A young woman spends a year adrift in Aoyama’s elegant English-language debut. Surly 20-year-old Chizu Mita moves in with her distant relative, Ginko Ogino, in Tokyo after Chizu’s mother leaves for a teaching job in China. Chizu tries to needle the 71-year-old woman for her quirks, such as decorating a room with photos of her deceased cats, but Ginko is unflappable. Chizu gets a job as a kiosk attendant at the nearby rail station and starts dating coworker Fujita, though they don’t have much to talk about (their meals are “quiet and peaceful, like the unruffled surface of a lake”). As the year passes, Chizu’s mood never thaws, despite Ginko’s efforts, such as inviting the young woman on outings with her new boyfriend, a ballroom dancer. Aoyama adeptly conveys Chizu’s loneliness and how her unvoiced emotions drive her attempts to pull others into her misery. The result is a notable tale of arrested development. Agent: Li Kangqin, New River Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Murray (coauthor of The First Ladies) delivers a winning portrait of Harlem Renaissance figure Jessie Redmon Faust (1882–1961). Jessie moves to Harlem from Washington, D.C., in 1919 to serve as literary editor of NAACP magazine The Crisis, helmed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Faust is thrilled at the opportunity to provide a venue for Black writers and helps to make stars out of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, but she risks her career and the magazine’s reputation by having a secret affair with Du Bois, who is married. Murray illuminates Faust’s steadfast and selfless work, showing how she labored behind the scenes to bring others to prominence while putting her own dream of writing a novel on hold, a sacrifice made bitter when she watches Du Bois receive the acclaim. Murray doesn’t shy away from her characters’ flaws, examining for instance Du Bois’s disdain for uneducated Black people and Faust’s mother’s well-meaning if unhelpful chastening (“You are neither white nor a man, and so you’ll be judged harshly and unfairly, even as you perform well”). Historical fiction fans will want to snatch this up. Agent: Liza Dawson, Lisa Dawson Assoc. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this richly imagined adult debut from YA author Li (True Love and Other Impossible Odds), the death of a Hollywood star brings together two Chinese American families. Nora Deng, 21, had never heard of Vivian Yin until her mother, Elaine Deng, tells her Vivian has died and included their family in her will. The pair drive from San Bernardino to Vivian’s Altadena manor, where Nora meets Vivian’s daughters, Lucille Wang and Renata “Rennie” Yin-Lowell, and granddaughter Madeline Wang, who are shocked to learn Elaine has inherited the house. As the two families tensely navigate this unexpected development, Li shuttles readers to the 1970s. Vivian, then a young actor with two children from a previous marriage, marries actor Richard Lowell and settles into the home that has been in Richard’s family for generations. Vivian delves into the house’s mysterious history, finding that a “strange, dismal beauty” emanates from it and discovering secrets among Richard’s ancestors. The gothic motif extends to a series of tremors that shake the house in the present day, and tensions between the families eventually reach a breaking point. Fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic ought to take note of this beautiful and haunting novel. Agent: Jess Regel, Helm Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

A brother and sister’s artistic rivalry intensifies when they fall for the same woman in Dess’s electrifying debut. In the novel’s framing device, Ava Stern’s older brother, Demetri, is near death from a tumor. Ava, a painter, writes about their life together while the 31-year-old documentary filmmaker lays unresponsive in home hospice care. She begins with their childhood on Long Island, where they were raised by an aloof father after their mother died by suicide when they were eight and seven. Both children show artistic promise, but their teachers favor the serious-minded Demetri, while Ava, deemed “oversexed” by school officials, acts impulsively in an effort to fit into her brother’s world. In one instance, she paints a nude portrait of a girl Demetri desires but is too anxious to approach. After Ava drops out of high school, they move to Boston so Demetri can attend Harvard, then to New York City, where they alternately support and undermine each over the course of their 20s. Their dynamic is unsettled when they meet Nati, an Italian gallerist who commissions Ava’s work and starts dating Demetri. After Ava begins an affair with Nati, she grows anxious about jeopardizing her bond with Demetri, especially as his health deteriorates and they clash over his idea to make a film about her. Dess harnesses her characters’ feelings of sorrow and dread as their bond unravels, and she skillfully untangles the complexities of their all-consuming relationship while offering keen insights into the pressures they face as artists, both from others and from within. It’s a tour de force. Agent Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

This middling novel in stories from Matthews (Shaky Town) traces a screenwriter’s ups and downs in Hollywood. Dale Davis likes to describe himself as faded rather than failed (“Poets can fail. Screenwriters can’t fail, the bar is set too low,” he says to a fellow writer and drinking buddy in the title story, set in 2008). In “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others,” Davis gets the chance to direct his own script, a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1974 film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia in Nicaragua, where the 1987 production is interrupted by insurgents and canceled by the studio before he can finish. His bad luck continues with the writers’ strike the following year, as he loses his agent and resorts to teaching and ghostwriting to make ends meet. In “Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes,” set in 2010, Davis tries to sell a remake of the 1972 blaxploitation movie The Thing with Two Heads, claiming the story of a terminally ill white surgeon who transplants his head onto the body of a Black man is the “lesson in race relations the country needs now.” The tales of Dale’s losing streak become repetitious, though some of them pop with life. Lovers of Hollywood lore will get a kick out of this. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lyndsey (Girl in the Dark) captures the horror of having one’s chronic illness dismissed by others in her scattershot latest. After Tom Jenkins, a British PhD student in physics, starts experiencing headaches and nausea, he takes part in the psychology department’s study of self-described “reactors,” people who believe they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Tom comes to believe that he’s a reactor, too, when he notices the symptoms lift as he spends time away from campus, which has just installed a high-powered Wi-Fi system. After many reactors drop out of the study, Tom and his psychologist friend Kevin band together to report on its problems. When their concerns are brushed under the rug and Tom’s girlfriend dumps him, claiming he’s imagining his condition, he retreats to the countryside and joins a camp of fellow reactors. As he recuperates, he hatches plans for an experiment that will prove what they’re enduring is real. Rigorous discussions between Tom and the others about the scientific method throttle narrative momentum as the plot veers from Tom’s inner turmoil to hints of a far-reaching conspiracy. Still, Lyndsey paints a realistic picture of what it means to cope with a condition that is not recognized as a medical diagnosis, but which still has the power to shape one’s life. It’s a provocative tale. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

This heartbreaking novel from Nigerian American writer Atta (The Bad Immigrant) follows a 17-year-old girl whose dreams are dashed when she becomes an unwitting victim in a human trafficking scheme. Gift plans to attend the local college in her small Nigerian city, though she’s uncertain what she’ll study. While her father is away working as a driver in the capital, her stepmother, known as Madam, presents Gift with a golden opportunity: in exchange for college tuition plus salary, she’ll work as an au pair in the U.S. for Madam’s sister, Victoria, a pediatrician pregnant with her first child, and her husband, Jonathan, an ER doctor. Without hesitation, Gift accepts the offer and travels to Middleton, Miss. Gift’s feeling that she’s won the lottery fades when Victoria neglects to pay her and puts off enrolling her in college. Setta’s intelligent narrative offers a nuanced portrayal of Gift’s desperation, naivety, and pride, building tension by juxtaposing the stark terms of Gift’s exploitation and her stubborn hope that she’ll eventually get what she was promised. It’s a powerful coming-of-age tale. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

This deeply intelligent 1938 novel from de Céspedes (1911–1997), crisply translated by Goldstein, matches the bravery of the author’s The Forbidden Notebook in its groundbreaking portrayal of a group of female friends in Rome. The women, all literature students from different parts of Italy, meet as boarders. As the novel unfolds, the women reckon with important life decisions and face pressure to conform to their patriarchal Catholic society. The oldest, Augusta, warns the others, “Once you’re married, you won’t be free ever again.” Nevertheless, Anna plans to marry and have a child after her studies are completed, while Xenia runs away from school and enters a criminal underworld. The author builds tension as the characters consider the gravity of their choices. As Sylvia, the “genius” member of their group, notes, “It’s as if we’re on a bridge. We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other.... What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.” Readers will be grateful for this rediscovery. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Canadian writer Peters (The Berry Pickers) delivers a skillful set of tales featuring Indigenous characters in contemporary and historical settings. The narrator of “(Winter Arrives)” describes the seasonal return of white colonists to her riverside land. Though her father assures her that the colonists’ stay will be short (“Each year they come, little one. They come and they leave”), the narrator has her doubts. “Tiny Birds and Terrorists” centers on an encampment of activists, who are called “terrorists” on the evening news for attempting to protect their natural resources. One of them, a 16-year-old girl who skips school to join the group, is later cautioned by her mother against becoming a “rez bum.” Peters draws on oral history with “The Story of the Crow (A Retelling),” which details how the crow became black and hoarse. “In the Name of God” chronicles a boy’s harrowing experience at a Catholic residential school, where a priest locks him in a cupboard for four days as punishment for insubordination. Peters casts an unflinching eye on the suffering of her characters, resulting in the heightened emotions of stories like “Three Billion Heartbeats,” in which a young woman leaves home for the city to score drugs and faces mortal danger. It’s an affecting and wide-ranging collection. Agent: Marilyn Biderman, Transatlantic Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sarsfield’s ambitious and delightfully bizarre debut portrays the yearning and misfortunes of a white 20-something migrant worker in the Midwest. In September 2014, Elise travels from Brooklyn with her boyfriend, Tom, to work the harvest on a Minnesota beet farm. Both, as Sarsfield wryly puts it, are hoping to return to Brooklyn with the highly valued “social currency” of “hardscrabble Steinbeckian authenticity,” though Elise is genuinely broke while Tom comes from family money. At their camp, they meet a cast of crusty punks, train hoppers, and other seasonal workers, including Sam and his girlfriend, Cee, whom Elise is attracted to. As the grueling labor begins, Elise struggles to come to terms with the wind and cold. She can’t afford new boots, or anything to eat beyond the peanut butter and cheese sandwiches provided at a nearby soup kitchen, which she refuses out of an aversion to processed food. After a mysterious charge on Elise’s credit card deepens her financial woes and causes tension between her and Tom, the beets begin talking to her, or so she thinks (“Return the dirt,” she hears them say). Another voice already in her head, which she attributes to her eating disorder, tells her how worthless she is. When Tom leaves with Cee and doesn’t return, Elise’s hold on reality becomes even more tenuous. Sarsfield perfectly captures the vulnerability Elise feels as a result of being at the mercy of things outside of her control and her terrible sense of self. It’s a knockout. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink