Shin’s suspenseful debut sets an adventurous love story against the backdrop of North Korea’s authoritarian government during the last years of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Suja, a young North Korean girl whose father works for the government newspaper and gets her a photography internship there, has become enamored of Jin, a country boy from the impoverished town of Yangdook whom she met at Kim Il-sung University. On a school break, Jin steals cornmeal for his starving family—a treasonable offense—and is condemned to a prison camp, from which he escapes. Suja, hearing the news of his miraculous breakout at her father’s newspaper office, determines to find him. Shin, a poet and filmmaker who has documented the hardships of North Korean defectors, brings veracity to the fast-paced story, revealing the harsh circumstances of life in North Korea, the bargains some make in order to escape their homeland, such as their complicity in the black market for human trafficking, and the bleak and sometimes frightening conditions facing them as they near the border with China. With taut pacing and rich prose, Shin provides a revelatory view on a system of underground brokers who aid defectors, but also fuel indentured servitude in China. The many layers make for a moving and powerful story. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

In Williams’s exuberant, meticulously researched debut, the daughter of a lexicographer devotes her life to an alternative dictionary. As a young child in 1880s Oxford, Esme Nicoll is enchanted by the “Scriptorium,” a shed behind their house where her father, Harry, works with a team to sort and select words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. When she finds the word “bondmaid” on a discarded slip and realizes the term refers to a female slave, Esme begins her own effort, the “Dictionary of Lost Words,” stowing slips of words deemed unfit for the OED in a chest belonging to their servant, Lizzie. In her teens, Esme becomes further obsessed with which words make the cut—decisions primarily made by men—and listens to women in the marketplace, returning with suggestions for Harry. The ensuing bildungsroman carries the reader at a rapid pace through Esme’s 20s, when she rubs shoulders with suffragettes, finds romance, and bonds with Lizzie while struggling to get her book of lost words printed. Though this sweeping effort takes some time to build momentum, the payoff is deeply satisfying. Williams’s feminist take on language will move readers. Agent: Linda Kaplan, DeFiore and Co. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

Marashi’s moving if frustrating debut offers a portrait of three young women in Tehran as they struggle with various challenges. Leyla is desperately missing her husband, Misagh, who is studying in Canada. Her friend Roja, accepted to study in a PhD program in Toulouse, is trying to secure a student visa. And Shabaneh, who works with Roja at an architecture firm, is considering the pros and cons of marrying a co-worker. All three women struggle with the bonds of family as they work to achieve their goals. Roja worries about leaving her mother alone; Shabaneh cares for her disabled brother; and Leyla tries to maintain her independence by writing a newspaper column after her husband leaves. The novel is split into two parts, “Summer” and “Fall,” with each alternately narrated by the three women. The shifting points of view intrigue by showing how little each woman understands what the others are going through, and their misunderstandings lead to envy and verbal abuse, culminating in a party where secrets are revealed. While frequent, meandering flashbacks add more confusion than clarity, Marashi succeeds at depicting her characters’ limited freedom in an otherwise modern society. Readers of women’s fiction will appreciate this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

TV and video game writer Hall’s mind-bending novel (after The Raw Shark Texts) chases its protagonist at full speed through a labyrinth of philosophical conundrums. Underachieving author Thomas Quinn is in trouble. He can’t pay his bills, and his wife is away on scientific research halfway across the world. He’s still wrestling with the death of his famous writer-father and the disappearance of his father’s protégé, Andrew Black, whose own thriller, to Quinn’s chagrin, was a bestseller. After Quinn receives a disturbing letter from Black, which includes a photo of a strange black sphere, weird things begin to occur, such as a message from his dead father on his answering machine, leading Quinn to wonder if the characters from Black’s book have sprung to life. Quinn’s search for answers plunges him deep into biblical texts, theories of the alphabet’s magical powers, angelic hierarchies, and myriad other subjects, and his quest is complicated further when Black’s publisher offers him a fortune to recover a manuscript from Black. The complex typography presents a challenge (be prepared to read sideways and upside down), but for the right reader, the author’s plethora of ideas and proliferating rabbit holes provides endless delights. Fans of Mark Danielewski will love this heady postmodern thriller. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

Women take control after a pandemic kills mostly men in Whitaker’s clever and convincing debut. Ally Reynerson, a middle-aged widow and pandemic specialist with the NIH and CDC, receives secret communications about a highly contagious virus that originated at a Russian base in the arctic circle and is transmitted by dogs. Army Intelligence major general Dirk Roadfuss and philandering, golf-obsessed President Merriwether—who dresses like a “sorry blend of Rodney Dangerfield and Jimmy Buffett”—are suspiciously inactive over the threat. When word spreads to the Chinese, war-hungry and sadistic Minister Szu Qiang, brother to the Chinese president, orders samples to be obtained in the arctic for development of a bioweapon. The virus spreads rapidly throughout the world, killing millions of men and young women, with the survivors being mostly women in their 50s and 60s. Reynerson joins CDC Director Renée Carson in a joint effort with Sen. Ruth Cochran and former spy Dr. Yi Nian to discover the origin of the disease and treatment. As the diverse cast works to overcome incompetence, arrogance, and petty political fiefdoms, readers will cheer on the women (and the men they can trust) as they take decisive control and power this story of a precarious globalized world toward a satisfying conclusion. Whitaker’s fast-paced, well-written satire of men in power is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

Ross (Orange Laughter) draws on her Jamaican ancestry for a vibrant story of sensual characters and awe-inspiring, sometimes hilarious magic (or, as it’s known on the ferocious island chain of Popisho, “cors”). In this small fictional country, each person is born with a special cors (“A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing so inexpressibly your own,” Ross writes). Xavier Redchoose is divinely chosen to cook each person a perfect, individualized meal; Anise Latibeaudearre, Xavier’s long-lost love, is a healer; Romanza, son of the governor who exiled him for being gay, lives in a tree on the Dead Islands and can detect lies; Sonteine, the governor’s daughter, is the only woman yet to receive her cors. Xavier, on the anniversary of his wife’s death, is tasked to prepare a special meal for Sonteine’s upcoming wedding. Xavier, however, detests such elitism: he prepares meals at random, not according to privilege. As the governor’s corruption becomes more evident, the land itself revolts, sending the people of Popisho into odd, disorienting chaos, intertwining the lives of many and exposing a fermenting class revolution. Though the novel suffers from long, laborious exposition, Ross’s joyous imagining of a peoples’ power goes a long way to redeeming the narrative doldrums. This fresh take on magical realism delivers the goods. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

A German Jew evades arrest by traveling on a series of trains in this uncanny 1938 novel from Boschwitz (1915–1941), his first to be published in English. WWI veteran Otto Silbermann slips out the back door of his Berlin house when Nazis show up to arrest him in 1938. He seeks out his Aryan business partner, Becker, in Hamburg, to recover a debt, and Becker unleashes an anti-Semitic screed before paying up. Otto uses the money to aimlessly ride the rails (“I am safe, he thought, I am in motion. And on top of that I feel practically cozy”). He eventually tries to sneak into Belgium, only to be returned to Germany by soldiers who reject his attempted bribes. He avoids Jewish acquaintances and pesters his son in Paris to figure out how to get him to France, but when the briefcase containing the money goes missing, Otto loses all hope of escape. His bleak reflections on his endless journey (“I’m a prisoner. For a Jew the entire Reich is one big concentration camp”) are contextualized by scathing observations of Aryan Germans, who sometimes offer mild sympathy but ultimately seem to find the concentration camps “rather novel and quaint.” This chilling time capsule offers a startling image of fascism taken hold. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

Lennon (Pieces for the Left Hand) deploys his trademark off-kilter, acrimonious humor in this arresting collection. A series of riffs on marriage are sprinkled throughout, involving spouses sparring in an atmosphere of feral domesticity: “Everything is ruin... even love,” thinks an adulterous husband as he falls down the stairs in “Marriage (Whiskey).” There is a theatrical quality to the marital scenes, revealing not so much the inner lives of the combatants but their readiness to quip and wound. Other stories condense an entire history of filial resentment within one sculpted paragraph, as in “Polydactyly,” about a boy born with six fingers on each hand. “Death (After)” gets the job done in one sentence: “I believe in the afterlife in the same way I believe in the afterparty: it may exist, but I’m not invited, and so will never find out.” The “Cottage on the Hill” series is the standout, four eerie accounts of a man’s visits to a rundown rental cabin at different points in his life, in which the place is drastically, sometimes inexplicably, changed each time. If some of the pieces fail to elicit more than a smirk or a nod, there are plenty that dig deep. Lennon has talent to spare. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

Johnson (Flyover Lives: A Memoir) makes a welcome return to her wheelhouse in this propulsive domestic dramedy of manners. Having lived for more that 20 years in a village with the “exigent rectitude of formal, starchy France,” Lorna Mott Dumas leaves her philandering husband, onetime museum curator Armand-Loup, whose life consists of “sex, cassoulet and Bordeaux,” to return home to San Francisco, hoping to reboot her floundering professional life as an academic, establish a career on the lecture circuit, and reconnect with three grown children from her failed first marriage. Prime among the crises and misfortunes she encounters are Lorna’s pregnant and diabetic 15-year old granddaughter, Gilda. Lorna’s relationship with Gilda becomes a focus of the narrative, and it gradually gives her a sense of purpose. Meanwhile, Lorna may have left France behind, but it didn’t leave her. After a mudslide disinters the bones of a famous American painter back in the French village where she lived, Lorna is contacted by French police, entangling her in legal problems that eventually intertwine both story lines. Johnson’s usual razor-sharp prose and astute observations are on full display as she tweaks comic incidents arising out of her characters’ relationships. This provocative family chronicle resolves in a poignant ending with prospects for a promising sequel. The author’s fans are in for a treat. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink

The power and pain of Wright’s writing are evident in this wrenching novel, which was rejected by his publisher in 1942, shortly after the release of Native Son. Fred Daniels, a Black man who lives in an unidentified American city, is on his way home after a hard day’s work for the Wootens, a well-to-do white couple. Before he can reunite with his pregnant wife, Rachel, Daniels is unjustly seized by three white cops for the murder of the Wootens’ next-door neighbors. After he’s beaten, Daniels signs a confession, naively hoping that doing so will enable him to see Rachel. The cops take him to see her (“No one can say we mistreated him if we let ’im see his old lady, hunh?” one says), and she goes into labor, necessitating a rush to the hospital, which provides an opportunity for Daniels to escape. From that point forward, Daniels hides out in the sewers. Wright makes the impact of racist policing palpable as the story builds to a gut-punch ending, and the inclusion of his essay “Memories of My Grandmother” illuminates his inspiration for the book. This nightmarish tale of racist terror resonates. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/05/2021 | Details & Permalink