PositiveZyzzyvaIcelandic novelist, playwright, and poet Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir offers a bizarrely lighthearted and humorous –– yet nonetheless moving –– portrayal of suicide and post-war life in her latest novel, Hotel Silence ... like [protagonist] Jonas and the inhabitants of this war-ravaged city, much of its original beauty can be restored –– and as Ólafsdóttir shows in her winning novel, it is a task worth attempting.
Akwaeke Emezi
RaveZYZZYVA\"Emezi offers a perspective on mental illness that refuses categorization and diagnoses. Rather than characterizing Ada’s behaviors—her insatiable sexual appetite after being raped, her self-mutilation, alcoholism, and an eating disorder—as coping mechanisms or symptoms of mental illness, Emezi attributes them to conflicts between our spiritual and physical selves. She also refuses to portray the spirits that lead Ada to acts like self-harm as entirely malevolent. As she makes clear, Asughara and the other ?gbanje love Ada, and exist to protect her. With her brilliant novel, Emezi shows how the different aspects of our personality are often in conflict, and how that conflict can be inescapable.\
