.

Sahara Kesandu Nwadike, the protagonist of J K Chukwu’s brazen and bold debut novel, is a living, breathing poster girl for the “sophomore slump.” Already exhausted following her first year of college, Sahara decides to jump ahead to her senior thesis and begins to document the reality of being Black on campus. A troubling number of Black students (dubbed “the Unfortunates” by their Black peers that remain) have disappeared, dropped out or died. Grappling with a “D” of her own—depression—Sahara secretly aspires to join the ranks of the Unfortunates before the academic year is done, frequently fantasizing about how she’ll end her suffering and finally silence the voice in her head that has been with her since childhood. The voice, which Sahara has nicknamed LP, short for “Life Partner,” insists that she is not good enough, a message that’s reinforced by the majority of her peers, professors and family. She’s not smart enough, not straight enough, not rich enough, not skinny enough, not Nigerian enough.

But even if Sahara really is useless, she feels she cannot end her life without doing one thing that truly matters. So she writes about the mental toll of being at the university and skewers the performative allyship, the racial inequalities in health care access and treatment, and the white supremacy tacitly condoned by the university. She bares her soul and shares all the things no one else wants to hear. Finally, her own voice—her rage—will be heard.

The Unfortunates is an electrifying read that’s meant to disrupt and disturb; as a result, it can be deeply uncomfortable and disheartening. Yet despite the novel’s sobering subject matter, it is not devoid of hope or humor. Much to her credit, Chukwu punctuates Sahara’s despair with witty turns of phrase and wordplay to keep readers from spiraling into an existential crisis of their own.

While refusing to gloss over the bitter realities of the Black experience in modern America, Chukwu has written a tale about how those who “[live] in a school—no, state—no, country that hates—no, kills—no, destroys, so much of us” are still able to survive. The Unfortunates is a powerful call to arms by a promising young writer who is not afraid to take risks, and for that we are very fortunate indeed.

The Unfortunates is a powerful call to arms by a promising young writer who is not afraid to take risks, and for that we are very fortunate indeed.
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I’m Glad My Mom Died

I’m Glad My Mom Died is a celebrity memoir, but even if you (like me) have never heard of actor Jennette McCurdy or seen a single second of “iCarly” on Nickelodeon, getting sucked into this frankly told and deeply nuanced story of a troubled mother-daughter relationship is almost inevitable. McCurdy’s story kicks off when her mother, Debra, pins her own dashed dreams of Hollywood stardom onto her shy 6-year-old daughter. The pressure’s on, and things get worse from there. McCurdy writes from the perspective she had in the moment, creating tension for the reader, who can see the unhealthy dynamic between McCurdy and Debra long before McCurdy can name or understand it herself. After reading I’m Glad My Mom Died, it’s impossible to see Debra as a good mother, but McCurdy’s commitment to portraying her mother as she truly was still somehow feels like a tribute. 

—Trisha, Publisher


Tuesdays With Morrie

I first read Tuesdays With Morrie in my high school English class. Much like Mitch Albom’s teacher Morrie Schwartz, my teacher Mr. Baker longed for his students to understand what makes life worth living. As the book begins, Albom, a successful young columnist in Detroit, walks through life dead-alive, driven by the pursuit of fame and personal gain. He paints the plague of the modern world so poignantly—the slow and silent indoctrination of society, its swift corrosion of the soul. During his Tuesday visits with his old professor, Albom begins to realize that the dying man is more alive than he is. Tuesdays With Morrie is a book full of convincing triteness and truth. We all need Morrie’s reminders to dance with our eyes closed and reach down into the darkness for the sake of pulling up another. I still find myself in need of Morrie’s teachings—that love is all that stands at the end of time. For readers who share my appreciation of this book, be aware that Rob Schwartz, Morrie’s son, will publish his father’s writing posthumously in The Wisdom of Morrie later this month.

—Emma, Editorial Intern


Lessons in Chemistry

Humor must be just about the toughest thing to get right in fiction. It’s so subjective, first of all, and it’s tricky to balance lightheartedness with the serious bits. And then to be funny without being mean? Practically impossible. Bonnie Garmus’ delight of a debut novel made me laugh—often and loudly—while still honoring the hard road of its heroine. Elizabeth Zott is a female chemist and single mom in the 1960s, so obviously the world has it in for her, and this includes an assault early in the novel. But in the face of such cruelties, she is pragmatic and determined and wry, like a grown-up version of Roald Dahl’s indomitable Matilda. She ends up starring on her own cooking show and finds herself surrounded by a supporting cast that’s as endearing as can be. She also has a dog (named Six-Thirty) who’s enough of a lead character to tip the story into the fantastical. Like so many other readers, I absolutely loved it.

—Cat, Deputy Editor


Uprooted

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is the type of fantasy novel that seems tailor-made for the exact type of crossover success it has achieved. It’s a seemingly simple story of a young peasant girl trying to save her friend from dark magic, and with its fairy tale-inspired setting, engaging characters and just the right amount of romance, it appeals to fantasy readers and nonfantasy readers alike. I am as intrigued by these types of books as I am leery of them. It’s easy for a story to rest on folklore references and well-known character types within an aesthetically pleasing world and and still never quite step out of the shadows of other works. But Novik didn’t set out to just retell a fairy tale: She wrote her own, and it’s so enthralling that it gave me the type of stay-up-all-night, can’t-put-it-down reading experience I had when I was a 13-year-old first discovering fantasy. I read it within days, its impossibly perfect ending made me cry, and I still think about it more than a year later.

—Savanna, Associate Editor


The Testaments

One of the perks of working at BookPage is getting to read books before they are published, but occasionally a high-profile title gets embargoed, meaning advance copies aren’t sent to the press. If members of the media do receive a copy, they’re forbidden to share the review before the publication date. I’ll always remember the day I was opening mail at the office and unwrapped a finished copy of The Testaments, the long-awaited and heavily embargoed sequel to Margaret Atwood’s groundbreaking 1985 bestseller, The Handmaid’s Tale. Set 15 years after the events of the dystopian classic, the suspenseful plot is driven by the narratives of three women whose fates converge just when their world’s authoritarian regime, Gilead, begins to crumble. The Testaments is the work of a writer at the top of her game; Atwood sticks the landing in a thrilling conclusion to an all too culturally significant tale. 

—Katherine, Subscriptions

Every once in a while, it feels like everyone in the world is reading the same book—and we can all admit that sometimes, that book isn’t very good. This month, we’re celebrating books that are extremely popular and are actually (believe it or not) as excellent as everyone says.
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Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, is a feat of technical brilliance, a fictional biography about a mysterious and notorious 20th-century artist known as X. The biographer is X’s widow, C.M. Lucca, who insists that she’s telling X’s story, but as her research into her wife’s past reveals more and more shocking surprises, it becomes clear that she’s actually telling her own story—and that of the country she lives in. In the novel’s America, most of the South seceded in 1945 to become the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy divided from the Northern and Western territories by a wall and ruled by a ruthless autocratic dictatorship.

Though the novel’s world building lacks a critical engagement with race, which Lacey only mentions in passing, and though it sometimes feels more like a stylized thought experiment than a book with a beating, human heart, Biography of X is still a stunning achievement. It is nearly impossible not to get lost in Lacey’s exquisitely detailed version of America. Nothing about it feels fictional, from the extensive footnotes, images and assorted ephemera included, to the slightly altered references to real people and events (activist Emma Goldman and David Bowie, among others).

Even more compelling is the assuredness with which Lacey inhabits the persona of C.M. Lucca. There’s something unhinged and upsetting—but legible, even understandable, at times—in Lucca’s unwavering devotion to her late wife, even as she spirals deeper into the disturbing realities of X’s life and work. Lucca isn’t merely an unreliable narrator; her involvement in the story she’s trying to tell is too complicated and multilayered to be explained through a simple narrative device. Through Lucca, and through X, Lacey explores bigger, thornier questions about authorship and identity, art and futility, obsession and abuse. She pokes at reality and perspective, probing what it means to seek out the truth of another person, even—maybe especially—when that truth proves impossible to find.

Biography of X is a dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams. It is also, in its own subtle way, a love letter to writing and writers. With the pacing of a thriller and the careful consideration of a definitive biography, this is a sure and surprising novel that will haunt its readers for quite some time.

Biography of X is a dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams.
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Some people feel like outsiders every day of their lives. One such person is Harley Sekyere, a 21-year-old gay Black man in England who comes from an unsupportive household, felt at sea at college and has no idea where to turn. That’s a situation plenty of people will relate to. And it’s the premise of Small Joys, Elvin James Mensah’s sympathetic debut novel.

It’s 2005, shortly after terrorists coordinated a series of subway and bus bombings that devastated London. Harley had grand plans to graduate from university with a degree in music journalism but dropped out. Bereft of any other constructive goals, overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and depression, he makes a drastic decision: Back home in the town of Dartford, southeast of London, he wanders into the woods with a small X-ACTO knife.

He catches a break. Muddy, a straight white man “holding a pair of binoculars,” approaches Harley, sees that he’s bleeding and stops him from proceeding further. Fortuitously, Muddy is more than just a devoted bird-watcher who happened to walk by. He’s also about to become Harley’s roommate.

Mensah then introduces other characters who become part of Harley’s support network. They include Chelsea, a young white woman whose father owns the apartment building where Harley and Muddy live. She’s a friend of Harley’s and helps him reclaim his old job at the cinema where she works. Also in the mix are Finlay, Muddy’s best mate, whom Chelsea is dating; and Noria, a Black woman who’s dating Muddy and is obsessed with styling Harley’s hair.

The center of all of this is Harley, of whom Mensah writes with great affection. He offers unforgettable details, such as when he notes that Harley is so self-conscious that he sometimes stores food in his cheeks “to create the illusion [he] was eating quicker than [he] actually was.” Harley’s lack of assurance, he says, comes from “anxiety and queerness and failure.” It also comes from his homophobic father, a religious man hoping to convert his son; his relationship with an abusive older man; and his burgeoning feelings for Muddy.

Small Joys is simpler and more predictable than the books to which it is already being compared, among them works by Brandon Taylor and Bryan Washington. The raw emotions in Mensah’s book, however, will resonate with anyone who has ever felt as if they don’t belong. Harley may feel like an outsider, but as Mensah astutely notes, he’s got a lot of company.

The raw emotions in Small Joys will resonate with anyone who has ever felt as if they don’t belong. Harley may feel like an outsider, but as Elvin James Mensah astutely notes, he’s got a lot of company.

When 17-year-old Bucky Yi is sent from the United States to South Korea, leaving the only home he knows, he must summon all the pluck and perseverance he has gained as a high school football player to survive in a place that is both his birth country and foreign to him. 

Bucky has lived most of his life in the rural town of Tibicut, Washington, having moved there after his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to an American woman. After his father’s later abandonment, Bucky continued to live with his stepmother, Sheryl, and became determined to get a football scholarship so he could leave Tibicut, where he is one of only three Asian American students at his school. But after getting involved in one of his Uncle Rick’s disruptive outbursts, Bucky is arrested and ends up in an immigration detention center. Unable to provide official proof of his American citizenship, Bucky is deported to South Korea, where he is forced to serve in the Korean army.

Korean American author Joe Milan Jr. spins an immersive, fast-paced story in his debut novel, The All-American. Bucky is an intriguing and sympathetic character. He’s vulnerable and strong, raw and mature. He finds common ground between the divergent points of his birth and adopted countries, such as discovering a way to communicate in Korean while drawing on his experience as an American.

Milan’s writing is tight, with fresh and vivid descriptions that illuminate the contrasts in Bucky’s background and cultural makeup. The novel raises questions about who and what exactly determines your identity. Is it your birthplace, or where you’re raised? Is it your parents or your name or the papers you carry? Is it perception, either from yourself or others?

Rich and engrossing, this coming-of-age story offers an intricate exploration of identity and transformation that will be especially appealing to fans of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, My Year Abroad by Chang Rae Lee and China Boy by Gus Lee.

Joe Milan Jr.’s debut novel raises questions about who and what exactly determines your identity. Is it your birthplace, or where you’re raised? Is it your parents or your name or the papers you carry? Is it perception, either from yourself or others?
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If the title of Elizabeth McKenzie’s third novel (after The Portable Veblen) were the strangest thing about it, it would still be remarkable. Luckily for readers who like their books odd, haunting, strange and surprising, it isn’t. 

As The Dog of the North begins, narrator Penny Rush is recently separated from her husband and heading from Salinas to Santa Barbara, California, where she knows she has problems waiting for her. Penny’s story intertwines with that of her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, a quirky, cantankerous hoarder who values privacy above all; and Burt, a lonely man who shares his toupee with his brother and loves his Pomeranian. Burt’s van is the titular Dog of the North, and it becomes Penny’s home and the place from which her adventures spring. 

Penny is searching for connection, for meaning in her life after quitting her marriage and job. Throughout her episodic travels, there are missing parents, a grandfather ready for an adventure, strange objects that perform mysterious and surprising functions, Dr. Pincer’s science experiments, shared meals, injuries, ailments and bits of hope.

Penny’s voice is curious and kind; she’s empathetic and reserves judgment from both herself and others. Her route—through places and among people, through landscapes both internal and exterior—surprises her. She doesn’t know what she’ll find or who she’ll meet, and her openness allows experiences to take shape that otherwise simply could not. Her presence unsettles some characters, forcing them to share more than they might have intended, and this enables a deeper connection between McKenzie’s characters and the reader, illuminating challenges we could’ve missed. 

Through Penny’s eyes, we see the beauty in the seemingly broken, in the flawed stories we tell ourselves—and what happens when those stories delightfully shatter.

Through Penny’s eyes, we see the beauty in the seemingly broken, in the flawed stories we tell ourselves—and what happens when those stories delightfully shatter.

Y/N

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It’s time for the literary world to take fanfiction seriously. Well into the internet age, contemporary literature is profoundly shaped by online aesthetics and sensibilities, but for some reason fanfiction remains outcast. Esther Yi’s debut novel gives fanfiction, and stan culture more broadly, the piercing, unhinged analytic treatment it deserves. Beginning with an unnamed Korean narrator living in Berlin who is lured into an intense K-pop fandom, Y/N takes readers on a surreal, self-reflexive adventure that blurs and ultimately dissolves the borders between reality and fiction, self and other, and admiration and fetishization.

Though the unnamed narrator is the catalyst for the novel, both she and Yi make it clear from the start that this book is not really about her; it is about the limits of fandom. The novel opens with her first exposure to Moon, the youngest member of a Korean boy band that captivates international audiences in sold-out arenas. From her nosebleed seat, the narrator falls instantly for Moon, except it is not love she falls into but rather something like delusion. Soon after, our narrator starts writing fanfiction in which the protagonist is called Y/N (fanfic lingo for “your name,” which allows readers to insert themselves into the story). But soon Y/N takes over the narrative, traveling to Korea to meet Moon and destroying any semblance of selfhood that the narrator had. 

Yi speaks to some of the most pressing ideas in today’s culture with wit and grace. Y/N illustrates how serious fandoms can be, how their influence reaches beyond bedroom wall posters to shape politics and identity. When Moon livestreams and calls his fans “liver,” insinuating both “lover” and the idea that his fans are somehow a part of his body, we see how a fandom forms a collective, though with a strict hierarchy. Parasocial relationship is an apt term, but in this case, it’s not necessarily the other that is the object of one-sided connection, but rather a fictionalized version of the self. With this in mind, Yi explores how gender discrimination and racism (particularly fetishization) can be the outcome of such constructed realities, as characters repeat Korean stereotypes and parrot a culture they have no real link to. 

Considering all of this, it is clear that Y/N is one of the most daring novels of the year. Yi has set a new standard for internet-influenced literature by showing that online and literary narratives exist hand in hand, creating the world with every word.

Esther Yi has set a new standard for internet-influenced literature with Y/N, one of the most daring novels of the year.
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Nothing much happens in Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, but the author’s artistry is such that you keep on reading, whether for the beautiful writing or for the beautiful pain of the strange couple at the story’s core.

First published in South Korea in 2011 and set mostly in Seoul, Greek Lessons is the story of two damaged people. One is a man, a professor of ancient Greek who is slowly losing his vision. The other is a woman taking his class. She’s a writer and former teacher who has either abandoned her power of speech or whose speech has left her; she recalls Liv Ullmann’s character in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona, an actor who suddenly goes mute in the middle of a performance and decides to stay that way.

Near-blindness and muteness seem to be physical manifestations of Kang’s characters’ excruciating loneliness. At the end of the day, each goes home to nearly empty apartments on nearly empty streets. The relationships they do have with other people are fraught. The woman is divorced. Her ex-husband thinks she’s “too highly strung and that this was a bad influence” on their son, so she lost custody of the boy. The Greek professor lived much of his earlier life in Germany, where he and his family stood out and were sometimes discriminated against for being East Asian.

“Why ancient Greek?” a reader might ask. The woman tells herself she’s studying it because it’s so different from Korean that it might help her reclaim language itself; ancient Greek lacks the traumatic baggage that caused her to go silent in the first place. Still, her speech does not return. She is so speechless that her teacher starts to believe she is deaf as well as mute.

Then, one night the man breaks his glasses. Helpless without them, he needs an emergency optician. The woman can help.

Beautifully translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, Greek Lessons conjures a mood that calls to mind the Korean word ho, which is that time just after the sun sets and just before it rises. To go Bergmanesque again, it’s the hour of the wolf, when people experience the most anguish. Though the woman and her teacher are full of sorrow, their sadness doesn’t stop them from appreciating and even seeking small moments of beauty. This gives Kang’s slender book much of its power.

Han Kang’s Greek Lessons conjures a mood that calls to mind the Korean word ho, which is that time just after the sun sets and just before it rises.

For most, the term doula is associated with the process of childbirth and bringing new life into the world. However, beginning in the early 2000s, the death doula began to gain attention within American popular knowledge. These individuals perform a similar function to their birthing counterparts but instead focus on ushering people through the dying process and providing end-of-life support. Mikki Brammer’s gentle and uplifting debut novel, The Collected Regrets of Clover, takes readers into the fascinating world of one particularly memorable death doula and serves as a potent reminder that the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life.

Clover Brooks has always had an affinity for death, having lost both her parents at the age of 6 and later deciding to pursue a graduate degree in thanatology, the scientific study of death and dying. When her beloved grandfather dies, Clover decides to pay tribute to him by working as a death doula to provide companionship to others during their final days. 

Part of Clover’s job involves recording her clients’ final words, which she catalogs in one of three private notebooks: Regrets, Advice or Confessions. Most people’s dying revelations tend to fall into the Regrets category, and if Clover were honest with herself, she has more than enough regrets to fill an entire notebook on her own. Perhaps her biggest is that she has spent so much time honoring the lives of others that she has forgotten how to live her own life to the fullest.

All this changes when she forms an unexpected connection with her latest client, an indomitable woman named Claudia. Clover finds herself on a cross-country trip with Claudia’s grandson, searching for Claudia’s secret lost love. Along the way, Clover questions whether she has the courage to truly start living on her own terms and begin whittling down her stack of regrets while she still has the chance.

Like all the best fiction that centers on death, The Collected Regrets of Clover inspires its readers to ask, in the spirit of Mary Oliver, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Although not subtle in its messaging, Brammer’s novel is a comforting exploration of grief, love and human connection that is sure to appeal to fans of books that feel like a warm hug, like The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes.

Mikki Brammer’s gentle and uplifting debut novel takes readers into the fascinating world of a death doula and serves as a potent reminder that the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life.
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The second novel from Abraham Verghese, author of the unforgettable Cutting for Stone (2009), is a masterpiece. Put it on your bookcase next to A Passage to India by E.M. Forster or anything by the brave and brilliant Salman Rushdie. Indeed, put it next to any great novel of your choice.

Sprawling, passionate, tragic and comedic at turns, The Covenant of Water follows a family from 1900 to 1977 in an Indian region that eventually becomes the beautiful state of Kerala. Among the interesting things about this family is that they’re Christians among Hindus and Muslims, and once a generation, a family member dies by drowning. This tragic recurrence isn’t all that weird when you consider that their home is surrounded by water, and every year the region is all but washed away by the monsoon. Yet for this family, the drownings have taken on a near-mystical significance. Big Ammachi, the family matriarch, calls it the “Condition.”

Speaking of Big Ammachi, her story begins a few hours before her wedding. Normally a character’s wedding day wouldn’t fill the reader with dread, but in this case the bride is 12 years old. At this age she is known as Mariamma, and she is to marry a 40-year-old widowed landowner whom she’s never met. Though Mariamma’s mother is closer to this gentleman in age, she’s not eligible to marry him because she’s a widow, and a widow in this society is considered less than useless. Such is the dread hand of patriarchy in action.

But Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations, not just this time but again and again. The marriage of Mariamma and the thamb’ran—the boss—turns out to be a happy one. He is a gentle, stoic giant who scrupulously avoids bodies of water, even though it may take him days to walk to a place he could have reached in a few hours by boat. Mariamma and the thamb’ran’s young son, JoJo, adore each other, and it is he who gives her the nickname of Big Ammachi, which translates to “Big Little Mama.” The name sticks throughout her life. 

Big Ammachi’s first child is born with a thyroid condition, but instead of tragedy, Baby Mol’s life is one of light, joy and innocence. The second child, Philipose, born many years later, becomes the father of Big Ammachi’s namesake. This second Mariamma becomes a doctor determined to get to the bottom of the family’s Condition.

Verghese surrounds the family with a world of unforgettable characters. There’s Shamuel, the thamb’ran’s factotum, faithful till his last day. There’s the tragic and brilliant Elsie, Philipose’s artist wife, and the Glasgow-born surgeon Digby Kilgour, who’s come to India to practice medicine and who’s taken in by the saintly Dr. Rune Orqvist after a ghastly accident. There are the residents of the lazaretto (leprosy hospital) tended to by Dr. Orqvist, and an abundance of saints, scoundrels and people who are a little bit of both. There’s even an elephant named Damodaran.

All are interconnected, like the braiding waterways of Kerala. The Covenant of Water, as they say, is a lot. You won’t want it to end.

Abraham Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations again and again in his long awaited follow-up to Cutting for Stone.
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Love may be universal, but no one writes about love quite like Edmund White. The veteran author returns with The Humble Lover, an outrageous, tender novel that complicates contemporary ideas of what traditional, “appropriate” desires and relationships look like. 

Aldwych West is an aging elite who spends his money trying to woo the latest object of his affection, a ballerino (that’s the male form of ballerina) named August Dupond. Very quickly, the two men become entangled—emotionally, financially and physically. But Aldwych isn’t the only one with ambitions; his inheritance-hungry niece-in-law, Ernestine, also wants to win August over, even as the young man moves in with Aldwych. In this complicated web of desire and wealth, everyone chases ecstasy, no matter the cost. 

White has been pushing the boundaries of what love can be since the beginning of his career. With The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977, White (with co-author Charles Silverstein) helped to codify the sexual, psychological and spiritual pleasures of gay life. This holistic concept of pleasure is present as White plumbs the depths of Aldwych’s desires, detailing the man’s insecurity and loneliness—though of course, there are still thrilling moments that brim with sexuality, both inhibited and explicit. When Aldwych first invites August to stay with him, he restrains himself, and even though they are half-naked in the same bed, all they do is lie next to each other and sleep. When sex does appear on the page, it is ecstatic—tinged with, or perhaps enhanced by, the pain and hunger of uneven power dynamics.

The Humble Lover could be categorized as a political satire, but that would imply a target. Rather than going on a tirade, White forces readers to become intimate with what they might otherwise denounce. At first blush, Aldwych’s desperation is repulsive, particularly considering his vast wealth and the age gap between him and August, but the closer we get to Aldwych, the more relatable his misery is. He is searching for something, maybe youth, maybe affection, maybe acceptance, and White keeps his journey engaging, hilarious and moving throughout. 

As Ernestine clashes with Aldwych, and August defies Aldwych’s wishes, we become more and more invested, wondering which of these characters will finally get what they want. Filled with sublime descriptions of ballet and Aldwych’s out-of-touch, affluent sensibility, this novel is as mischievous as it is thought-provoking. It is Edmund White at his very best.

Mischievous as it is thought-provoking, The Humble Lover is Edmund White at his very best.
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Genetic engineering and mutations are a staple of fiction; think The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World or, more recently, Jurassic Park. Ramona Ausubel’s sparkling novel The Last Animal focuses on a young scientist’s impulsive attempt to revive an extinct species and the impact this has on her children, who are traumatized by the accidental death of their father. 

Graduate student Jane is the only female member of a scientific team working in the Arctic Circle, searching for traces of the wooly mammoth and hoping to reignite an ecosystem that could possibly reverse the effects of global warming. She is accompanied (begrudgingly) by her two teenage daughters, the fiery, sarcastic Eve and sweetly obedient Vera. The girls crave routine and stability, and they are fiercely protective of their mother as well as each other. 

Eve and Vera’s accidental discovery of a perfectly preserved baby mammoth in the Siberian permafrost brings a flurry of excitement. But once back at the University of California, Berkeley, Jane is still washing pipettes in the lab while research grants are handed out to her male colleagues. At a departmental fundraiser, Jane has a chance encounter with a glamorous woman named Helen, who has a palatial estate and home zoo in Italy, complete with giraffes and an elephant. This leads to Jane implanting a genetically modified embryo, based on the baby mammoth’s DNA, into Helen’s elephant. The next thing you know, Jane and her daughters are flying to Lake Como to meet an animal that’s been extinct for hundreds of years. 

The Last Animal whizzes around the planet—from the steppes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to a remote alpine village—with a dizzying, almost madcap speed, but at the novel’s heart are the deep ties between mother and daughters, sister and sister, human and animal. Though Jane, Eve and Vera are grieving, they never lose their sense of adventure and love of scientific discovery. Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.

Ramona Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.
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Sarah Cypher’s debut novel is as much about storytelling as it is about the characters who inhabit it. A swirling multigenerational family epic, it’s about the power that stories hold over families and whole nations, and the mysterious ways that certain indelible narratives can supplant real memories. Through an unusual structure that bucks narrative convention, Cypher explores the blurry lines between storytelling and history, memory and identity, exile and home.

Born with blue skin into a diasporic Palestinian family, Betty Rummani grows up awash in stories. During the first years of her life, she is passed between family members: her scientist mother, who often buries herself in work; her white father, desperate to remake the three of them into a functioning family unit; and her great aunt Nuha, the true keeper of the family’s stories. 

Betty recounts this turbulent childhood many years later as an adult faced with a difficult decision: to stay in the city she knows, or to follow the woman she loves to a new country. Searching for clarity, she hungrily turns to the notebooks left behind by Nuha when she died, and begins to piece together the surprising story of her aunt’s life.

Though Betty narrates the novel in the first person, she often feels like a peripheral character. She slips into Nuha’s voice and life as if she were Nuha herself. The book is full of vivid scenes from before Betty’s birth and memories of Nuha’s life in Palestine. This unusual structure can feel a bit clunky at times, as Betty recounts not only events she never witnessed but also the associated complex emotional realities. But readers who can relax into this kind of magical storytelling will find it both whimsical and powerful.

Cypher’s prose has a softness to it and a melodic cadence. It often feels as if Betty is speaking directly to the reader, though when she breaks the fourth wall, she does so slyly, so quietly you’ll miss it if you blink. The story feels like it’s being untangled as it’s told, and this—along with subtle glimpses of almost-magic—provides the sense of mystery that permeates the book.

The Skin and Its Girl is an intriguing debut, a story within a story within a story, and a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.

Sarah Cypher’s first novel is a story within a story within a story, a lyrical and haunting journey through generations and across oceans.

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