PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"Given the size of the thing it indicts — not only America, but the entirety of modern society — it’s a somewhat spectacular achievement that Gabriel Bump’s second novel, The New Naturals, feels as fun as it does ... sharp, witty even in some of its darkest moments ... This sort of thing could get real dour real quick. Fortunately, Bump has a sense of humor, and makes good use of it. There are slivers of Denis Johnson here, especially in the dialogue, which often recalls the hospital scene from Jesus’ Son: people speaking through and around one another, the result uproarious, addictive and just removed from how most human beings actually talk. It’s delightful ... There are a couple of frustrating aspects to The New Naturals. The first is stylistic ... The other issue is pacing — or rather, the relationship between pacing and depth. Virtually every character in this novel is incredibly compelling. Rio and Gibraltar feel especially alive, in large part because of how well Bump renders the small contours of their love, even as their utopian dream spirals out of control. But the focus shifts from one set of characters to the next too haphazardly, and not all the narrative threads are reconciled as convincingly as one might hope ... Regardless, The New Naturals homes in on perhaps the most daunting anxiety of modern life: the sense that some load-bearing beam is about to cave, and there’s only a foggy, terrifying guess as to what comes next.\
Salman Rushdie
PositiveThe Globe and Mail (CAN)Grand and conflicted ... Victory City is many things – an Indian historical epic, a centuries-long fable, a meditation on the self-ruinous nature of power – but perhaps more than anything else, it is a story about the immortality of stories, the way a tale told will always outlive a sword swung ... Victory City begins at the beginning and ends at the end of a life, even if that life is overrun with magic ... It takes a while for the story to dig its claws in, and there’s a stylistic cost to Rushdie’s very fable-heavy approach. A little too often, the narrator slips into jarringly ornate modes of speaking ... At his best, Rushdie composes with a scalpel – every observation at once transgressive and authoritative, a necessary opening up of things ... A conflicted piece of writing, too often a victim of the warring demands of wit, world-building grandeur and narrative pacing. More so, the aftertaste of Victory City is of a desperate plea for shared humanity, especially in our darkest times.
V. V. Ganeshananthan
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPerhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like \'terrorism,\' and be done ... Ganeshananthan is a writer of remarkable restraint. Occasionally a precious exclamation mark finds its way into an especially cataclysmic scene, or the narrator might feel the air rushing out of her lungs or her hand involuntarily covering her mouth at the news of a loved one’s death; but otherwise the prose is almost unsatisfyingly steady. And yet, in tone and emotional register, Sashi’s storytelling is a perfect fit for the delicate balance she is forced to walk by virtue of living in a society where running afoul of the dominant forces, saying the wrong thing, leveling too impassioned a rebuke, can prove a capital offense ... The narrator’s deliberative mode of describing her life feels, by the end of the novel, like the only way this story could have been told ... And when she wants to, Ganeshananthan can loosen her restraint to pull off gorgeous sentences.
Jamil Jan Kochai
RaveThe AtlanticAmerican literature is necessarily littered with meditations on violence—its ubiquity, its marrow-deep kinship with this country’s mythology of frontiers tamed and destiny manifested. But although Jamil Jan Kochai’s writing touches on these themes, his profound and visceral short-story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, is much more an interrogation of another central facet of modern American violence: its absurdity. More than almost any other work of fiction I’ve read in the post-9/11 era, Kochai’s collection lays bare the surrealism that colors nearly every interaction between one of history’s most powerful empires and the people it considers disposable. By using a fantastical style to describe the ordinary lives lost over the course of the war, Kochai brings into relief the farcical nature of a conflict in which an army can investigate itself for the death of phantom terrorists killed remotely from a control room. The result is a dark literary impeachment, a fable in which the emperor is missing not clothes but a conscience ... Simply detailing the scope and nature of the War on Terror’s carnage is one thing, but Kochai, whose stories feature anthropomorphic monkeys who instigate revolutions and a child’s severed limbs dutifully reattached by his mother, opts for a far less-traveled road, creating a world so preposterous that the violence seems like just another type of everyday absurdity. In a vacuum, Kochai’s characters and scenes would come off as ludicrous, but framed against the past two decades, they reveal how inured we’ve become to the strangeness of war. The book’s central means of indictment is to show us just how terrifyingly routine violence became for anyone who lived through the U.S. military’s prolonged campaign in response to the September 11 attacks ... In clumsier hands, such subject matter might result in monotonously dour pieces of fiction...Kochai achieves the opposite. The stories in this collection are wildly divergent in form and style, veering from surreal to photorealistic to, in some cases, both at once ... Kochai’s fiction speaks to the human need to make sense of overwhelming violence—who survives it and who doesn’t; who is held culpable and who isn’t. Such questions are often considered the domain of distant others, but Kochai makes his readers confront them head-on. His stories aren’t about some faraway people. There’s no such thing as faraway people.
Aamina Ahmad
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... quietly stunning...stunning not only on account of the writer’s talent, of which there is clearly plenty, but also in its humanity, in how a book this unflinching in its depiction of class and institutional injustice can still feel so tender ... Given that perhaps the most exhausted narrative container in American cultural life is the murder investigation... it would be easy for readers and booksellers to categorize this story as something in that vein. But Ahmad has taken on an entirely different kind of storytelling. Over the sweep of the novel’s middle, and especially in its quiet yet crushing conclusion, the fullness of the characters and their intersecting lives makes this far more than a murder mystery ... Where the novel sags, it’s when the narrative broadens from its tight focus into intergenerational saga. But it is a short interlude; the characters are too real, as is the violent collision of their scheming and resignation, the depths of their wanting ... It is difficult to write a novel like this one and not contend with a spectrum of violence. There is immense misery in this book. Ahmad has done her research, and the world she constructs is fictional, but tethered to the world as it was, and in some places still is ... At the line level, Ahmad has a habit of wielding softness against the most grotesque scenes, giving them an intimacy anything louder would likely wash out ... Ahmad’s compassion and deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters never wavers, no matter how monstrous or self-interested or defeated they become ... extends through generations and transformations of place, all the way to a devastating final chapter, fully human, fully engaged with what makes us human, no matter the size of the wounds or the immunity of those who inflict them. The powerful might often escape consequences, Ahmad shows, but life without these is its own kind of poverty, its own miserable inheritance.
Neal Stephenson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSchmidt’s sulfur gun, and his decision to use it as the centerpiece of his unilateral geoengineering experiment, is the unifying thread in a story that features everything from Venetian nationalism to martial arts melees at the Indian-Chinese border. The characters who populate Stephenson’s fractured world are equally far-flung, and to his credit, the author gives the central ones elaborate pasts that could easily feel like notes cribbed from a series of unrelated Wikipedia articles, but don’t. There’s a density to these people, anchored firmly to the historical and geographical minutiae with which Stephenson is so often concerned. In fact, the back stories are the source of some of the book’s most emotionally resonant moments. As absurd as the rest of this sentence is going to sound, there is something profound in the grief of a veteran trying to hunt down the massive feral hog that ate his daughter. You don’t get this sort of thing too often in a lot of Stephenson’s work, and as is the case here, it’s all wrapped up in the sheer oddness of concept that permeates almost every other part of the scene. But when the author allows himself to center human emotion, he frequently does it quite well ... Partly as a result of all this density, though, the first half of Termination Shock can be a slog. There’s just so much character development to get through, so much technological and geopolitical groundwork to lay. It’s almost a necessity, given how sprawling and detailed a world the story demands. Stephenson is one of speculative fiction’s most meticulous architects, and here he’s got sheets and sheets of blueprint. If you’re one of the many readers who enjoy his novels for precisely this reason, rejoice — few writers do this stuff better. There’s a roughly 20-page section early on that explains exactly how the giant sulfur gun works, and I found it fascinating as a work of both imagination and pedantry. But there are also a couple of drawn-out scenes in which multiple characters speak almost exclusively in exposition and, at the end, one of those characters helpfully sums up all the key concepts discussed ... There are also more minor gears that don’t quite connect ... Throughout the book, but especially as it nears its climax, the drones that fly in and out of so many scenes feel overused, their myriad capabilities bordering on deus ex machina territory ... One of Stephenson’s greatest talents is his ability to utilize size and scope, the spatial intensity of things ... manages to pull off a rare trick, at once wildly imaginative and grounded, and readers who go in for this world-building will likely leave with a heightened concern for all the ways in which we are actively making the planet inhospitable. Like T. R. Schmidt’s sulfur gun, this novel is both a response to a deeply broken reality, and an attempt to alter it.
Meng Jin
RaveBookPage...spectacular and emotionally polyphonic ... In a particularly brilliant act of alchemy, the novel finds new ways to dissect the geopolitical significance of China’s explosive 1980s through the complicated nature of the story’s relationships ... Su Lan is a difficult and singular character of immense depth. What makes Little Gods extraordinary is the way it examines not only the trajectory of its characters’ lives but also their emotional motivations ... an awesome achievement.
Jeanine Cummins
RaveBookPage... a fast-paced, narrative-focused journey into the often terrifying world of the North, Central and South American refugee trail ... Cummins moves the story along skillfully, with sprinkled-in suspense in the form of backstory and action-heavy sequences. Much of the book is made up of relatively short, present-tense sentences, and there’s little in the way of digression. Like its two central characters, the story is in constant motion. But for all the suspense, what holds the novel together is the relationship between Lydia and Luca. Both characters are forced to delay their grieving process in order to survive, and so they are bound not only by blood but also by shared trauma ... an important book for the current political moment, providing readers with a better understanding of the motives behind such journeys at a time when migrants are readily and easily vilified. It’s an absolute page turner with wider relevance.
Carolina De Robertis
RaveBookPageFreedom—its presence and absence, the longing for it—colors every page of Carolina De Robertis’ masterful, passionate and at times painful new novel ... The novel covers some 35 years, frequently changing focus from one character to another and yet at all times retaining a powerful sense of intimacy. Each of De Robertis’ central characters is of incredible emotional depth. Cantoras is at its most powerful when dissecting consequences of desire ... The bond the five women form—the way they orbit, attract and repel, take solace and find strength in one another—is the most moving part of Cantoras. By the end of the novel, there is a sense that the reader has done more than simply peer in on the lives of strangers, that instead they have experienced something organic and deeply human—a dangerous, powerful kind of freedom.
Rajia Hassib
PositiveBookPageHassib is especially talented at rendering the small details of daily Egyptian life—not in some exoticized fashion but rather as a foundation on which to lay the wide variety of experiences, ideologies and aspirations of the country’s citizenry. These details, found throughout the book, shine ... What’s most impressive about A Pure Heart isn’t the central tension—how Gameela’s death comes about—but rather the novel’s meditation on the nature of multiple identities ... There is a tenderness and honesty in the way Hassib describes the relationship between the two women, and it is in this relationship that the novel is most nuanced.
Oscar Cásares
PositiveBookPage...quiet, deeply human ... There are many moments of quiet power in Cásares’ story ... The novel’s depiction of children’s daily lives is particularly well done ... Where We Come From is not the kinetic, suspenseful novel its opening pages will make many readers believe it is. This is a good thing. It moves instead at a slow, deliberate pace.
Namwali Serpell
RaveBookPage\"... an expansive yet intricate novel that bends, inverts and at times ignores conventions of time and place. Part historical fiction, part futurism, part fantasy, Serpell’s hundred-year saga of three families and their intertwined fortunes is as unique as it is ambitious. And in just about every way, it succeeds ... There is a timeless quality to Serpell’s storytelling ... In clumsier hands this complex, sprawling, century--spanning book might have easily folded in on itself, a victim of its scale and scope. Instead, The Old Drift holds together, its many strands diverging and converging in strange but undeniable rhythm ... And for all the ways it subverts and reinvents convention, The Old Drift is a very human book, deeply concerned with that most virulent strain of history: the unpunishable crimes of others.\
Jerome Charyn
PositiveBookPage\"... a surprisingly poignant assessment of smaller, more universally human moments ... Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively ... Deftly, Charyn interweaves what is real and invented about Roosevelt’s life, and the result is at once surprising and very entertaining.\
Khaled Khalifa Trans. by Leri Price
PositiveBookPage\"Many Western readers will find Khaled Khalifa’s new novel unbearably grim ... Death Is Hard Work moves in a way similar to the war it chronicles—mercilessly over the bones of its victims ... Frequently and without warning, the novel strays from the present-day narrative into the histories, dreams and frustrations of its central characters. The result is something at the intersection of Faulkner and Kafka, a modern-day As I Lay Dying passed through the lens of maddening bureaucracy, hypocrisy and slaughter. Readers looking for optimism or resolution need look elsewhere. Readers who want an unflinching account of one of recent history’s bloodiest civil wars will find in Khalifa’s latest work a story superficially colored by the many manifestations of death, but chiefly concerned with what a miraculous, Herculean thing it is to simply live.\
Katie Williams
PositiveBookPageWilliams does an admirable job of weaving myriad characters’ stories together ... But the novel is at its best when it pushes the technology to the background and turns instead to the emotional mechanics of happiness. Williams is a deft observer of small human details, and in moments when she pinpoints these details, the story shines.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
PositiveBookPageThe Map of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to the brutality of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient Arabian history ... an audacious debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space ... There is a heartfelt quality to the story, evident in the meticulous historical research that must have gone into the creation of the ancient part of the book.
Jasmin Darznik
PositiveBookPageWriting from a place of deep reverence for her central character, Darznik crafts a sensory experience, an Iran whose sights and sounds and scents feel neither superficial nor trivially exotic. The result is a well-honed novel about the meaning of rebellion—what happens when a poet of singular talent decides 'that it’s shame, not sin, that’s unholy.' ”
Luis Alberto Urrea
RaveBookPage...takes its rightful place alongside the best contemporary accounting of what it means to belong in this country of endless otherness ... Urrea writes in exhilarating but controlled slashes, wielding a machete that cuts like a scalpel. Every page comes alive with scent, taste and, perhaps most movingly, touch.
