‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave Booklist In Murakami’s multiverses, as always, fascination dominates.

Yoko Tawada, trans. by Margaret Mitsutani

Positive Booklist Mitsutani, thankfully, returns as Tawada’s translator-of-choice, again adroitly parsing anglophone equivalents of the renowned polyglot’s intricate wordplay.

Danzy Senna

Rave Shelf Awareness Senna is a fabulously sly, provocative writer, seamlessly focusing race and privilege on virtually every page ... Senna again focuses on race and privilege in the novel Colored Television, with impressively engrossing, adroitly illuminating results.

Yoko Ogawa, trans. by Stephen B. Snyder

Rave Booklist Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her notquite- quotidian family saga with pivotal world events, but what disturbingly, ironically stands out in 2024 are references to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Auschwitz, and Israel’s founding.

Yoko Tawada, trans. Susan Bernofsky

Rave Booklist For patient readers, the strangers’ developing relationship will be an esoteric, erudite lull before a brilliantly shocking revelation.

Anton Hur

Rave Booklist Hur creates with expansive erudition harnessing science, technology, history, landscapes, culture; his world building is brilliant and boundless.

Tracy O'Neill

Pan Booklist Despite O’Neill’s intense self-examination (and impressive vocabulary), her excessive details, distracting asides, and disturbingly misplaced and comical insertions ultimately diminish a potentially illuminating reading experience.

R O Kwon

Mixed Booklist \"Kwon creates stark sentences elevated by exquisite vocabulary—fiat, mirific, Icarian, sluing. Spare pages belie a dense narrative exploring identity, sexuality, religion, and parenthood ... In spite of many notable elements, Exhibit is more show than indelible art.\

Crystal Hana Kim

Rave Booklist Kim’s second novel is a wrenching, haunting read as her breathtaking storytelling provides indelible testimony to witness and behold.

Gina Chung

Rave Booklist Superb ... Mythic Korean origins, deftly reimagined, memorably haunt some stories ... Vibrant.

Tessa Hulls

Rave Booklist Detailed, vulnerable, harrowing.

Andrés N. Ordorica

Rave Shelf Awareness Searing ... Ordorica affectingly ciphers stripped-bare emotions into a haunting tribute to love and survival ... Fiercely impassioned.

Katherine Min

Positive Shelf Awareness Balancing biting humor, wrenching despair, and unexpected redemption, Min radiantly succeeds in delivering that promised (mostly, cautiously) happy ending.

Anthony Veasna So

Positive Booklist So’s essays resonate with vulnerable eloquence, but his potency lies in storytelling, effortlessly creating immersive worlds animated by familiar, vital characters, their vibrancy further magnifying the poignant loss of what could have been.

E. J. Koh

Rave Booklist Brilliant, sly ... Koh produces another intricately accomplished, intimate melding of history and storytelling.

Salar Abdoh

Positive Booklist Plenty of bed-hopping, both considered and consummated, happens on Iranian-born, New York-based professor Abdoh’s provocative pages, resulting in a poignant dark, dark dramedy exposing the elusive, performative nature of never quite true love.

Ed Park

Rave Booklist Park blurs fact and fiction so seamlessly that search results will undoubtedly surprise if not shock, albeit not without reverential delight.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave Shelf Awareness Nunez adroitly turns each of the characters...into the titular vulnerables, confronting exposure to illness, isolation, rejection, homelessness, and death ... A spare, remarkable novel featuring an unnamed narrator contemplating the nature of writing fiction amid the global Covid-19 pandemic.

K-Ming Chang

Mixed Booklist Chang’s existing fan base will likely be enthralled; her fantastical, visceral meanderings may confound or repel others.

Tan Twan Eng

Rave Booklist Tan succeeds in delivering another intricate literary gift.

Paul Yoon

Rave Booklist Another spare, controlled masterpiece, comprising seven exquisite stories highlighting the Korean diaspora scattered across time and oceans.

Banana Yoshimoto, trans. by Asa Yoneda

Positive Booklist Yoshimoto infuses the familiar coming-of-age experience (leaving home, separation from parents) with (of course) unusual twists.

Justin Torres

Rave Booklist Spectacularly displays his remarkable manipulations of fiction and reality.

Sheena Patel

Positive Booklist A barbed, gut-punch confession ... An anti-Bridget Jones for the short-fused, screen-addicted generation.

Jesse Q Sutanto

Positive Booklist Death shouldn’t be funny or sweet or heartwarming, except maybe in a new cozy series starring Vera Wong.

Yu Miri, trans. Morgan Giles

Rave Booklist Yu brilliantly combines almost a century of onerous history, peripatetic family drama, and wondrous storytelling. The epic translation, requiring intimate knowledge of Japanese, Korean, and English, is a brilliant polyglot achievement by Tokyo-based Giles.

Wendy Chin-Tanner

Positive Booklist Chin-Tanner’s exacting details render little-known medical history, deftly interwoven with the Chinese American experience, from paper sons to debilitating racism to bifurcated identity, to create a satisfying, polyphonic narrative about the intricate relationships within families by birth and circumstance.

Nishanth Injam

Rave Booklist July 2023. 224p. Pantheon, $25 (9780593317693); e-book (9780593317709). REVIEW. First published May 15, 2023 (Booklist). Eleven gems make up Injam’s stellar debut short-story collection showcasing exquisite quotidian beauty haunted by seemingly inevitable loss.

Cristina García

Rave Shelf Awareness Stalwartly stands alone ... Return readers might notice that García\'s inventive structure in both novels is similar, mixing third- and first-person narration, moving back and forth in time, and inserting interludes for illuminating, sometimes teasing, glimpses into the past. Underscoring a visceral longing for connections--even hugs are too few--in generations scattered by ideology, politics, and just plain circumstance, García presents an exquisite family affair to remember.

Augusto Higa Oshiro, trans. Jennifer Shyue

Positive Booklist Oshiro manages to expose decades of invisible history, including the U.S.-initiated deportation of Japanese Peruvians to U.S. prison camps during WWII. Talented polyglot Shyue enables Oshiro’s debut in English, rendering Oshiro’s dense, lyrical prose into a resonating anti-bildungsroman of a man’s dissolution.

Fae Myenne Ng

Rave Booklist Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives ... Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.

Kyung-Sook Shin, trans. Anton Hur

Rave Booklist Shin masterfully glides between quotidian details and astounding feats of survival revealed through multiple voices ... to create another universally empathic masterpiece.

Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won

Rave Booklist Han has built an enviable career providing exquisite, intimate space for damaged, lost souls. Her Booker-sharing translator, the lauded Deborah Smith, has gifted three of Han’s English-rendered titles to Anglophone audiences; she returns here for a fourth seamless collaboration ... What might originally read like a bifurcated narrative deftly intertwines into a haunting exploration of tentative possibilities and yearned-for connections.

Abraham Verghese

Rave Booklist \"Instantly and utterly absorbing is the so-worth-the-long-wait new novel by the author of Cutting for Stone ... Verghese—who gifts the matriarch his mother’s name and even some of her stories—illuminates colonial history, challenges castes and classism, and exposes injustices, all while spectacularly spinning what will undoubtedly be one of the most lauded, awarded, best-selling novels of the year.\

Joe Milan Jr.

Positive Booklist Amid the uncomfortable laughter, Milan confronts transracial identity, societal roles chosen and forced, limits of language, \'good\' and \'bad\' mutability, and the porousness of truth and lies.

Nicole Chung

Rave Booklist Chung’s prose hones her grief into razor-sharp insights even as her words interrogate, honor, and celebrate the unbreakable bonds of parenthood.

Jinwoo Chong

Rave Booklist Chong bursts forth, Athena-like, with an impossible-to-simply-label masterpiece that melds various genres—from Bildungsroman to speculative fiction, coming-of-age drama to epic tragedy, crime documentary to noirish thriller—into an intricate literary mosaic. Iterative repetition provides the novel’s structure in both its characters’ identities and Chong’s actual writing ... Chong stuns readers with a multipronged, multilayered, multivoiced, magnificent enigma.

Sonora Jha

Rave Shelf Awareness Astutely provoking, deeply disturbing, and unexpectedly delightful ... Jha is an extraordinary storyteller, aiming her shrewd erudition and humor directly at elitism, sexism, and racism.

Kathryn Ma

Rave Booklist Balancing humor and poignancy with seemingly effortless ease, Ma is a magnificent storyteller.

Matthew Salesses

Rave Shelf Awareness Intricate ... Salesses moves, fakes and pivots his narrative with practiced, sly expertise. He cracks inappropriate jokes, waxes philosophical, details (biological and adopted) family dysfunction, confronts cultural history, deciphers the tropes and plots complex dramas, all while deftly exposing pervasive racism and sexism in two of the worst, inequitable industries.

An Yu

Positive Booklist Yu delivers another intimate, intricate performance.

Rubén Degollado

Positive Booklist Degollado’s absorbing novel resembles deftly interlinked short stories with impressive, nonlinear chapters that could easily stand alone. That he favors the older Izquierdo children here suggests a sequel might prove necessary to assuage inspired, curious readers.

Bora Chung, trans. by Anton Hur

Rave Booklist Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur, is poised to shock and delight ... Bizarrely enigmatic, Chung’s collection proves irresistible.

Murasaki Yamada tr. Ryan Holmberg

Rave Booklist Decades since its introduction, the slice-of-home-life bildungsroman remains hauntingly relevant as a resonating record of wife- and motherhood ... The story is autobiographically inspired—Yamada herself survived a violent marriage, during which drawing in secret became an act of resistance. Her pioneering manga—mostly black-and-white and strikingly expressive—was some of the first to realistically confront the difficulties of womanhood, a feat for which she deserves wider, greater recognition, as Holmberg presents in his essential, definitive afterword.

Guy Delisle tr. Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall

Positive Booklist ... showcases plenty of such droll, occasionally disturbing, shorter pieces spanning decades of his stupendous career. Little escapes his sharp observations that land with perfect timing, including a quiche-eating dead bird, an ax-wielding tree with a vendetta, and the exacting art of doing nothing. While Delisle’s distinct on-the-page avatar remains immediately recognizable—as a festival guest, exhibit honoree, reluctant companion to a panic attack–stricken neighbor—the collection also features strikingly different artistic styles from simplified line drawings to shade-heavy panels and highly-detailed scenes. \'Sit down . . . Pick up the pencil,\' Delisle convinces himself, so that we lucky readers can once more sit down and pick up his newest book.

Kevin Chen tr. Darryl Sterk

Positive Shelf Awareness ... certainly cinematic ... Chen divulges key events in his fiction--T\'s mysterious murder, the black dog\'s execution, Plenty\'s and neighbor Nut Wang\'s suicides--in multi-voiced, circular repetition, each time adding a little more information, as if to increase the circumference and take up more space. With each iterative reveal, Chen gloriously resurrects the dead--and emboldens the living.

E M Tran

Positive Shelf Awareness ... absorbing ... Despite a growing distance--of geography, time, generations--Tran\'s matriarchal epic gives voice to the \'many silences in [her] family\' by insisting \'the Trung women had a record of their existence.... Whatever else they maybe have sacrificed in marriage--dignity, autonomy, freedom--they insisted upon preserving their name.\' Tran adroitly claims their enduring stories.

Eduardo Halfon, trans. by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn

Rave Shelf Awareness Exquisite ... Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, who have translated previous books by Halfon, work in consultation with the author. The results are nonlinear vignettes that cross decades, countries, characters and world events in a gorgeously rendered meditation on borderless identity, historical traumas and ongoing repercussions.

Kim Hye-Jin tr. Jamie Chang

Rave Booklist ... impassioned ... seamlessly translated ... Kim’s confessional first-person narration expresses the sense of urgency to unburden one’s most vulnerable thoughts and longings and readers willing to become intimate witnesses will be rewarded with a resonating and empathic tale.

Elisa Shua Dusapin, trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Rave Shelf Awareness Dusapin\'s remarkably intricate and lean prose reveals a layered narrative about isolation and displacement ... Dusapin sets her novel amid a Tokyo heat wave, brilliantly imbuing the story with a sense of stifling unease. Claire can\'t connect with her grandparents; her peripatetic parents aren\'t available; she\'s estranged from her lover; and any attachment with Mieko is fleeting. Dusapin\'s spotlight on characters who ache with longing is a dazzling consideration of loneliness.

Celeste Ng

Rave Booklist So much of this utterly stupendous tale is hauntingly, horrifically, historically, currently all too real, from removing and caging children to anti-Asian hate crimes, violent protests, police brutality, and despotic (so-called) leadership. Yet Ng creates an exquisite story of unbreakable family bonds, lifesaving storytelling (and seemingly omniscient librarians!), brilliantly subversive art, and accidentally transformative activism. As lyrical as it is chilling, as astonishing as it is empathic, Our Missing Hearts arguably achieves literary perfection.

Yiyun Li

Positive Booklist From post-WWII rural France, where there was never enough, to a posh finishing school in England, Li creates an achingly controlled narrative simmering with desperation to be truly seen and heard.

Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi

Rave Shelf Awareness The nearly 15 years Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi spent writing and rewriting proves to be tenacity well invested, resulting in her audacious debut ... The 10 chapters here work as standalone pieces, but to read them together rewards audiences with mesmerizing intertwined narratives ... Born and raised in Nigeria, Ogunyemi deftly filters the personal, historical and political throughout her collection, weaving autobiographical details from her own career as a biomedical informatician with Christianity\'s culturally destructive colonialism, senseless police violence, labyrinthine healthcare and the consequences of the radical and racist polarization of U.S. society. Yet, Ogunyemi never forgets to engage and entertain even as she slyly exposes and educates ... For admiring readers, the radiance of Ogunyemi\'s debut hopefully signals more dazzling fiction to come.

Kate Beaton

Rave Shelf Awareness Beaton draws on those crucial experiences to create an impassioned, astonishing memoir ... In immersive black, white, gray and blue-tinted panels, Beaton bears powerful witness to desperate adversity and redeeming goodness with sharp candor and unexpected humor. Her panels are strikingly emotive: furrowed eyebrows demanding attention, an undecorated artificial Christmas tree on its side, clenched fingers during a difficult conversation. As if to remind readers of what\'s happening beyond, Beaton regularly inserts zoomed-out landscapes underscoring the devastating cost of such lucrative opportunities beyond the human toll. Beaton\'s memoir, despite an almost 450-page count, is a mesmerizing story that readers will want to devour in a single sitting.

Ling Ma

Rave Shelf Awareness Ma channels her own peripatetic experiences: her birth in China, her Utah upbringing and her current Chicago home--each geography included, possibly transformed, in her fiction. Effortlessly moving between the quotidian and surreal, Ma explores identity molded through immigration, parental expectations, cultural colonialism and conflicted relationships for searing, poignant and occasionally (surprisingly) droll gratification.

Kate Gavino

Rave Booklist While Gavino empathically showcases independent APA women in search of fulfillment, she also lovingly celebrates Asian American publishing with clever inclusions: a Kaya Press mug, a Dictee poster, Amy Tan, and so on...Presented in delightful four-part, black-and-white panels, Gavino’s memorable characters manage the quotidian, dissect challenges, navigate change, and celebrate triumphs—together.

Banana Yoshimoto tr. Asa Yoneda

Rave Booklist ... brilliantly relevant ... open, accessible simplicity that belies revelatory observations about life, love, happiness, and more ... Bittersweet yet radiant, poignant yet promising, Yoshimoto once again showcases her dazzling appeal.

Titaua Peu

Positive Booklist In Tahiti, Tenaho is one of those \'quartiers nobody ever hears about,\' but what happened to that family \'with too many kids . . . was beyond all expectation\'...Decades ago, Auguste and Ma married in love...Nine children later, screaming, slapping, and beating are commonplace...Alcohol fuels Auguste’s vilest offenses, rendering him comatose following a car accident...In his absence, 16-year-old Pauro falls in love, 15-year-old Rosa indiscriminately chases sex, nine-year-old Pina watches all—including their youngest Moïra...The relentless violence here perhaps warrants a warning, but the worst horrors, award-winning author Peu exposes in her English debut, belong to colonialism...That Peu, who is Mā’ohi (indigenous Tahitian), writes in French, the language of the island’s white conquerors, already manifests that occupation...A multilayered accomplishment of careful understanding and empathic respect...Bearing witness seems a minimal obligation for global readers.

Elaine Castillo

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo’s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now, an incandescent collection of essays that provokes and discomfits, but ultimately engages, edifies, and thoroughly entertains ... The shrewd insights she wove into her fiction – about identity, inequity, immigration, politics – rise brilliantly to the surface here, shining with piercing truth, bolstered with significant research (20 annotated pages of works cited), and tempered with surprising humor ... Each of her essays has indelible lessons to explore and absorb ... This is not a collection of essays to race through; instead, it should be read thoughtfully and with an open mind to encourage fresh understanding.

Zain Khalid

Pan Booklist Riotous with erudition....Zain’s multilayered, nonlinear narrative turns unwieldy and ultimately disappointing as an exercise in sly cleverness rather than rewarding storytelling.

Sopan Deb

Rave Shelf Awareness Deb\'s empathic affinity ensures an exquisite first novel ... Deb writes with effortless openness, even as he confronts what are certainly many of life\'s deepest tragedies: the loss of a child, the breaking of bonds, the betrayal of trust. He transfers his journalism prowess into clear, crisp sentences. His reporter\'s skills transform small but distinctive details into presenting an impressive cast of indelible characters ... Insightful, resonating, surprisingly funny, Deb\'s own second act could earn him a standing ovation.

Sayaka Murata tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori

Rave Booklist Once more, internationally bestselling Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories ... Murata groupies will appreciate a glimpse of characters from Earthlings (2020), while readers seeking the undefinable will enjoy these tales immensely.

Morgan Talty

Rave Shelf Awareness The dozen stories of Morgan Talty\'s vivid debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, certainly stand alone ... To discover all 12 together, however, becomes a richly enhanced experience, their intertwining links creating a more sustained, rewarding read ... Through David\'s maturing eyes, Talty illuminates his narratives with empathy, vulnerability and, occasionally, unexpected humor ... Strikingly successful.

Riku Onda

Positive Shelf Awareness ... riveting, tightly plotted ... Onda is an expertly sly storyteller, deft with digressions and diversions. Seemingly simple statements--\'That\'s a lie\'--are hardly so straightforward and prove to be multilayered clues to more intricate reveals. But neither of her protagonists is a particularly reliable narrator. Onda ingeniously manipulates captivated readers as she interrogates the instability of memories, how well we can ever really know one another and the capricious nature of love--and revenge

Jamie Ford

Positive Booklist Ford deftly reveals seven women’s lives ... The name and epithet are actual history, which Ford embellishes with a poignant past and intriguing descendants ... While loneliness, suffering, and violence haunt throughout, Ford’s revisionist penultimate chapter, \'Echoes,\' feels less empowering than uncomfortably forced. That said, Ford fans are unlikely to be disappointed, his writing remains reliably immersive and enlightening.

Meron Hadero

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ... superb ... Although she\'s concerned with specific geographies, Hadero creates a remarkable universal resonance, exquisitely illuminating quotidian moments that could, and do, happen anywhere in the world where people long to belong, find community, and be welcomed (even when they’re not) ... In numerous stories, Hadero deftly examines what it means to be Black in America, especially as a transplant from another country ... In other stories, Hadero empathically and expertly explores living between cultures and countries ... From narrative to narrative, Hadero is a wondrously agile writer, whether describing moments of triumphant anticipation; shocking devastation; rightful contentment. Hadero’s prodigious storytelling is part testimony, part warning, part balm.

Meng Jin

Rave Booklist Following her extraordinary novel Little Gods (2020), Jin presents a fascinating 10-story collection...One-line drawings of profiles interrupt, switching directions as if cleverly reminding readers to shift perspectives...In \'Philip Is Dead,\' the narrator insistently does not mourn a manipulative ex-lover...In \'Suffering,\' a widow can’t trust her dead husband, her pretentious sister, or \'old and ugly\' Mr. Fu, who wants to take care of her...In \'Self Portrait with Ghost,\' a paternal aunt who was \'crazy\' in life posthumously returns to talk books outside a library with her writer niece... Jin effortlessly navigates across generations, cultures, and borders to expose inequities, misunderstandings, and \'this America . . . in these \"unprecedented times\"\'...The result proves deftly imaginative and brilliantly interrogative.

K-Ming Chang

Rave Booklist Relationships between women—familial, beloved, strange, imagined—dominate queer Taiwanese American Chang’s explosive and bizarre first story collection...Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections—\'Mothers,\' \'Myths,\' \'Moths\'—which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and diasporic identity, confront inequity and dysfunction...Chang glides effortlessly between the shocking and quotidian, demanding attention, deserving applause.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Rave Shelf Awareness Cuban Irish American author Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes effortlessly displays both craft and narrative in the 11 loosely interlinked stories of Are We Ever Our Own...With deft precision, Fuentes parses a compelling multigenerational history of womanhood revealed through complicated relationships, disturbing violence, wrenching longing and sometimes, bittersweet, hard-won autonomy.

Joseph Han

Rave Booklist Tragic, funny, and strikingly ingenious, Han’s prodigious debut is a spectacular achievement. Seamlessly dovetailed into his sublime multigenerational saga are pivotal history lessons, anti-colonial denunciations, political slaps. For Korean speakers, Han’s brilliant linguistic acrobatics will prove particularly enlightening...and shrewdly entertaining.

Jokha Alharthi, trans. by Marilyn Booth

Rave Booklist Rorgeously rendered by Oxford professor Booth ... Alharthi again showcases a puzzle-like narrative that eschews linearity, overlaps stories, and requires attentive commitment ... In probing history, challenging social status, questioning familial bonds and debts, Alharthi’s multilayered pages beautifully, achingly unveil the haunting aloneness of women’s experiences.

Don Lee

Rave Booklist Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth ... Lee further showcases his ingenious narrative acrobatics ... While Lee’ s devotees will joyfully relish casually dropped references to previous titles, new readers should savor plenty of first-time delight.

Pyae Moe Thet War

Rave Booklist ... vivacious debut nonfiction collection showcasing wise-beyond-her-years insight ([War] is 25 in her first essay), biting impatience, and plenty of unfiltered humor. She deftly skewers gender inequity ... a well-earned moniker indeed.

Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Rave Booklist Commanding, introspective ... Adroitly interweaving pivotal moments of Fuyuko’s past, Kawakami expertly reveals how independence morphs into debilitating loneliness. Candid and searing, Kawakami’s latest is another brilliantly rendered portal into young women’s lives.

Michelle de Kretser

Rave Booklist Time becomes arbitrary in de Kretser’s remarkable presentation of past and future ... As contrasting as the details of their lives are, both Lili and Lyle must relentlessly navigate the challenges of being perpetual outsiders who are judged, overlooked, dismissed, targeted, used, and abused. Wrenchingly poignant, brilliantly biting, de Kretser provides an indelible, ageless examination of the migrant experience.

Vanessa Hua

Positive Booklist Hua draws on 20-plus years of experience as a journalist covering Asia and the diaspora to reclaim a few of the \'millions of impoverished women who have shaped China in their own ways yet remain absent from the country’s official narrative\' ... Hua’s 14-year journey of research and writing deftly proves that \'fiction flourishes where the official record ends.\'

Shuang Xuetao tr. Jeremy Tiang

Rave Shelf Awareness ... prodigious ... multilayered voices revealing intricate perspectives that result in gloriously gratifying rewards ... His crisp, unadorned sentences might seem to contrast his fantastical twists and turns, but that irresistible combination is waiting to be discovered by lucky new audiences.

Cristina Rivera Garza

Rave Shelf Awareness Indie press Dorothy\'s release of New and Selected Stories, which gathers 30-plus years of intriguing work, ensures English-speaking readers enhanced access to Rivera Garza ... Transparent understanding, definitive endings, convincing closure won\'t be found here; what Rivera Garza offers is invention, challenge, linguistic acrobatics and a more-than-occasional embrace of the impenetrable ... Rivera Garza\'s presentations invite continued interpretations and interrogations.

Julie Doucet

Rave Shelf Awareness ... another intense, electrifying, diary-inspired autobiographical title ... her work is unpredictable—rarely are comics viewed so unconventionally. Even more striking is Doucet\'s flowing presentation, originally created in an accordion-style notebook: the result is that every panel-less, borderless page overlaps into the next so that if the pages could be lined up, long edge to long edge, the effect would be that of a long, continuous scroll ... Thirty-one years ago, Doucet won the 1991 Harvey Award for Best New Talent. Her reemergence makes her new all over again to another generation of comics fans. Savvy, knowing enthusiasts will have a field day reliving her past comics here. Both audiences can expect exceptional discoveries--equally disturbing and delightful.

Kyung-Sook Shin, trans. by Anton Hur

Rave Booklist Hur...returns to adroitly cipher her latest impressive import. With this trigger-warning-worthy tale, Man Asian Literary Prize–winning Shin delivers another meticulous, haunting characterization of an isolated young woman in crisis.

Lisa Hsiao Chen

Positive Booklist Ambitiously inquisitive and ingeniously compelling, Chen’s debut novel confronts the liminal spaces between identities, languages, expectations, realities.

Melissa Chadburn

Positive Shelf Awareness ... electrifying ... A warning feels necessary here: indeed, the violence is graphic and relentless. And yet bearing witness seems equally mandatory: Chadburn\'s concluding author\'s note reveals that her fiction is \'inspired by all-too-real events\'; this horror is reality, especially for girls and women of color, in that the novel\'s murderer has an actual counterpart (with the same name) who admitted to butchering 49 victims. As an activist, Chadburn--who experienced foster care herself--has reported extensively on the child welfare system, grounding her novel in what she\'s seen, what children and adults have (not) survived, what the voiceless cannot say. Writing with remarkable grace, even surprising moments of transporting joy, Chadburn creates a miraculous literary platform to claim these missing stories.

Grace D. Li

Positive Booklist Fascinating albeit uneven ... Li composes gracefully, and her polyphonic quintet is especially convincing as each considers motivations, generational debts, hybrid identities, and complicated on-the-cusp adult relationships. The to-be-expected navel-gazing, alas, repeats and lingers, dulling Li’s brilliant ending.

Jane Pek

Mixed Booklist Despite clever writing and headline-grabbing narrative spins, Singapore-born New York City lawyer Pek’s debut disappointingly devolves into unwieldy sprawl.

María Gainza, tr. Thomas Bunstead

Positive Booklist ...defftly translated ... Gainza doesn’t even hint at easy answers or exacting closure by the novel’s end ... That titular \'unknown\'-ness—times four—might prove disappointing to some, but shrewd audiences will surely enjoy the engrossing challenge of an unpredictable pursuit.

Sindya Bhanoo

Rave Booklist Eight distantly connected stories, mostly centering isolated women, comprise Bhanoo’s exquisite debut ... Bhanoo’s piercing stories further augment the growing shelves of spectacular first short story collections by women of color.

Amanda Pellegrino

Rave Shelf Awareness ... a sizzling read that adroitly balances relevant headlines, girl-power attitude and surprisingly savvy humor ... Pellegrino writes with absolute assurance and dexterous pacing. More than a delicious (and screen-ready) revenge narrative, the novel interweaves enough romance, family relationships, BFF fallout and (under/over)privileged characters to make the friends—and their friends—remarkably believable. The \'whisper network\' is about to become a resonating rebel yell.

Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani

Positive Booklist Fascinating ... Tawada slyly interrogates shifting (disappearing) borders and populations, native (invented) identities, assumptions, and adaptations. Her most frequent translator, Mitsutani, brilliantly ciphers Tawada’s magnificently inventive wordplay.

Maud Casey

Rave Shelf Awareness Maud Casey\'s compelling City of Incurable Women...might invite an expeditious single-sitting read. That sparseness obscures its intricate density: hardly straightforward narrative, City of Incurable Women is a fascinating, multi-layered interaction between Casey\'s pithy words on the page and history\'s virtual elision of the titular \'incurable women.\' Readers may well want side-by-side access to sources of additional information for a more satisfying, enhanced experience ... With acute empathy, Casey is here as witness and scribe ... Maud Casey masterfully magnifies the stories of \'incurable\' women in Paris\'s 19th-century Salpêtrière hospital.

Lyn Liao Butler

Mixed Booklist Readers may tire of Tam’s self-absorption, Mia’s spite, Angela’s five-year-old precocity, and the insistent coincidence of homicidal truck drivers. Taiwan-born Butler’s sophomore titl is yet another tangled melodrama, albeit with enough nods to Very Important Issues (family dysfunction, Taiwan-China divide, gender inequity, orphanage horrors) to push it toward literary fiction . . . lite.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Tr. Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy

Rave Booklist These three stories date back a century, yet their universal theme, familial relationships, remains relevantly evergreen ... [a] thorough afterword provides historical, biographical, and literary enhancements for interested readers ... Tanizaki enthralls with sharp, human(e) observations.

Julie Otsuka

Rave Booklist Otsuka is averaging one book per decade, making each exquisite title exponentially more precious. Here she creates a stupendous collage of small moments that results in an extraordinary examination of the fragility of quotidian human relationships ... Once more, Otsuka creates an elegiac, devastating masterpiece.

Perumal Murugan, tr. Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Positive Booklist With exquisitely honed details, Murugan vividly exposes society’s blind adherence to draconian traditions.

Kim Fu

Rave Booklist Sly, provocative, fabulous short stories sure to delight and shock ... Fu flaunts an inimitable imagination ... Speculative elements so adroitly and casually inserted into seemingly realistic narratives seem to be stoking a growing genre ... Irrefutably fantastic.

Lan Samantha Chang

Mixed Booklist Glimmers of Chang’s irrefutable pedigrees occasionally sparkle through multigenerational wrongs, disastrous relationships, and complicated expositions. Alas, tenacity is necessary to endure didactic screeds about race, identity, love, and loyalty for a perhaps-too-obvious whodunit reveal.

Fabio Morábito tr. Curtis Bauer

Positive Booklist American poet and professor Curtis Bauer adroitly enables English access here. Literacy, fluency, and interactive engagement with words loom throughout the novel, adding multilayered density to what might initially seem to be a light narrative.

Sophie Burrows

Rave Booklist ... poignant, timely ... Burrows exhibits...deft cleverness throughout ... Burrows’ pencil drawings in mostly grays-to-blues enhanced with glowing reds produce a visually and emotionally nourishing feast. Although marketed for young adults by the publisher, Burrows’ memorable creation should resonate with singles of any age in search of connection.

Weike Wang

Positive Booklist ...provocative ... Here Wang dissects the titular Joan’s singularity, interrupted by seeming demands from her hospital co-workers, her overfriendly new neighbor, and, most urgently, her immediate family comprised of wealthy older brother Fang, their late father, and surviving mother ... add Wang’s latest to the growing list of pandemic titles.

Gwen E Kirby

Rave Shelf Awareness Remarkable ... Kirby\'s (partially) titular opener...brilliantly sets the collection\'s comically scathing tone ... Dark-but-brilliant comedy ... Kirby writes with stunningly acerbic wit ... Wielding humor and shock, Kirby audaciously unmasks gender disparity with delightful, disturbing aplomb.

Un-Su Kim, Tr. Sean Lin Halbert

Positive Booklist Deftly translated by award-winning Halbert, Kim’s latest import...again showcases his sly, surreal, dark humor about all the ways humans are, well, not particularly human.

Sosuke Natsukawa, tr. Louise Heal Kawai

Rave Shelf Awareness Delightful ... Smoothly translate[d] ... Natsukawa\'s empowering Bildungsroman enhanced as a fantasy adventure manages to be both whimsical and wise, revealing Rintaro\'s superpower is imbedded in his love of books. What might at first seem like simple entertainment exposes a multi-layered analysis ... Natsukawa\'s one shortcoming here might be the glorification of the Western canon ... Nevertheless, what lingers longest for readers will be the everlasting resonance of great books.

Juhea Kim

Rave Booklist Kim’s debut novel wondrously reveals broken families and surprising alliances created by uncontrollable circumstances ... Beyond her literary prowess, Korean-born, Princeton-educated polyglot Kim further showcases her other passions as artist and sustainability activist, interweaving the history of Korea’s decimated tiger population as well as traditional singing, dancing, and even filmmaking ... Richly alluring and significant.

Sang Young Park tr. Anton Hur

Positive Booklist Self-described queer Korean translator Hur empathically delivers Park’s affecting English-language debut to Western audiences. A best-seller in Korea for being a significant (and rare!) gay novel, Park’s lost-love(s) narrative is also a universal literary beacon for readers of all backgrounds.

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Rave Booklist The book is labeled fiction, but the extraordinarily haunting narrative is inspired by Gendry-Kim’s mother and two elderly survivors of Korean War separations who were briefly allowed to meet their North Korean families ... spectacular ... Visually, Gendry-Kim’s stark black-and-white compositions couldn’t be more affecting: the ominous efficacy of all-black pages, unpredictable layouts with and without panels, and prodigiously empathic expressions throughout. Translated into English by lauded Hong, Gendry-Kim’s latest import proves to be another stunning masterpiece.

Jung Yun

Positive Booklist un’s sprawling second novel, after her brilliantly honed Shelter (2016), ambitiously confronts the multilayered mutations of the male gaze—modeling, catcalling, porn, #MeToo, sexual violence—magnified by socioeconomic disparities and, most affectingly, the cutting divides of race.

S.J. Sindu

Positive Booklist As if channeling the prevarications dominating her debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), Sindu’s sophomore title (despite a slow first half) proves to be an explosive, provoking examination of what we are forced to or choose to believe to be true.

Kwon Yeo-Son, tr. Janet Hong

Rave Booklist Kwon is deftly translated by award-winning Korean Canadian Hong ... A powerhouse thriller told in elliptical interlinked stories, Kwon’s provoking narrative requires careful parsing and connecting ... A deservedly successful Stateside debut that should assure future imports.

Kyle Lucia Wu

Positive Booklist Debuting novelist Wu, already recognized with fellowships, residencies, and teaching appointments, crafts impressive, insightful prose ... Though of interest, her novel doesn’t quite reach the same lofty level, ultimately proving more self-indulgent than self-aware.

Amanda Jayatissa

Positive Booklist Readers might figure out who’s who and what’s what rather quickly, but the details of how and why will require reaching the final, six-months-later chapter. Meanwhile, Jayatissa has a heyday exposing white-savior syndrome, religious hypocrisy, and mental-health system failures, with plenty of schadenfreude voyeurism.

Ye Chun

Rave Booklist Bilingual Chinese American writer, poet, and translator Ye showcases her linguistic prowess in a prodigious debut collection featuring women on both sides of the globe, many defined and confined by and reliant on motherhood ... Each of Ye’s dozen stories astounds.

Shruti Swamy

Positive Booklist Each segment challenges expectations and exposes the limitations of being female. Beyond adaptation, sacrifice, and even erasure, Swamy provides no easy answers to the search for fulfillment.

Choi Eunyoung, Tr. Sung Ryu

Positive Shelf Awareness \" Choi writes assuredly, her sentences direct and unadorned, yet the simplicity belies intricate narratives often hinging on unpredictable details--a nipple caterpillar tattoo, an Antarctic burial, a 1997 cassette tape. As they long, endure, transform (and not), Choi\'s exceptional women are well-primed for their close-up\

María Amparo Escandón

Positive Booklist Telenovela anyone? Why, yes, bestselling Escandón (Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., 2005) also works in film and TV, so, naturally, the Alvarados are getting the Hollywood treatment. If the print version is any indication, the forecast sure looks promising for screen success.

Samira Sedira, Tr. Lara Vergnaud

Rave Shelf Awareness ... a fascinating amalgam of gruesome headlines...and Sedira\'s personal experience ... The Algerian-born French novelist, playwright and actor Sedira intertwines these disparate events to create a jarring narrative of privilege and power ... Sedira plots a tight, terse novel, made particularly intriguing with Anna as cipher ... her searing fiction further exposes the reality of monstrous inhumanity.

Yoon Choi

Rave Booklist The characters in Choi’s stories are caught in-between cultures, families, generations, even life and death. Especially stupendous are her Korean immigrant women-in-flux ... Rare is the impeccable first collection ... Multiple prestige outlets have previously published the Korean-born, Long Island-raised, Johns Hopkins/Stanford-educated Stegner Fellow, presciently aware that Choi’s debut would be a masterpiece.

YZ Chin

Positive Booklist Chin’s non-love story moves back and forth in time, interspersing Edwina’s desperate day-by-day search with her (occasionally unreliable) backstory as half a couple. To that dual time line, Chin clumsily appends a distracting frame in which Edwina addresses a (not-quite) therapist as \'you.\' Even an abundance of Very Important Issues—body-shaming, women in tech, profiling, inter- and intra-racial prejudices, immigration inequity, and animal welfare—ultimately can’t save Chin’s narrative from disappointment.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Positive Booklist ... provoking ... Sayrafiezadeh’s assured writing works in contrast with his discontented, stumbling, watching, and waiting characters who are plagued by the titular estrangement and its undermining consequences.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, tr. Anne McLean

Rave Booklist Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian McLean ... Disturbing yet necessary, Vásquez’s fiction becomes enduring testimony.

Naomi Hirahara

Positive Shelf Awareness ... provocative ... Although [Hirahara] skillfully integrated historical events in many of her previous titles, her 10th novel incorporates three decades of researching and collecting the oral histories of Americans imprisoned for being of Japanese heritage ... While Clark and Division is currently a standalone endeavor, Aki Ito shows plenty of intriguing tenacity to star in a series of her own. Readers are sure to agree.

David Hoon Kim

Positive Shelf Awareness His erudite prose is undeniably sublime and polished (his vocabulary remarkably extensive—anechoic, astrakhan, tatterdemalion) but perhaps too much of many good things doesn\'t coalesce successfully here, resulting in distracting missteps and disconnects. Kim\'s debut hasn\'t quite accomplished all that it could and should. The exquisite beauty of his composition--combining words, crafting sentences--however, bodes well for perfecting future narratives.

Ha Jin

Mixed Shelf Awareness ... another quiet, more passive-than-not antihero caught between China and the U.S ... Jin\'s narrative here isn\'t his strongest—prolonged over hundreds of pages, Tian\'s meandering, passive acceptance, especially, grows cumbersome. For Jin\'s most devoted readers, however, his signature ability to engage and expand his characters through acute, forthright observations will not disappoint. Once again, Jin provides a meaningful everyman tale beyond borders and cultures.

Eto Mori, tr. Jocelyne Allen

Positive Booklist ... a classic. Issues challenging Japanese teens then—\'Bullying. Dropping out. Suicide.\'—continue to find international resonance as, nimbly translated by Allen, the best-seller’s arrival marks Mori’s stateside debut ... the novel has spawned films, anime, manga, and more. It’s also saved lives—undoubtedly storytelling’s superpower.

Sunjeev Sahota

Rave Shelf Awareness ... outstanding ... dense with intricate layers ... Sahota brilliantly plays with access to knowledge, to history ... In revealing their narratives, Sahota grants virtual omniscience to his readers, but complicity comes with appeals to engage more deeply with contextual issues that continue to plague contemporary society, including child marriage, gender inequity, multi-generational trauma, ongoing hate crimes. China Room is no effortless read, but one that promises to haunt and illuminate.

Tahmima Anam

Positive Booklist ... utterly contemporary ... Anam’s not-quite-love-story shrewdly exposes gender inequity, racism, homophobia, and male white privilege, achieving sharply exposing, skillfully engaging results.

Pik-Shuen Fung

Positive Booklist Perhaps what is most noticeable upon opening Fung’s elegiac debut is all the white space. Paragraphs, phrases, words, even detached letters float across the pages, undoubtedly an ethereal reflection of lost chances, missing time, stolen opportunities, and spaces impossible to fill ... While it was always there, the space to acknowledge, exchange, and grow never seemed possible until looming loss ironically allows for open I-love-you’s. In between, the narrator fills the empty spaces with what the living are willing to share. Seemingly spare yet undeniably dense with so much unsaid, Fung’s polyphonic first novel is a magnificent literary triumph.

Sara Mesa, trans. by Megan McDowell

Positive Shelf Awareness Intriguing Spanish writer Sara Mesa...continues to explore highly charged power dynamics ... Obvious or predictable could never describe Mesa\'s narrative here. Her sly hints...are clearly meant to manipulate readers in various directions, right or wrong, truth or not ... Mesa, meanwhile, prods, enables, challenges, maybe even misleads. Satisfaction—of sorts—arrives in Mesa\'s concluding \'Part Two,\' which shrewdly reveals the bittersweet outcome beyond the hedges.

Mia P Manansala

Positive Christian Science Monitor Chicago-based, self-described \'procrastibaker\' Manansala clearly loves her characters – even the bad guys – imbuing so many of them with rich, detailed, diverse stories of their own ... Clever with the never-saw-that-coming twists and turns, Manansala nimbly stays at least a few steps ahead, never letting complacency settle on the page. Just desserts await at the book’s end – literally and culinarily!

Tom Lin

Rave Shelf Awareness ... addictively gruesome ... manages to enhance a wild, wild western with Odyssean devotion, magic realism and historical racism, to create quite the unlikely love story gone awry ... Ming\'s story of denial becomes Lin\'s ingenious assertion of his own Chinese American heritage, his fiction a literal projection of the Chinese American experience onto the page. Lin cleverly reclaims the language as he marks each of the story\'s three parts with untranslated Chinese characters ... With dexterous agility, Lin showcases Ming\'s multi-faceted identity as a native-born American, a builder of transcontinental railroads, a rebel against racist laws, a killer of injustice--and maybe even a hero who might finally get the girl.

Yan Lianke tr. Carlos Rojas

Rave Booklist Yan transplants this subgenre into the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to showcase \'the erotics of revolutionary activism\' as exemplified by an impossible love story ... If not love, then certainly lust-at-first-sight ensues. Despite marriages (and children) with others, their all-consuming affair translates to impassioned revolutionary fervor that leads to suicide, madness, unimagined power, and horrific downfall. In between, the lovers’ boldness galvanizes their radical (albeit, not quite clear) demands for change. Yan’s signature biting wit creates another indelible work of bittersweet humor and sociopolitical insight.

Lana Bastasic

Positive Booklist \"...a startling confrontation of memory, boundaries, disappearance, and identities bartered, elided, imagined, and betrayed. Bastašić’s intense examination of female friendship provides a portal into the tumultuous recent history of the former Yugoslavia. Awarded the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Bastašić’s compelling and enlightening first novel arrives in the U.S. in her own agile translation, sure to engage urbane anglophone readers.\

Eric Nguyen

Rave Booklist While the story arc might sound familiar—other-side-of-the-world refugees who endure challenging lives in the U.S.—Nguyen’s gentle precision nevertheless produces an extraordinary debut with undeniable resonance ... Once upon a time, Hương was a village wife to teacher Công, mother to young Tuấn. Suddenly, all three are running for their lives, but only Hương and Tuấn board the boat, embarking on a path of everlasting separation ... Nearly three decades later, Hurricane Katrina will once again confront the trio with Things We Lost to the Water and the question of what can and should be salvaged from the devastation.

Geling Yan tr. Jeremy Tiang

Mixed Booklist Only the stranger’s observations seem to penetrate Hongmei’s tiresome self-absorption to guide her toward some semblance of self-awareness. Alas, this tale is unnecessarily coy for being rather obvious, and, sadly, tedious.

Bo-Young Kim tr. Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu

Rave Shelf Awareness As impressive as Kim Bo-Young\'s intriguing stories are, their literary provenance is equally entertaining ... Lucky readers are wise to lean in and get ready to sigh and soar ... a plethora of compelling choices seems poised to enable and encourage Kim\'s international acclaim.

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ... doesn’t disappoint ... [Murakami\'s] books are an intimate invitation to revel in his perpetually unpredictable, yet remarkably convincing, imagination ... Murakami writes with such assurance as to turn the implausible credible, the outlandish engrossing ... Each story enthralls. (Readers should be aware some of the stories are not appropriate for everyone) ... Avid fans might notice that six stories previously appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Freeman’s, but to savor the collection in full will undoubtedly prove to be a beguiling gift.

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ... doesn’t disappoint ... Murakami writes with such assurance as to turn the implausible credible, the outlandish engrossing ... Each story enthralls. (Readers should be aware some of the stories are not appropriate for everyone) ... to savor the collection in full will undoubtedly prove to be a beguiling gift.

Gabriela Garcia

Positive Booklist Garcia turns her MFA thesis for Purdue University [...] into her widely buzzed first novel. Presented in 12 chapters that read more like interlinked stories, Garcia channels her Miami-based Cuban-Mexican American heritage into five generations of a Cuban American matriarchy ... Garcia’s women populate a sprawling albeit textually spare narrative that demands careful parsing for resonant rewards.

Morowa Yejidé

Positive Booklist ... moody, bleak ... Fatal racism, police violence, pedophilia, family dysfunction—and all the other horrific ills of contemporary society wreak destruction, but somehow humanity survives.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Rave Booklist Undeniably erudite and culturally fluent as ever—interweaving history, philosophy, political treatise, theology, even literary criticism—Nguyê˜n effortlessly enhances the story with snarky commentary, sly judgments, and plenty of wink-wink-nod-nod posturing to entertain committed readers ... Fans of The Sympathizer will appreciate the many delight-inducing connections embedded here, but The Committed also works as a strong stand-alone.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Positive Booklist With echoes of themes in his internationally lauded Never Let Me Go (2005)—that life can be manufactured, bartered, bought—Booker-ed, Nobel-ed, and knighted Ishiguro presents a bittersweet fable about the human heart ... In Ishiguro’s near-future dystopia, Klara—appropriately monikered to suggest both clear and obvious—could prove to be the most human of all.

Elvira Navarro

Positive Booklist Spare in pages, Navarro’s collection of 11 short stories proves dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized ... Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro’s tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes ... Navarro—adroitly anglophone-enabled by award-winning Christina MacSweeney—distinctly proves her inarguable facility with short fiction.

Sonia Faleiro

Mixed Booklist Faleiro’s meticulous reconstruction moves far beyond the Katra events, dovetailing countless gruesome crimes, disclosing shocking data, divulging pervasive incompetence, and exposing widespread corruption. These contextual extras, while unarguably urgent, prove excessive, eventually overwhelming the girls’ tragedy.

Te-Ping Chen

Rave Booklist Wall Street Journal correspondent Chen emerges as a fiction powerhouse, each of her 10 stories an immersive literary event ... Traversing continents and cultures, moving effortlessly between China and the U.S., Chen deftly presents everyday lives that entertain, educate, and universally resonate.

Caitlin Horrocks

Positive Shelf Awareness The majority of these 14 stories deliver a gut-punch reminder of the seeming unavoidability of loneliness and isolation, despite the promises of coupledom, familial bonds and understood social contracts among various groups ... While the collection might be filled with miscommunications and disconnects, Horrocks\'s storytelling prowess shines, creating communities that draw in readers immediately, even as the inhabitants are on the verge of personal implosions. Horrocks writes with simple precision, her characters wholly convincing in all their flaws and insecurities. Life Among the Terranauts proves shrewd and rewarding.

Ae-Ran Kim, Trans. by Chi-Young Kim

Rave Booklist The youngest winner ever of multiple important literary prizes in her native Korea, Ae-ran Kim’s first full-length novel arrives stateside, hauntingly English-enabled by lauded translator Chi-Young Kim ... In a narrative about fatal illness, compounding moments of insight and joy resonate deeply, with heartwarming results.

Nadia Owusu

Positive Shelf Awareness Owusu sometimes works a little too hard to mold her experiences into her seismic theme of faults and shocks. Repetition, too, is occasionally problematic, stalling the already non-linear narrative. But beyond any imperfections, Owusu\'s raw vulnerability hauntingly, steadily beckons readers.

Peter Ho Davies

Rave Booklist ...never-knowing haunts Ho Davies’ (The Fortunes, 2016) brief, admittedly autobiographical new novel, a raw, intimate look at a couple’s journey into parenthood, from the choice to abort their first pregnancy after a diagnosis of mosaicism to the arrival of a son after a difficult birth ... a resonant treatise on identity, family, grieving, writing, and \'the taking and telling of other people’s stories.\'

Homeira Qaderi

Positive Shelf Awareness With this haunting memoir, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother\'s Letter to Her Son, Qaderi literally, indelibly writes the proof of her existence into being ... Raw, honest, humble, Qaderi renders her excruciating loss into words and stories that help her live, keep her connected and never lose hope for a miraculous reunion.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Positive The Christian Science Monitor ... a quirky, sigh-inducingly satisfying read ... As a first-time novelist, Kawaguchi’s writing isn’t quite comparable (yet?) to some of his globally revered compatriots – think Haruki Murakami, Yoko Tawada, Banana Yoshimoto, and Kenzaburō Ōe. His narrative is occasionally uneven and tends to meander- readers might like to know why Kazu is the only one able to pour the brew, for example, while the description of Hirai’s family’s historic business could have skipped a few irrelevant details. The new author is also sometimes repetitive, and his sentences aren’t always exactly elegant ... And yet, where Kawaguchi excels is undoubtedly more essential: He has a surprising, unerring ability to find lasting emotional resonance. Interwoven into what initially feels like a whimsical escape are existential conundrums of love and loss, family and freedom, life and death.

Emily Hashimoto

Mixed Booklist Alas, over the story line’s 13 years and more than 400 pages to wade through, even the most devoted readers are likely to face tedium in order to arrive at book’s end.

Hideo Yokoyama

Rave Shelf Awareness Prefecture D is comprised of four compelling, loosely interlinked novellas ... Each novella presents a mystery that exposes the labyrinthine relationships within Prefecture D\'s sprawling police department ... Yokoyama\'s dozen years\' experience as an investigative journalist undoubtedly enhances his already sharp fiction with unexpected minutiae that proves essential. Beyond cleverly solving mysteries, he adroitly exposes gender inequity, career climbing, personal sacrifice, dysfunctional relationships, power imbalances and abuses. Who needs actual criminals when Prefecture D is already abuzz with lawbreakers?

Kao Kalia Yang

Positive Shelf Awareness ... affecting ... rather than full histories, [Yang\'s] chapters offer glimpses of lives before, of escapes, of stopovers, of arrivals, of transformation ... While personal experiences cannot be judged, narratively, as literature, some stories prove stronger and more affecting than others. An epilogue would have strengthened the work, providing a fuller overview for readers to further invest in each of the family and friends Yang introduces. That said, these voices are here, their stories are here, to provide an intimate window into once faraway lives, now intertwined together in a community they call home.

Julián Herbert

Rave Shelf Awareness ... electrifying ... [an] impressive assemblage ... Beyond the death and destruction, Herbert certainly knows how to cultivate erudite narrative company ... Reunited with award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney, Herbert presents 10 stories ready to disturb, quite possibly even disgust. That said, even for the most reluctant readers, the surprisingly immersive humor and slyly playful wit make resistance futile.

Aoko Matsuda, Trans. by Polly Barton

Rave Booklist Preface any storytelling format with \'traditional,\' and audiences will have no expectations of feminist agency. Thankfully, prizewinning Japanese writer Matsuda imagines reclamation and brilliantly transforms fairy tales and folk legends into empowering exposés, adventures, manifestos ... adroitly translated by UK-based Polly Barton ... While each story easily entertains, there are standouts ... Matsuda enthralls with both insight and bite.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, tr. Iona MacIntyre and Fiona Macintosh

Positive Booklist With history as backdrop, Cabezón Cámara confronts colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism and even honors fluid identities to create an unexpected utopian reclamation.

Marie Ndiaye, tr. Jordan Stump

Rave Shelf Awareness The intriguing complexity...contained in her superb novel underscores again why she is one of France\'s most lauded contemporary writers ... Reminiscent of a Beckett play—NDiaye is also a notable playwright—this surreal narrative quickly devolves into a nightmarish fever dream. With adroit precision, NDiaye transforms Herman\'s situation, his choices (or lack thereof), his complicity, his feeble attempts at rebellion, into a biting, brilliant exposé on class and privilege, entitlement and hypocrisy, power and control.

Paco Roca

Positive Booklist To begin at the end is to gather the background—cultural context, short biographies of the vast cast—that further elevates and illuminates Roca’s graphic history, deftly translated into English by Rosenberg ... Page after page, Roca excels at show-don’t-tell, keeping dialogue to a minimum, deftly relying on detailed expressions to radiate hope, frustration, determination, and, of course, rebellion.

Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori

Positive Booklist ...societally defiant, shockingly disconnected, disturbingly satisfying fiction ... Murata again confronts and devastates so-called \'normal,\' \'proper\' behavior to create an unflinching exposé of society.

Jenny Bhatt

Rave Shelf Awareness Debut collections rarely prove even in quality and efficacy, which makes Jenny Bhatt\'s 15 compelling stories in Each of Us Killers even more memorable ... Challenging assumptions, confronting power, manipulating barriers whenever possible--even at grave personal cost--Bhatt\'s cast surprises, inspires, frightens, beguiles, but never disappoints.

Yeong-Shin Ma, trans. by Janet Hong

Rave Booklist Presented in stark black-and-white panels, these aging moms have nothing to hide: they’re raucous, demanding, and sexual middle-aged women finding enjoyment despite useless partners, disappointing careers, unfulfilled dreams. They text at all hours, use dating apps, swear indiscriminately, steal other women’s boyfriends, occasionally pummel one another with bare fists. Their greatest challenge, like people everywhere at every age, is loneliness—but even that can’t stop Ma’s fearsome mothers from living their best possible lives.

Scholastique Mukasonga, Trans. by Jordan Stump

Rave Shelf Awareness ... exquisite ... five wrenching stories ... Each of Mukasonga\'s other stories expose raw moments of excruciating challenge ... Providing welcome continuity, French professor Jordan Stump translates the book, making Igifu the third of Mukasonga\'s four English-language titles Stump has translated with graceful agility ... Despite the undeniable terror, Mukasonga\'s storytelling proves illuminating and resilient.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Rave Booklist Bynum’s prowess here lies in her ingenious ability to elevate seemingly minor moments into the pivotal crux of a narrative ... Although the collection proves uneven, Bynum’s more dazzling tales surpass the less memorable for ultimately rewarding results.

Susan Abulhawa

Positive Shelf Awareness ... haunting ... Through Nahr, Abulhawa seamlessly, affectingly parallels Palestine\'s brutal, occupied history during the last half-century, humanizing headlines with names, families, dates, memories that belong to people with whom readers can identity, believe, empathize, mourn and ultimately, albeit tentatively, celebrate.

K-Ming Chang

Mixed Booklist Raw, angry, even sneering, Ama, Mother, and Daughter’s three-voiced narrative is often breathtaking ... The agile, abundant beauty of Chang’s phrasing, however, is not quite enough to mitigate the relentless abuse, dysfunction, and violence that permeates her debut ... stifling enough to potentially estrange less patient readers.

Yaa Gyasi

Rave Booklist Despite compounding challenges and tragedies, Gyasi never allows Gifty to devolve into paralyzing self-absorption and malaise. With deft agility and undeniable artistry, Gyasi’s latest is an eloquent examination of resilient survival.

Madeleine Ryan

Positive Booklist Ryan’s novel covers less than 24 hours, but by book’s end, readers are left feeling remarkably bonded with this fiercely independent young woman who thinks, acts, and lives differently from the so-called norm ... Her sharp, unfiltered thoughts—compellingly presented by Australian director and debut novelist Ryan, who herself is #OwnVoices neurodiverse—never seem to pause as she skips between describing her present and divulging her past, meticulously processing her actions, and regarding herself and others from unexpected perspectives. Virtually every page offers a discerning observation ... Her piercing insight is relentless. Ryan is currently preparing her intriguing tale for the screen, but how this intense inner life will transfer across media remains to be seen—literally. Until then, read the book.

Kuniko Tsurita, Trans. by Ryan Holmberg

Rave Shelf Awareness ... a label-defying collection ... Tsurita explores the role of women through numerous shorts in unexpected format ... Drawn & Quarterly\'s meticulously curated presentation ensures Tsurita\'s legacy will continue to gain deserved recognition internationally, decades after her untimely death.

Jayant Kaikini, Trans. by Tejaswini Niranjana

Positive Booklist Most affecting are \'A Pair of Spare Legs,\' which portrays an incorrigible six-year-old, and the title story about young lovers in the midst of wedding plans ... Intriguing, albeit somewhat uneven multiculti fare for the internationally inclined.

Lauren Beukes

Rave Shelf Awareness With remarkable prescience, Lauren Beukes\'s Afterland takes on an \'unprecedented global pandemic\' with chilling results—and surprising comic relief threaded throughout ... Never-ending body counts, attempted sororicide and tween exploitation might not particularly be phrases that invite \'Read me!\' but this pandemic distraction is ready for worldly audiences, offering titillating thrills, schadenfreude and, most surprisingly (and necessarily), even a few take-me-away snorts and shrieks.

Yiyun Li

Positive Booklist In [Li\'s] first title with a non-Asian-specific cast (as if creating some semblance of distance), an adult child’s suicide propels a multilevel narrative that sprawls through relationships, perspectives, and responses ... Once more, Li confronts unbearable grief and claims agency.

Lysley Tenorio

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ... offers another fierce, revelatory literary experience ... In a riff on the conventional immigrant novel – which features bicultural protagonists tied to two countries, departed and arrived – Tenorio adds a clever twist by creating a citizen of nowhere: Excel is always in limbo, both legally and figuratively ... Tenorio has written a resonant story about what one family is willing to do to \'protect the child.\' It’s seamlessly interwoven with cogent explorations of hybrid identity, racism, immigration history, shifting familial bonds, parental sacrifice, socioeconomic disparity, and even alternative social models ... The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the Trump administration could not rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy on an accelerated schedule, bringing DREAMers back into headlines. That attention should give Tenorio’s affecting novel a well-deserved boost; he humanizes the lives imperiled by shifting immigration policies.

Yu Miri, Trans. by Morgan Giles

Rave Booklist Yu is no stranger to modern society’s traps driven by nationalism, capitalism, classism, sexism. Her anglophoned latest (gratitude to translator Giles for providing fluent accessibility) is a surreal fable of splintered families, disintegrating relationships, and the casual devaluation of humanity.

Kelli Jo Ford

Rave Shelf Awareness Kelli Jo Ford makes a magnificent #OwnVoices debut ... Ford\'s interlinked structure allows for an intriguing, vast cast ... A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Ford adroitly, affectingly weaves indigenous history into her spellbinding narrative, exposing displacement, unacknowledged violence, cultural erasure, relentless racism and socioeconomic disparity. Post-publication, Ford should expect plenty of applause and awards to come.

Seong-Nan Ha, Trans. by Janet Hong

Rave Booklist Best-selling Korean author Ha and award-winning Canadian translator Hong are two-for-two at spectacular pairing, repeating the successful partnership of Ha’s collection, Flowers of Mold (2019), with another sensational, 11-story collaboration ... Despite a significant body count, Ha’s provocative narratives never devolve into the maudlin, showcasing instead sly moments of macabre fascination and startling dark comedy.

Zaina Arafat

Mixed Booklist Debuting novelist Arafat’s damaged cast might resonate with untethered millennials, but utmost patience is a must.

Adrian Tomine

Rave Booklist ... what Tomine highlights here, with self-deprecating vulnerability and humble humor on pages of graph paper, are, well, the many failures ... In this exquisitely rendered, prodigiously articulated work, Tomine proves again why he’s still that \'famous cartoonist.\'

Bishakh Som

Rave Booklist ...mesmerizing juxtaposition in \'Come Back to Me\' inaugurates Som’s extraordinary debut collection, signaling an exceptional graphic achievement. Other prodigious standouts include \'Pleasure Palace,\' about two unlikely strangers who meet at a posh resort and, as the older woman offers the younger man a glimpse of a mythic past, unexpectedly leave together; \'Swandive,\' in which a pair of conference attendees are drawn together by their flesh and—literally—blood as they map out a wondrously inclusive future; and \'I Can See It in You,\' about an interracial couple whose party-going—and perhaps their very relationship—is interrupted by a not-so-mysterious intruder. Richly hued, gorgeously lettered, and often exquisitely detailed, Som’s work, the writing as well the art, presents a brave new world of diverse women—talking, dancing, dreaming, plotting—living among friends, lovers, and chimerical creatures, in familiar cities and faraway landscapes, balancing the expectantly mundane with the utterly fantastical.

Aimee Liu

Rave Library Journal A riveting amalgam of history, family epic, anticolonial/antiwar treatise, cultural crossroads, and more, this latest from best-selling author Liu...is a fascinating, irresistible marvel.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez

Rave Booklist A searing work of literary excellence, Cuban writer Álvarez’s disturbing, dazzling debut novel arrives stateside, Anglophone-enabled by award-winning Irish writer/translator Wynne. Álvarez unravels this story of an imploding family-in-crisis with symmetrical precision. The novel is in five succinct sections, each of which Álvarez further divides to present the four family members’ points of view, rotating their perspectives in a pattern—visually and narratively—throughout. Although Álvarez’s characters are named, the chapter headings—son, mother, father, daughter—suggest that what happens to this family could happen to any family.

Sara Mesa, Trans. by Katie Whittemore

Positive Booklist Anglophoned by Whittemore (an interview with her follows the novel), Spanish writer Mesa presents a painful exploration of inequity, cruelty, and the immeasurable cost of belonging.

Joe Sacco

Positive Booklist ... talking heads given agency to speak their truths, exquisitely detailed artwork, meticulously revealed events ... Amidst the arduous journeys of survival (and not), Sacco’s occasional godfather-of-manga-Tezukaesque self-parodies provide welcome, momentary (can’t resist) comic relief. Harrowing and enlightening, Sacco presents another solemn, resonating dispatch.

Sameer Pandya

Rave Shelf Awareness Members Only...is as provocative as it is comedic ... Facing social, professional, personal implosion—all in one week—might seem impossibly overdramatic, but Members Only proves remarkably convincing ... That said, don\'t expect all doom-and-gloom here: without ever eliding the gravity of serious social issues like racism, privilege and power, Pandya deftly manages to create a tragicomedy of errors driven by surprising wit, irreverent humor and razor-sharp insight.

Yoshiharu Tsuge, Trans. by Ryan Holmberg

Rave Shelf Awareness Readers have an easy choice here: to read this resonating six-chapter collection as an entertaining, albeit sobering, manga about the middle-aged life of a seeming slacker, or approach it as a prominent, pivotal example of 20th-century graphic literary history ... Drawn in stark black-and-white panels, Tsuge\'s frank narrative portrays an artist-in-decline, an anti-Bildungsroman that offers effective storytelling, enduring characters, poignant reflection and, most notably, gratifying art. Audiences who shut the book after the final panels would certainly leave Sukezō in his solipsistic reverie with satisfying closure ... translator Holmberg\'s [biographical] essay...is an illuminating enhancement—biographically, historically, literally.

Tian Veasna, Trans. by Helge Dasche

Rave Booklist First published in France, Veasna’s debut is notably graphic—yes, because he’s a visual artist but also because words alone couldn’t capture the magnitude of this (in)human tragic history. Prodigious Francophone translator Dascher enables English-language reading; award-winning filmmaker Rithy Panh provides introductory context.

Megha Majumdar

Rave Booklist Kolkata-born and Harvard- and Johns Hopkins–educated book editor Majumdar presents an electrifying debut that serves as a barometer measuring the seeming triviality of human life and the fragility of human connections.

Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Rave Booklist Japan’s literary superstar Kawakami...significantly expands her 2008 Akutagawa Prize novella, notably translated by Bett and Boyd ... Within an affecting portrait-of-an-artist-in-transition, Kawakami deftly, deeply questions the assumptions of womanhood and family—the bonds and abuses, expectations and betrayals, choices and denials.

Shubhangi Swarup

Rave Library Journal ...will certainly be one of the most wondrous literary achievements to hit the shelves this year ... A multigenerational epic intertwined with spellbinding myths, Swarup’s is a many-layered narrative ... linked across borders and barriers, from sinking islands to glacial mountaintops ... Extraordinarily affecting, this work should be a priority acquisition for all libraries with astute, globally hungry patrons.

Ishmael Beah

Rave Booklist Unflinching and unadorned, Beah’s novel provides an indelible portrait of desperate survival.

Ian Williams

Positive Booklist Everything here sounds off-kilter—on purpose. Discomfort pervades the reading, whether conversations are awkwardly not-quite-synched between speakers, or sentences spoken in an (unnamed) Caribbean island patois are made purposefully wooden and German words and phrases become virtually unintelligible. That jagged performance, however, seems integral to Williams’ 2019 Giller Prized debut novel, in which the disquieting delivery unexpectedly enhances an already unique on-the-page, meant-to-disrupt presentation ... Words don’t quite do justice here: to better interpret what’s in the ears, visual clarification with a print copy is highly recommended (which is why libraries exist!).

Frances Cha

Rave Booklist As former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul, U.S.-Hong Kong-South Korea-raised and Brooklyn-domiciled Cha writes exactingly of what she knows in her first novel. With unblinking focus, she confronts some of the darkest consequences of contemporary gender inequity by targeting the erasure of female individuality by oppressive beauty standards and expectations ... [a] magnificent tale ... Despite a society designed to stifle, these women manage to nurture mutual bonds for strength and survival.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Positive Booklist As in her debut...literary darling Buchanan’s newest presents another self-absorbed cast made memorably affecting by real-life challenges—distracted relationships, filial expectations, tiresome careers, and especially mental illness—which consume and debilitate daily lives.

Sahar Mustafah

Positive Booklist While Mustafah writes impressively and convincingly of her Palestinian American immigrant community, she falters when revealing the shooter’s narrative, which veers too close to predictability. Her achievements nevertheless outweigh minor missteps, making her an adept author well worth reading.

Yan Lianke, Trans. by Carlos Rojas

Positive Shelf Awareness After decades of glimpsing autobiographical hints in his always intriguing, often surreal novels and short stories, Anglophone audiences get access to Yan Lianke\'s real life ... Carlos Rojas returns as Yan\'s excellent translator ... Meandering through his past, Yan shows you can--and should--go home again

Kevin Nguyen

Positive Library Journal Savvy and savage (with plenty of racist, sexist, sociopolitical bite), pop lit doyen Nguyen\'s fiction debut is poised to trigger \'new waves.\'

Nancy Au

Positive Shelf Awareness Fractured families populate Nancy Au\'s provocative 17-story debut collection, highlighting disappearing parents--whether by choice or by death--and the children left to endure and survive. Au draws on her Chinese heritage in her narratives. Some of her characters are deeply affected by recent history: some are escaping the horrific tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, and others have the in-between identity of being an immigrant. Still others are steeped in a cultural legacy that incorporates magic, fox spirits and dragon gods. Lest readers worry that darkness overshadows, Au proves herself quite adept at sly, affecting humor ... By the book\'s end, Au\'s unpredictable cast has embodied far-ranging history, cultures, locations and genres, with irreverently engaging results. For short-form connoisseurs, Au\'s accomplishments will undoubtedly regale and resonate.

Chan Ho-Kei, Trans. by Jeremy Tiang

Rave Shelf Awareness Yes, it\'s almost two inches thick and more than 400 pages, but that shouldn\'t deter readers from procuring this book promptly ... virtually irresistible, with twisty-turny, didn\'t-see-that-coming manipulations guaranteed to keep readers wide awake into the wee hours ... translated by Singaporean novelist and playwright Jeremy Tiang, who dexterously conveys Chan\'s amalgamation of prose, text streams, e-mails and blog posts complete with belligerent comments ... Chan presents what initially seems to be a linear mystery--solve the dead girl\'s murder--and amplifies the thriller into a multi-layered treatise on overcrowded cities and its overlooked citizens (his native Hong Kong earns character status here), the unchecked power of the Internet, the grey ethics of revenge, and the potential limits of morality in business, friendships and even among family members. Deftly controlling multiple narratives beyond the sisters\' tragedy, Chan exposes high tech, high finance, high fraud, high school hierarchies, dysfunctional families, absent parents, relentless surveillance, sexual politics and rape culture. For readers, the provocative mix of urgent contemporary issues and page-turning action won\'t disappoint.

Tomas Moniz

Rave Shelf Awareness For readers in search of a tautly streamlined, deeply resonating, contemporary family story, Big Familia by Tomas Moniz won\'t disappoint ... Without ignoring societal ills--racially charged police violence, incarceration bias, aggressive gentrification, generation gaps—Moniz creates a broadly diverse cast on the verge of transformation. Testing options, pushing past comfort zones and welcoming new bonds result in a big familia well worth getting to know ... engaging.

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Rave Library Journal In under 200 pages, Canadian poet Thammavongsa showcases 14 spectacular stories in her fiction debut ... Thammavongsa parses her own culturally amalgamated heritage through most of her narratives here, some previously published. The collection opens with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize short-listed title story, a poignant, eyes-wide-open exploration of a young girl’s embarrassed realization of how little her immigrant father seems to know. Other lingering standouts are many...

C Pam Zhang

Positive Booklist ... mesmerizing ... Zhang reveals as much through deliberate elision as meticulous storytelling ... Zhang, just 29, writes with precocious assurance as she confronts the inseparable connections between lies, liars, and secrets; the barriers of language; the impossible price of family bonds, and the everlasting longing to find home.

Vanessa Hua

Positive Booklist Journalist Hua’s debut in fiction is an intriguing collection of 10 stories with personal resonance from being the child of Chinese immigrants and a two-decade, continent-hopping career. Each of her protagonists is never quite grounded, caught between multiple cultures and countries. Each hides beneath layers of deceit, clinging to lies that enable survival ... Hua’s ability to imagine the detailed lives of her disparate characters, including a sex-scandal runaway, missionary saviors, and a lock-picking immigrant, gives her stories impact, despite a few jarring endings. Hua’s collection pairs well with those of Mia Alvar, Violet Kupersmith, and Tania James ... Hua is a writer to watch.

Sagwa Kim, Trans. by Sunhee Jeong

Positive Booklist At turns raw and piercing, dreamy and surreal, Kim’s latest import—urgently Anglophone-enabled by scholar/editor/Seoul-based translator Jeong—is a pressing indictment of today’s too-often onerous transition toward uncertain adulthood.

Michal Ben-Naftali, trans. by Daniella Zamir

Positive Booklist Winner of the Sapir Prize, one of Israel’s highest literary honors, Ben-Naftali’s biographical novel portrays a vanished woman finally found. Translator Zamir provides a vivid translation.

Charles Yu

Positive Booklist Resembling a script, complete with a classic typewriter font, Yu’s tale ingeniously draws on real-life Hollywood dead ends for Asian American actors, including, quite possibly, Kelvin Yu, the author’s younger brother. As preposterous as many scenes may seem, their sobering reality will resonate with savvy readers.

Tishani Doshi

Positive Booklist Doshi certainly writes with eyes wide open, never minimizing the challenges and the failures that prove both damning and redemptive.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Trans. by Imogen Taylor

Positive Library Journal Be forewarned: identity, nationality, and gender are all fluid here—histories intertwine and conflict, narrators change and prove unreliable, and pronouns are a challenge throughout ... Salzmann’s multilayered first novel should find resonance with cosmopolitan Stateside audiences, most especially with internationally savvy LGBTQIA readers.

Deepa Anappara

Mixed Library Journal Anappara’s journalist training helps create a keen sense of place populated by vivid characters, but her fiction skills aren’t quite as honed, and the narrative drags, proving more unsatisfying than edifying.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Positive Library Journal Adichie\'s tone seems light, and she uses ironic humor brilliantly throughout ... But she doesn\'t shy away from getting angry, dismantling stereotypes, exposing inequity, and demanding change. Adichie\'s own definition of a feminist is simply empowering ... Libraries aware of Adichie\'s global popularity will surely want to spread her concise, common-sense, inclusive feminism.

Cathy Park Hong

Rave Booklist Title aside, nothing is minor about Hong’s taut, sharp collection. The award-winning poet’s prose debut will elicit comparisons to contemporary race-conscious luminaries—think Claudine Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay—but Hong’s singular voice expresses both reclamation and declaration ... Seven stupendous essays mark her journey toward claiming agency ... Hong creates a fierce amalgamation comprised of careful memoir, radical history, sociopolitical treatise, and revolutionary call-out.

Sayed Kashua

Positive Shelf Awareness That Kashua\'s protagonist is a nameless \'I\' who shares considerable biographical overlaps suggests, perhaps even implies, the so-called truth of Kashua\'s first-person fiction. Yet his character, whose job is to transcribe others\' memories onto the page, repeatedly reveals his elisions from and additions to strangers\' memoirs-for-hire, often inserting his own memories as their own, thereby erasing his life in scattered pieces. The narrator\'s confessions are hardly reliable, making every level of his storytelling suspect, which Kashua further visually underscores by \'track changes\'-style crossed-out text. For savvy, curious readers, that interplay of parsing fact and fiction proves to be a lively, interactive experience.

Paul Yoon

Rave Booklist Yoon again exemplifies his unparalleled ability to create a quietly spectacular narrative that reveals the unfathomable worst and unwavering best of humanity; the result here provides mesmerizing gratification.

Aravind Adiga

Positive Booklist Adiga, who’s become a part-time Australian, again scrutinizes the human condition through a haves-vs.-have-nots filter with sly wit and narrative ingenuity ... Best-selling Adiga’s smart, funny, and timely tale with a crime spin of an undocumented immigrant will catalyze readers.

Meng Jin

Rave Booklist With precocious dexterity, Jin—Chinese-born, Harvard-educated, Brooklyn-based—adroitly privileges her readers with a haunting omniscience she denies her characters, giving voice to Liya’s first caregiver and the runaway stranger whose genes are Liya’s dubious legacy. Skillfully revealed, exquisitely rendered, Jin’s first novel undoubtedly presages future success.

Valérie Mréjen, Trans. by Katie Shireen Assef

Positive Library Journal In language that’s laconic and concise, Mréjen writes affectingly without emotional entanglement—\'her aim is not to eulogize but to describe, to enumerate, to record,\' writes Assef (making her full-length translation debut) in her elucidating ending commentary ... While the novel is \'certainly not for members of the cult of the carefree,\' as Assef wryly notes, internationally-savvy seekers will undoubtedly be intrigued.

Perumal Murugan, trans. by N. Kalyan Raman

Positive Booklist Murugan—smoothly anglophone-enabled by award-winning Tamil translator Raman—moves fluidly between human and animal viewpoints, from detailing the humans’ relationship with their land and flock, to anthropomorphizing Poonachi’s maturation from fragile survivor into playful kid, longing lover, even miraculous mother. Yet as pastoral as this story seems, Murugan’s multilayered intentions prove far more admonitory. Poonachi is more daughter—with all the limitations of womanhood thrust upon her—than livestock. Beyond the fields, a regime looms, fear controls, and societal rigidity rules as Murugan adroitly transforms his caprine idyll into cautionary chronicle.

Hiromi Kawakami, Trans. by Allison Markin Powell

Rave Booklist The presentation is exquisite: in this small volume, Kawakami’s spare text is interrupted by Takako Yoshitomi’s delightful two-color illustrations of mostly geometric shapes with anthropomorphized additions ... this less-than-100 pages tome easily stands alone as a parable about memory, mythic characters, and confessional regrets, but for a lingering, sigh-inducing experience, read this only after finishing its companion, the internationally bestselling, Man Asian Literary Prize finalist, Strange Weather in Tokyo ... Kawakami’s enduring afterword follows—and haunts—as she ponders what happens to \'stories that have ended,\' of \'echoes that [she] hear[s], far off in the distance,\' how \'[t]he world that exists behind a story is never fully known, not even to the author.\' The result—Anglophoned once again by Powell, Kawakami’s translator of choice—is an ethereal, resonating literary gift.

Teresa Dovalpage

Positive Shelf Awareness Dovalpage adeptly draws on her heritage, intertwining her native country\'s tumultuous history with the contemporary experiences of the Cuban diaspora. While the collision of past and present produces fatal results, the ensuing labyrinthine journey provides readers with plenty of compelling diversions along the way.

Fernanda Torres, Trans. by Eric M. B. Becker

Positive Shelf Awareness Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres writes about what she knows, while writer, editor and translator Eric M.B. Becker provides English-language audiences ready access to Torres\'s affecting performance on the page. Having alchemized theater into her standout debut, The End, Torres returns with another tragicomedy about the cost of \'this bind they call fame\'—the irresistible lure, the blinding reception, the fickle adoration and the unrelenting need for reinventions.

Mimi Lok

Positive Booklist Lok channels her intimate observation of human relationships into an astute first story collection ... Through eight provocative stories, Lok’s sharp gaze transforms disconnection and longing with compelling results.

Ahmet Altan

Positive Booklist ...translator Yasemin Çongar...transfers...immediacy onto the page with reverence and grace, the essays alchemized into this phenomenally inspiring memoir. Despite stifling, Kafka-esque circumstances, Altan channels freedom through his imagination; he escapes through his mind. His unfailing creativity feeds his very soul to survive[.]

Maaza Mengiste

Rave Booklist ... monumental ... Mengiste’s extraordinary characters—shrewd Kidane, militant Aster, the enigmatic cook, narcissistic Italian commander Fucelli, conflicted photographer Ettore, elusive prostitute Fifi, even haunted Selassie—epitomize the impossibly intricate ties between humanity and monstrosity, and the unthinkable, immeasurable cost of survival.

Kevin Wilson

Rave Shelf Awareness Despite a sense of head-shaking impossibility, Wilson somehow manages to make his make-believe believable--in between the inappropriate laughing and bittersweet empathizing ... When it comes to unconventional families, Wilson again proves himself a master of heartstring-tugging, drop-jaw shocking, guffaw-inducing, (can\'t resist) highly combustible entertainment.

Paul Yoon

Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Yoon, a New York City-born Korean American, writes with such sparse precision as to create a visceral portrait of lost souls, each searching in worlds both living and dead ... In spite of all that is missing for his characters, Yoon\'s writing results in a fully formed, deftly executed debut. The lost lives, while heartbreaking, prove illuminating in Yoon\'s made-up world, so convincing and real. To read is truly to believe.

Monique Truong

Rave Booklist Truong, whose family’s violent 1975 displacement from Vietnam when she was six makes her intimately familiar with peripatetic longing, stupendously imagined the life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ Vietnamese Parisian cook in her award-winning debut, The Book of Salt ... She displays similar ingenuity in her extraordinary new book (an eight-year effort) presenting Lafcadio Hearn through the four most important women in his life ... By reclaiming these exemplary women’s voices, Truong enhances history with illuminating herstory too long overlooked.

Rawi Hage

Rave Booklist ... spectacular ... Hage’s visceral reminder that beyond money, power, religion, and war, we are nothing more than corpses to either let rot or set aflame.

Yoko Ogawa, Trans. by Stephen Snyder

Rave Booklist As fantastical as the premise of her latest anglophoned novel seems, Ogawa intends exactly that universality ... Ogawa’s anointed translator, Snyder, adroitly captures the quiet control with which Ogawa gently unfurls her ominously surreal and Orwellian narrative. The Memory Police loom, their brutality multiplies, but Ogawa remarkably ensures that what lingers are the human(e) connections—building a communicating device with tubing, sharing pancake bites with a grateful dog, a birthday party. As the visceral disappears, somehow the spirit holds on.

Edwidge Danticat

Rave Booklist Following The Art of Death (2017), a reflection on her mother’s passing and writing, Danticat focuses this haunting eight-story collection on, well, death ... Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics—refugee crises, polarizing inequity, violence, disasters—and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for literary enlightenment.

Yukio Mishima, Trans. by Sam Bett

Positive Booklist [Mishima\'s] slim novella—smoothly translated into English for the first time by prize-winning Sam Bett—is a raw, scathing examination of fame: \'The very thing that makes a star worth watching is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider.\'

Ocean Vuong

Rave Library Journal \"Vuong mines his memories, his traumas, his triumphs to create an epistolary masterpiece addressed to his mother—who can\'t read ... Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary; an essential acquisition for every library.\

Hwang Sok-yong

Rave Booklist Sentenced in 1993, renowned South Korean writer Hwang...served five of a seven-year sentence for making an unauthorized trip to North Korea to promote artistic exchange between the divided nations. Combining brutal adversity, escapist fantasy, and deep humanity, Hwang—adroitly Anglophone-enabled by expert translator Kim-Russell—indelibly alchemizes the plight of the North Korean refugee, and refugees worldwide, into resonantly timely storytelling.

Malaka Gharib

Positive Booklist ...a formidable balancing act negotiating parents, cultures, religions, and expectations ... Presenting her memories in hues of pinks, oranges, and blues, Gharib augments them with stinging, comically poignant interruptions ... Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream.

Grace Talusan

Positive Booklist Awarded the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Talusan bravely alchemizes unbearable traumas into a potent memoir remarkably devoid of self-pity, replete with fortitude and grace.

Julian Herbert

Positive Booklist Award-winning translator MacSweeney enables anglophone readers access to Herbert’s electrifying testimony, first published in Mexico in 2015.

Isabella Hammad

Mixed Booklist ...a historical, multigenerational sprawl, with a stupendous beginning that, alas, devolves into a tumultuous muddle of superfluous characters and unnecessary side-narratives, ending with a disappointing lost-letter-induced-insanity ploy. That the twentysomething novelist is already an enviable wordsmith promises, however, that experience and maturity will produce sustained spectacularity in future titles.

Susan Choi

Rave Booklist Choi’s fifth, and finest, novel ... Despite being a reference to a soul-baring acting exercise, \'trust\' will have little correlation to truth ... Literary deception rarely reads this well.

Etaf Rum

Positive Booklist The daughter of Brooklyn Palestinian immigrants, Rum was often told \'a woman is no man.\' Overcoming her fear of community reprisal, she alchemizes that limiting warning into a celebration of \'the strength and power of our women.\'

Seong-Nan Ha

Rave Booklist \"Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim ... PEN/Heim Translation Fund–awarded Hong enables English-language readers access into Ha’s disturbing, unpredictable, oneiric—yet all too recognizable—world in which heat stifles, waste rots, and bonds break; yet, for most, life goes on.\

Lisa See

Rave Booklist A stupendous multigenerational family saga, See’s latest also provides an enthralling cultural anthropology highlighting the soon-to-be-lost, matriarchal haenyeo phenomenon and an engrossing history of violently tumultuous twentieth-century Korea. A mesmerizing achievement.

Helen Zia

Positive The Christian Science Monitor Blending the personal with pivotal world history, Zia succeeds in creating a universal, timeless story ... She counters the dismissive narrative of refugees as \'freeloaders and parasites\' with examples of their global successes ... Gathered, analyzed, and distilled with insight and meticulous documentation, Zia’s book gives voice to a history almost lost.

Giacomo Sartori

Positive Booklist Sartori ruthlessly confronts the Catholic Church, hypermasculinity, environmental manipulation, capitalism, feel-good entitlement, and more, all in the name of God (whose perfection proves anything but). PEN/Heim Translation Fund–awarded Randall ensures that Sartori’s English-language debut conveys the full impact of Sartori’s scathing humor.

Un-Su Kim, Trans. by Sora Kim-Russell

Rave Booklist The winner of prestigious prizes in Korea, Kim makes his anglophone debut, thanks to Kim-Russell, who captures his dark, dark wit and searing sarcasm in an irresistible sociopolitical parable designed to delight and dismay.

Sookja Cho

Rave The Christian Science Monitor For the curious Anglophone reader of world literature, Cho Ung is a dramatic adventure filled with royal intrigue, swashbuckling wars, filial duties, multigenerational revenge—and, of course, a swooning love story ... To ensure a smooth, narrative experience, Cho makes reading the 138-page adventure straight through easily doable, clearly separating the story from additional information, keeping even footnotes relegated off the page until after the final line. Readers might close the book fully satisfied with a glimpse of vernacular fiction from another time, a faraway culture while digesting a bit of sociopolitical history. But beyond simply enjoying literature-in-translation, Cho’s contextual enhancements (totaling an additional almost-100 pages) are emphatically laudable as well as rewardingly readable. Her comprehensive introduction provides a treasure trove of exacting details about versions of the classic tale, a parsing of its factual and imagined elements, astute character studies, textual insights—undoubtedly illuminating for the casual reader, surely motivating for the academic scholar.

Chigozie Obioma

Rave Booklist By having Chinonso’s chi serve as storyteller, Obioma alchemizes his contemporary love story into a mythic quest enhanced by Igbo cosmology, centuries of history revealed through glimpses of the chi’s past hosts, elements of autobiography conjuring Obioma’s own Cyprian education and his meeting a fellow Nigerian whose dire experiences initially sparked the novel. Magnificently multilayered, Obioma’s sophomore title proves to be an Odyssean achievement.

Hwang Sok-yong Trans. by Sora Kim-Russell

Rave Booklist ... indelibly, adroitly anglophoned by Seoul-based Kim-Russell ... A piercing modern tale about all we can never know about our loved ones and ourselves.

David Ariosto

Mixed Booklist Despite repetition and disjointedness (some chapters seem like separate essays), Ariosto’s insights are plentiful, and amid erratically evolving Cuba-U.S. relations, such personal perspectives, even from a yuma, provide the best portals to mutual understanding.

Miguel De Cervantes and Ilan Stavans

Positive Booklist Weil is an ideal accomplice; his emotive artistry verges close to colorful caricature, and his text bubbles break panel boundaries as if he knows the script is too large to ever be contained. Stavans notes the simultaneous availability of a \'Spanglish\' edition. Undoubtedly, this is not your lit professor’s classic. Purists need not open, but readers in search of a good guffaw can expect rollicking fun times.

Sisonke Msimang

Rave Booklist Before personal and political events finally allowed her to go \'home\' to South Africa, Msimang spent her first 20-plus years in peripatetic exile ... Hauntingly raw (her sexual assault at age seven) and unblinkingly honest (her lingering hatred of a school bully), Msimang’s memoir and first book recounts the intimate, inspiring, tumultuous journey of a woman \'piecing [herself] back together.\'

Pyun Hye-young, Trans. by Sora Kim-Russell

Rave Booklist \"The first collaboration between Pyun and translator Kim-Russell, The Hole, introduced one of Korea’s most lauded writers to Anglophone readers. Kim-Russell’s ability to replicate Pyun’s stifling terror repeats here as he presents a nameless antihero, known only as \'the man.\' ... A slap-in-the-face parable of the perils of society’s failures, Pyun’s suffocating tale reveals a future all too possible and real. \

Frederick Luis Aldama

Positive Booklist \"The latest title in Mad Creek’s impressive Latinographix series showcases 80-plus contributions from the flourishing Latinx graphic community. Creators were prompted \'to reflect upon the most significant moments of their lives,\' rendering seven sections that explore language, coming-of-age, mythology, identity, heritage, self-image, and pop culture ... As testimony and magnification of the multitudinous Latinx experience, La Vida bursts forth con fuerte. \

Peter Kuper

Rave Booklist Eisner-winning Kuper’s career of \'translating Kafka into comics\' began in 1995, when his initial collection of nine shorts hit shelves, with Give It Up! He adds another five here, scrambles the previous order, and includes his \'Kuperesque\' foreword, emphasizing how, since Kafka’s death at 40, in 1924, \'our world increasingly reflects the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’\'—nightmarish, oppressive, surreal ... In distilling Kafka’s timeless themes, Kuper creates stark panels of disturbing truth and powerful warning. While Kafka aficionados will savor enhanced perception, readers without prior knowledge will nevertheless appreciate Kuper’s unflinching interpretations.

Alice Stephens

Rave Booklist ...The author, who describes herself as being \'among the first generation of transnational, interracial adoptees,\' takes charge with a tale that will knock your expectations to, well, somewhere surreal yet real. Step into Villa Umma, where Lisa has been kidnapped, no, delivered. She’s had a shattering fight with her BFF, fellow adoptee Mindy, at a Seoul Dunkin’ Donuts about meeting Mindy’s birth mother and absconded to Jeju Island with the MotherFinders representative. Turns out Mindy’s bioparent doesn’t particularly want her, but Lisa’s certainly does—not to reclaim 27 lost years but to further her Machiavellian plans to place Lisa’s half brother at the helm of a nuclear-power-to-be ... Stephens’ darkly comic, sharply irreverent, undeniably wise \'Great Adoption Novel\' is an unexpectedly timely, not-to-be-missed, epic wild ride.

Gina Apostol

Rave Booklist ...With shrewd insight, inventive plotting, and stinging history lessons, Apostol...puts the \'unremembered\' Philippine-American War on display, deftly exposing a complicated colonial legacy through the unlikely relationship between a U.S.-educated Filipino translator and a visiting American filmmaker ... The multilayered challenge, enhanced by the presences of Elvis, Muhammad Ali, various Coppolas, and a sprawling cast of characters both historical and imagined, proves exceptionally rewarding.

Don Brown

Rave Shelf Awareness Using a similar format that won him awards for Drowned City, Brown presents a graphic hybrid of history and facts—explained in text boxes—with scenes of personal experiences. Beyond numbing data, Brown gives faces and voices to the refugees, as he chronicles various journeys out ... Brown\'s panels can\'t—won\'t?—contain all that the Syrians must endure, as weapons, explosions, fleeing crowds, suffering victims repeatedly break through panel outlines. Yet amid the struggles, Brown won\'t abandon hope ... In urgently humanizing The Unwanted, Brown\'s sobering explication and tenacious advocacy prove both necessary and revelatory.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Rave Booklist Adjei-Brenyah’s dozen stories are disturbingly spectacular, made even more so for what he does with magnifying and exposing the truth. At first read, the collection might register as speculative fiction, but current headlines unmasking racism, injustice, consumerism, and senseless violence prove to be clear inspirations ... Ominous and threatening, Adjei-Brenyah’s debut is a resonating wake-up call to redefine and reclaim what remains of our humanity.

Nicole Chung

Rave The Christian Science Monitor \"[Passing on this book would be a mistake,] Because beyond the specifics here – as unique, affecting, heartstring-pulling as this debut is – Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know will resonate with any sensitive, thoughtful reader ... Raw, open, forthright, Chung’s personal odyssey is an intimate journey toward self-understanding and acceptance.\

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Rave Christian Science Monitor ...the latest evasive, magical, utterly unique novel by Murakami ... seamlessly translated ... At over 700-plus pages, it’s (thankfully) another intriguing, time-challenging tome you can’t wait to finish ... As entertainingly evasive as always, Murakami allows for some mysteries to be solved, while others remain in limbo. Avoiding absolutes, his playful slyness pops up throughout.

Samuel Park

Positive Booklist \"In alternating sections marked by Mara’s different ages, Park’s tale hauntingly examines the codependent mother-daughter bond amid complicated layers created by the pursuit of truth. Beyond the affecting pages, Park’s own April 2017 death of stomach cancer at 41 is a somber factor. The inclusion of his New York Times essay, \'I Had a 9 Percent Chance. Plus Hope,\' at the book’s end makes this an especially melancholic experience.\

Vanessa Hua

Rave Booklist In Perfume Bay, a luxurious oasis just outside Los Angeles, pregnant Chinese women are pampered through the U.S. birth of precious progeny who will provide their parents with \'a foothold in America.\' Among the guests is factory-manager Scarlett Chen, sent to the U.S. to bear the son of her older, married lover, who’s also her employer ... an astute debut novel that confronts identity, privilege, freedom, and a twenty-first-century rendering of the American dream with poignancy, insight, humor, and plenty of savvy charm.

Kyung-Sook Shin, trans. by Anton Hur

Positive Booklist Online ...Orphaned but adoringly raised by a royal attendant’s sister, coddled since childhood by the queen, taught French by a missionary-priest, Jin leaves Korea and settles in Paris. Her new life provides unimagined social, literary, even commercial opportunities, but the relentless exotification of her very person emphasizes her growing alienation. Her return home is bittersweet, as she’s treated like a foreigner, but events turn horrific when she’s caught in the violent Japanese takeover of the Joseon court ... The Court Dancer’s latest journey west should command substantial, eager audiences.

Crystal Hana Kim

Rave Booklist Hunger, both physical and emotional, haunts the lives of the extended Lee-Yun family during the tumultuous, violent decades that define modern South Korea in the latter twentieth century ... Kim renders her multivoiced, multilayered ancestral and cultural history into stupendous testimony and indelible storytelling.

R O Kwon

Mixed Booklist Kwon’s debut has all the elements of what should be a stupendous success—exquisite prose, vivid characterizations, and astute observations—yet somewhere between spark and explosion, the narrative strays unnecessarily from the essential, then becomes overly elliptical to provide a persuasive finale.

Lucy Tan

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Tan deftly explores evolving immigrant identity, layers of ex-pat privilege, tenacious gender disparity, family expectations and obligations ... Against a contemporary global backdrop, made empathic with a multigenerational family saga, embellished with timeless servant/master (and mistress) class conflict, Tan’s debut will be entertaining – and enlightening – savvy cosmopolitan readers throughout the summer and beyond.

Sayaka Murata, Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Positive Booklist The prestigious Akutagawa Prize–winning Murata, herself a part-time \'convenience store woman,\' makes a dazzling English-language debut in a crisp translation by Takemori, rich in scathingly entertaining observations on identity, perspective, and the suffocating hypocrisy of \'normal\' society.

Positive Booklist ...distinctly showcases her literary pedigree in this raucous, bittersweet non-love story across cultures, generations, morals, and other seemingly impossible divides.

Hwang Sok-Yong

Positive Booklist Galvanized by Nobel Prize–winner Kenzaburo Oe’s resounding endorsement—“undoubtedly the most powerful voice in Asia today”—and master translator Sora Kim-Russell’s exquisite rendition, Hwang’s latest import is surely poised for Western success.

Dunya Mikhail, Trans. by Max Weiss

Pan Booklist The survivors’ stories are relentlessly horrific; words seem inadequate in describing the systematic slaughter, capture, sale, rape, and torture of human beings by other human beings ... Despite the inarguable significance of these survivors’ stories, as literature, The Beekeeper ultimately disappoints. Mikhail’s diary-like presentation, complete with phone interruptions, personal dreams recalled, and ruminations on the universe, feels inappropriately trivial amid the gruesome accounts of hideous inhumanity.

Ana Simo

Rave Booklist Eschewing labels and defying expectations, Simo slyly confronts race, sexuality, multigenerational duty, immigrant dislocation, and even dirty politics while spinning a bizarrely spectacular, outlandishly disorienting (not-)love-story of lost, searching souls.

Jenny Diski

Rave Booklist ...[a] spectacular 1995 collection of bizarre-to-rueful-to-stunning stories ... Memorable girls and women—damaged, truculent, curious, stalwart—occupy Diski’s pages, claiming space, agency, and well-deserved attention.

Xiaolu Guo

Positive The Christian Science Monitor Although undoubtedly Guo’s most resonant book to date, Nine Continents is not without literary flaws, from needless repetitions to bombastic declarations of 'never' that don’t stick. Missteps aside, what remains is a viscerally affecting narrative in which Guo shares four decades of all the ways that being a woman – herself as daughter, sister, lover, and others as wife, mother, grandmother – has caused damage, humiliation, and tragedy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Rave The Christian Science Monitor In Giant, Ishiguro explores love that lasts – but at what cost? ...narrative is seemingly straightforward: An older couple embarks on a journey to reunite with their estranged son whom they have not seen in many years ... It covers just four days and three nights – and yet lifetimes of myth, allegory, and epic discoveries are contained within ...Ishiguro nimbly plays with both content and form. He imbues his leading man and woman with much more than just simple appellations... The changing viewpoints underscore the mutability of memories, and hint at the unreliability of storytelling ... Ishiguro’s 10-year investment comes to eloquent fruition here. The result is a provocative, multilayered mosaic.

Karen Tei Yamashita

Positive The Christian Science Monitor Yamashita clearly has an agenda: she aligns each letter-topic with a specific muse, to whom she reveals a corresponding part of her family’s story, then moves beyond personal details to illuminate a broader, contemporary context such as, say, today’s civil rights ... Allusive, quirky, questioning, Letters is a challenging text; for all its brevity, the less-than-200 pages are dense with assumptions of cultural literacy, community insight, historical background. And yes, don’t be deterred: for 'gentle, critical, or however' readers ready for intellectual stimulation, Letters awaits your inquisitive participation and rewarding collaboration.

Kamila Shamsie

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Shamsie, who has matured as global citizen and international writer in the age of social media, goes beyond mere plot adaptation to explore the nature of storytelling itself: who gets to tell the story, how will the story get retold, which story might last to become history ... Although just one in a substantial library of Antigones through centuries, cultures, and countries, Shamsie’s latest is a compelling, stupendous stand-out to be witnessed, honored, and deeply commended.

Jenny Zhang

Positive The Christian Science Monitor Amidst this shared indigence exposed in the opening story, Zhang skillfully introduces the kernels of the stories to come ... That Zhang suffuses her young protagonists with autobiographical details – Shanghai-born, immigrant parents, New York-raised, Stanford-educated – adds authenticity to these narratives of strife, growth, and various degrees of success. Beyond the details, however, is a universal shared experience: a longing for home, and the challenges – economic, social, familial, cultural – to finally get there. The topic couldn’t be more timely as immigration debates continue to flare; with unblinking candor, Zhang illuminates the struggles to belong, to settle, to be welcomed home.

Dina Nayeri

Positive The Christian Science Monitor ...both a commemoration of the ties that bind us and an indictment of the estrangement that isolates, and even kills, us ... With eyes wide open, Nayeri is not afraid to expose her characters as flawed, even unlikable. Caught between desperation and expectation, arrogance looms large: Bahman as the male patriarch whose less-than-thoughtful choices nearly destroy multiple lives, Niloo as the self-absorbed loner too damaged by fearful distrust to accept life-saving support. Presenting father and daughter in multi-faceted splendor, however, comes at a literary price for Nayeri: her intense involvement with Bahman and Niloo tends to eclipse her other, clearly lesser supporting cast ... Nayeri carefully illuminates the plight of the ever-searching, never-belonging global wanderer.

Katherine Boo

Rave The Christian Science Monitor That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well deserved ... Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit – is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty or a political treatise on widespread corruption ...pure, astonishing reportage with as un-biased a lens as possible trained on specific individuals in a clearly delineated section of ever-changing Mumbai ... Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.

Zinzi Clemmons

Rave Booklist ...[a] spectacular debut ... Clemmons creates haunting authenticity by imbuing Thandi with autobiographical elements—parentage, life in Philadelphia, attending Columbia, her mother’s death—but through enhanced fiction, she pushes Thandi into global citizenry, shows her skin color to be a barometer of fraught relationships and race politics, explores mother-child bonds with brutal honesty, and even reveals cancer to be 'a disease of privilege' elevated with ribbons and campaigns. Clemmons performs an exceptional sleight of hand that is both affecting and illuminating.

Diksha Basu

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...[an] endearing, astute debut ... Breezily entertaining enough to enthrall droves of this summer’s beach and poolside readers, Windfall also manages to seamlessly insert urgent, relevant themes of gender inequity, socioeconomic prejudice and aggression, familial expectations and constrictions, isolation, entitlement, and more. Avoiding heavy-handed judgments (most of the time), the Delhi-born, internationally-raised, Cornell and Columbia-educated Basu writes what she knows, clearly familiar with adroitly navigating between East and West. Her global citizenry inspires sharp insights.

Lisa Ko

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...[an] achingly insightful, gorgeously redemptive debut ... Although Ko began writing Leavers in 2009, headlines regarding immigrants have hardly changed: round-ups, detention, deportation, separated families – especially tragic are recent international adoptees deported as adults because of legal loopholes to a birth country they left as children . Beyond the desensitizing media coverage, Ko gives faces, (multiple) names, and details to create a riveting story of a remarkable family coming, going, leaving…all in hopes of someday returning to one another.

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...a whimsical delight ... Despite so much seeming to be the same, rather than familiarity breeding contempt, Murakami always manages to entertain, surprise, and satisfy ... If Murakami is in the (repeating) details, then such details are what make his writing so identifiably unique.

Nadeem Aslam

Rave The Christian Science Monitor I know it’s only still May, but I’m already willing to predict that The Golden Legend could be the best book you read this year ... indelibly intertwined with the atrocious violence and despicable tyranny are moments of wrenching beauty ... In a further stroke of literary brilliance, Aslam creates a book within his book, a 987-page masterpiece that haunts Aslam’s 'Legend' from beginning to end ... Aslam both severs and reunites connections, destroys and reclaims characters, to offer readers an unparalleled experience that both rightfully condemns and poignantly honors the worst and best of our shared humanity.

Bandi, Trans. by Deborah Smith

Rave Booklist British translator Smith expertly delivers Bandi’s subversive prose with nuanced grace. The afterword further explicates the manuscript’s remarkable journey out, with an additional note from the South Korean activist who enabled the precarious north-south crossing. As Bandi’s characters both fear and sling accusations, the title takes on piercing gravitas for readers: knowingly turning a blind eye to such inhumanity is not an option.

Lisa See

Positive Booklist ...a complex narrative that ambitiously includes China’s political and economic transformation, little-known cultural history, the intricate challenges of transracial adoption, and an insightful overview of the global implications of specialized teas. The only possible flaw is that some may consider her magic-wand ending unbelievable. As this is her first book since losing her own mother, bestselling author Carolyn See (to whom it is dedicated), See’s focus on the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters, by birth and by circumstance, becomes an extraordinary homage to unconditional love.

Deepak Unnikrishnan

Rave The Christian Science Monitor Combining surreal symbolism and linear narrative, wordplay and lists, family history and mythic retellings, Unnikrishnan uses fiction to '[illuminate] how temporary status affects psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s).' In a brilliant, subversive move, Unnikrishnan connects his three 'books' with a single-word chapter, 'Pravasis' – Malayalam for migrant, or 'temporary people' in Unnikrishnan-speak, which he repeats three times in each book ... [an] unsettling, dazzling, astute collection ... Its publication couldn’t be more timely given the current outcries for and against immigrants, bans, raids, and mass deportations. As an antidote to border politics, Unnikrishnan’s stories serve as both testimony and oracle to be read with grave urgency.

Tahmima Anam

Positive The Christian Science Monitor For those lucky enough to now be discovering Anam for the first time, a priceless literary gift awaits: to experience three generations of the remarkable Haque family – without interruption ... introspection, emotions, and attachments that illuminate this narrative, complete with rapid heartbeats and breathtaking sighs. Perhaps because Anam draws on personal details Grace proves to be the most intimately affecting of her three titles.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Positive The Christian Science Monitor To compare In Other Words to her English works – her previous titles – seems inevitable, even as such a comparison feels unjust. Unsurprisingly, her short stories are the collection’s standouts, but the raw intimacy of her essays offers an illuminating gift with which future titles can and will be read through a shifting lens.

Alexander Chee

Positive The Christian Science Monitor The sprawling result might not make for a perfect novel – it’s messy, convoluted, repetitive, and drawn out. And yet Queen undisputedly reigns as the grandiose, ostentatious opera it was meant to be: romance, betrayal, erotic fantasies, intrigue, espionage, murder, jealousy, bed-hopping, power, secrets, class, war, and even a balloon escape – all set to an opulent soundtrack that ranges from nonsense verses to sweeping arias.

Janice Y. K. Lee

Rave The Christian Science Monitor With meticulous details and nuanced observations, Lee creates an exquisite novel of everyday lives in extraordinary circumstances ... How Lee’s triumvirate reacts, copes, and ventures forth (or not) proves to be a stupendous feat of magnetic, transporting storytelling.

Kenzaburo Oe, Trans. by Deborah Boehm

Rave The Christian Science Monitor My advice to you: Buy, borrow, or steal this book – and then set aside some substantial reading time. This could be the densest and most rewarding 432 pages you’ll experience this year.

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November 21, 2024