In December 1979, shortly after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, army general Chun Doo-hwan assumed the role of South Korean leader. His expansion of martial law and crackdown on political activities led to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, an anti-authoritarian movement that began with student demonstrations and ended with the killing by government troops of hundreds of citizens, many of them in their teens.

Han Kang, author of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian, revisits the uprising’s toll on her native South Korea in Human Acts, a harrowing and stylistically daring series of linked stories.

Kang shifts perspectives and narrative styles throughout the book. The central figure who connects the stories is Dong-ho, a 15-year-old in his third year of middle school who, during the uprising, searches for Jeong-dae, his best friend, whom he believes has been killed. But, in the process of looking for his friend, Dong-ho becomes one of the casualties.

The other stories, set from 1980 through 2013, are told from the point of view of characters who were part of the uprising, including an editor contending with state censorship, an ex-prisoner who was the militia chief in the students’ plan to hold the university’s Provincial Office, a former factory employee traumatized for 20 years by the torture she suffered, Dong-ho’s mother and, in an audacious authorial move, Jeong-dae’s corpse. The epilogue focuses on Kang herself, who recalls hearing adults speak of a murdered 15-year-old when she was 9 and now wants to learn all she can about his fate. 

Although Human Acts depicts violence in graphic detail, anyone who reads this work will be moved not only by Kang’s poetic telling of horrific events but also by her nuanced treatment of the material. As the ex-prisoner asks, “Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species?” This novel is a thoughtful and humane answer to difficult questions and a moving tribute to victims of the atrocity.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

The title of Thus Bad Begins, Javier Marías’ challenging new novel, comes from Act III of Hamlet: “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind,” or, in other words, the current situation may be dire, but worse is to come. The Prince of Denmark’s preceding line is, “I must be cruel only to be kind.” As in the play, there’s cruelty in this book, and, like Shakespeare, Marías is canny enough to ask, is malice ever justified?

The narrator, Juan de Vere, recounts the brief time in 1980—five years after the end of the Franco dictatorship—when he was the 23-year-old live-in amanuensis to film director Eduardo Muriel. After Juan had been in the older man’s employment for a while, Muriel made an unusual request.

He asked Juan to spy on Jorge Van Vechten, a 60-year-old pediatrician who, despite having served on the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, earned a reputation as a caring doctor who tended to everyone, even those subject to reprisals after the war.

Muriel wanted Juan to invite Van Vechten out at night and introduce him to women. He didn’t explain his reasons, except to tell Juan that Van Vechten “behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman, or possibly more than one.” Juan soon suspected that this hint related to another of the novel’s many mysteries, Muriel’s brutal treatment of his 40-year-old wife, Beatriz. 

Thus Bad Begins is less focused than The Infatuations, Marías’ 2013 masterpiece, but it’s a satisfyingly enigmatic work that dares to ask: What’s the point of setting a record straight if the truth “gives the lie to everything that went before”? This being a Marías novel, there are no easy answers, and that’s as it should be. As Juan says, “The past has a future we never expect.”

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lara and Marija have always been more like sisters than friends. Growing up in the Balkans, they spent every summer together in Sarajevo, stealing fruit from the neighbor’s gardens and quoting classic Hollywood movies. The friendship only deepened in college, where they shared everything from fiercely anti-nationalist sentiments to a pale, white boy named Milko. Life was about ideological, heady conversations in tiny cafes over shots of vodka and reckless nights spent tangled in sheets. 

But when the Bosnian war begins, Lara, a Serb, and Marija, a Bosnian, are forced to face the realities of their separate identities. Lara moves to Washington, D.C., with her American husband, where she throws herself into her graduate studies in political science and tries desperately to nurture an unraveling marriage. Meanwhile, Marija returns to Sarajevo to work as an undercover journalist. When contact with Marija suddenly ceases, Lara is gripped with a fear that she has lost her. Amid the chaos and mess of her personal life and driven by her desire to know the truth, Lara embarks on a journey through war-torn Serbia in an attempt to discover what really happened to her dearest friend. 

Country of Red Azaleas, the third novel from Romanian writer Domnica Radulescu, is a tightly wrought, beautiful story of friendship. Whether she’s conjuring up the colorful sights and smells of the prewar Balkans or describing the “fierce clarity of the war” where you “get to see humanity all bare,” Radulescu creates images that lodge themselves firmly in your consciousness, giving you ideas to ponder long after you turn the final page. In the tradition of Elena Ferrante and Khaled Hosseini, Country of Red Azaleas prevails as a true testament to a bond that transcends the devastation of war.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Love in Lowercase, Samuel lives a quiet life based on routine. He’s a loner in every sense of the word: His family interactions are perfunctory, not pleasant. A professor, he teaches about great stories and tortured characters, but his own life is quite shallow and plotless—until a cat wanders through the front door of his Barcelona apartment and changes his life, inviting in love, friendship and even a little bit of adventure.

Inspired by his new cat, Samuel begins to reach beyond his comfort zone. He cultivates friendships with a vet, a neighbor and people he meets at a bar. Of course, a book with “love” in the title wouldn’t be complete without romance, and when Samuel meets a beautiful, mysterious woman named Gabriela, we get to see if his decision to re-engage with his life pays off romantically as well as platonically.

Samuel attributes his new relationship success to following signs, to the butterfly effect, to magic and happenstance. But Spanish author Francesc Miralles seems to be showing us that Samuel’s decision to take the opportunities life’s been handing him all along is what really creates his relationship changes.

The title of Love in Lowercase refers to the power of small actions. Miralles has given us a lovely little book with nods to literature, philosophy and music that encourages us to wake up to our lives and to the people in them, and to let small coincidences lead us to love.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Few novels manage to be both coy and brusquely honest, uproarious and profoundly affecting. Even fewer are about teeth—and yet Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s second work of fiction, The Story of My Teeth, is all of the above. But even more so, this eccentric work is about stories themselves. Recalling the literary traditions of Renata Adler, Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar, Luiselli abandons the traditional form of a novel in favor of something startlingly original to do this rambunctious and bittersweet story justice.

Divided into seven sections, The Story of My Teeth lays everything out at the start—chapter one, after all, is titled: “The Story (Beginning, Middle, and End).” Indeed, the life of this novel’s protagonist, Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez (aka Highway), is chronicled from beginning to end in this very first section. Born with terrible malocclusion, Highway rambles around the Americas until he becomes a world-class auctioneer, constantly in search for both salvation and the most glorious set of dentures—which he finally finds in an extremely unusual turn of events. As Highway would say: End of Story.

But Highway’s tale doesn’t end here. In a series of stories set in miniature, the following sections chronicle the various histories of famous teeth, from Plato’s to Virginia Woolf’s, as well as other episodes and characters that blur the line between fact and fiction. These sections form a sort of analog—including images, timelines and other devices—yet always reflect back to Highway as the narrative pinwheels around him, presenting revisionist histories and ulterior insights into the significance of storytelling itself.

Finishing The Story of My Teeth will leave you wanting more of Luiselli’s sense of humor and grace, her perfect ear for entertainment and epiphany. But more importantly, this novel will change the way you look at writing and stories—and will reveal that in the end, what is imagined is as important as anything else.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, August 2015

Susan Barker’s daring new novel, The Incarnations, begins in 2008, just months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics. The city is grimy and polluted behind the burst of new construction. After nights spent in the dense traffic of the city’s multiple ring roads, taxi driver Wang returns home exhausted to his wife and daughter. A rare visit with his invalid father and vicious stepmother, an aging femme fatale, doesn’t add much pleasure to Wang’s already lonely existence, but things take a turn for the bizarre when an anonymous letter, tucked into the visor of his cab, assures Wang that he is the reincarnated soul mate of the sender.

Letters continue to appear, each accompanied by a story drawn from more than a thousand years of Chinese history. In each life, Wang and the sender inhabit different roles and relationships, yet every letter tells a tale similar in its depictions of betrayal, lust and obsession. With each communication, the sender grows closer, increasing Wang’s unease and memories of his unhappy childhood, his mentally ill mother and his own hospitalization for depression.

The past-life stories in The Incarnations are culled from some of the bloodiest moments in Chinese history, from the invasion of Genghis Khan to the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution. Barker is unsparing in her depiction of China’s political and social excesses, and the closer the stories get to the present, the harder it is to dismiss them as ancient history or folktale. The novel’s shifts from the distant past to the present are seamless, and the bittersweet twist at the book’s finale will have readers searching back through the novel for clues to the ending.

Barker has explored the world of ghosts before: Characters from both of her previous novels (Sayonara Bar and The Orientalist and the Ghost) were haunted by visitors from beyond the grave—but never were the stakes so high. Barker, who grew up in East London with a British father and Chinese Malaysian mother, spent several years in China researching The Incarnations. She skillfully combines history, the supernatural and the everyday in a novel that suggests that the past is never really past, while providing a cracking good read.

Jean Perdu is a self-described literary apothecary. From his barge-turned-bookshop on the Seine, he doesn’t just sell books; he prescribes them as a pharmacist prescribes medicines, matching books to their perfect readers to help customers overcome life’s difficulties. And he does so with near perfect success. The only exception to the rule is Perdu himself.

Haunted by the love of his life, Manon, who left him more than 20 years ago, Perdu has distanced himself from reality: He avoids romance entirely, refuses to utter Manon’s name and leaves her final letter unopened. His imagination tells him that she left him because she got tired of him.

An encounter with his grieving neighbor across the hall, Catherine, a soon-to-be divorcée, finally drives Perdu to open the letter. What he discovers shocks him to his core and sends him cross-country to rediscover and make peace with the life he has lost. By barge, lock and dam, he travels all the way to the South of France, befriending a distinctive cast of characters—and staying in touch with Catherine via letter—along the way. 

Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop, already a bestseller in Germany, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands, is a beautiful story of grief, companionship, forgiveness and building a life worth living. A vulnerable, relatable tale of great love and loss, missed opportunities and moving on, The Little Paris Bookshop is, like the books its main character recommends, medicine for the wounded soul.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What happens when a book meets its perfect reader at precisely the right moment? For the narrator of The Library of Unrequited Love, a librarian who has witnessed many such encounters during her lifetime, her heart flutters. She knows the power of books to capture the full range of human experience and, as a result, help people when they feel their most abandoned, lonely and worthless.

It is at one of these low points that we meet the librarian, a single, middle-aged bookworm who fell in love, once, but was left. While preparing to open the library one morning, she finds a patron who has locked himself in the library’s basement, where the narrator spends most of her time, overnight. A monologue follows in which she gushes with observations about love, life and, you guessed it, libraries.

The Library of Unrequited Love, a debut novel by French writer and journalist Sophie Divry, is as much an ode to libraries as it is a monologue on heartbreak and loneliness. The narrator’s passion for literature, French history and the organizational precision of libraries is infectious. She is as knowledgeable about the history written in books as she is about the world before her, which she captures effortlessly through observations about different “seasons” of patrons—winter’s “central heating refugees,” spring’s students, summer’s buzz of people searching for something to do.

And though it would be easy for her to romanticize the library, she doesn’t. She admits its hierarchy, its monotonous drone and its lack of quality books and readers, while she also confesses her love for a student researcher who barely notices her. In many ways, the narrator is looking for love as much as she is that spark she sees her patrons experience in books.

Funny, smart and incredibly sincere, The Library of Unrequited Love is a lovely, quick read that speaks to the bookworm in all of us.

Russian-born Alina Bronsky made a splash with 2011’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, with praise from sources as varied as The Daily Beast and the Financial Times. She’s back with a third novel, Just Call Me Superhero, serving up more biting wit and a no-frills style that readers can eat up in big, satisfying chunks.

It’s been a year since Marek, a 17-year-old from Berlin, was mauled by a Rottweiler. Perpetually hidden behind sunglasses, he avoids mirrors and most people, struggling with their shocked reactions to the sight of his face. It takes a trick by his mother, no-nonsense divorce lawyer Claudia, to get him to a support group, but one look at the beautiful wheelchair-bound Janne keeps him at the meeting. Though he despises his other new cohorts and their leader, dubbed “the Guru,” his longing for the ice-cold Janne keeps him coming back. A trip to the countryside tests his maturity and puts him at odds with the group, but when a family emergency calls him away, he finds he might need those “cripples” more than he realized. Whisked off to the home of his young stepmother and the half-brother he barely knows, Marek faces a gauntlet of challenges to his self-absorption. Through this, he begins his journey to self-acceptance.

A twist ending comes out of left field, but the sum of Just Call Me Superhero is greater than its disparate plot parts: Bronsky’s sharp humor, her deftly painted characters and Marek’s strong narrative voice are all it needs. A painful, tender, very funny bildungsroman void of sentimentality, Bronsky’s book captures contemporary European adolescence in one delicious swoop. Adults and teens should enjoy it equally.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Much like J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin, best-selling author Haruki Murakami is the type of writer whose fans queue up at bookstores at midnight, clamoring to be the first to get their hands on his latest book. Unfortunately, people who do not read Japanese have had to wait quite some time to read Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which was published to acclaim in Japan in April 2013.

One could argue that it was worth the wait. In this somber book, readers are introduced to Tsukuru Tazaki, a Tokyo train engineer in his mid-30s. During high school, Tsukuru had been immersed in a particularly close friendship with two other boys and two girls in his hometown. However, one day soon after they started college, the group kicked him out of their close-knit circle and refused all future contact, without giving any explanation.

Now Tsukuru’s girlfriend has decided that before their relationship can progress, he needs to get to the bottom of why his friends tossed him out like a piece of garbage. So Tsukuru embarks on an international pilgrimage to visit each of his friends for an explanation behind the breakup, in order to move on with his life and find closure.

Traveling from Northern Japan through Tokyo and over to Finland, Tsukuru is immersed in the type of nostalgia where one feels homesick for a past that cannot be recreated or reclaimed, no matter how hard one might try. Those who have suffered a loss of friendship (and who can say that they haven’t ever been ousted by a clique?) will find this book hits particularly close to home.

As the ending of this sorrow-steeped novel approaches, a beautiful future for Tsukuru is only guaranteed by a close examination of the secrets that have stained his past.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.