An illiterate woman from the Moroccan countryside recounts her life in Taia’s hypnotic and masterful latest (after A Country for Dying). The novel opens in the 1950s with the narrator, 17-year-old Malika, falling in love with Allal, a man with a male lover named Merzougue. After Malika and Allal marry, he leaves with the French colonial army to fight in Indochina. She and Merzougue soon learn of his death in combat, and Taia stages a touching scene in which the pair pantomime the burial of Allal’s unrecovered body in the mausoleum where Allal and Merzougue used to meet to make love. In the novel’s second section, a 30-something Malika, now remarried, faces the possibility of a new loss: a white woman from France named Monique wants Malika’s oldest daughter Khadija to be her live-in maid. As Malika faces off against Monique, she confronts the ways in which, even after Morocco’s independence, the French are “still here, very much so.” The final section depicts an elderly Malika confronting a thief in her home, a young gay man from her neighborhood named Jaâfar, who wishes to be sent back to prison to reunite with his lover. Jaâfar was also friends with Ahmed, Malika’s gay son who cut off contact with her after he immigrated to Paris. With magnificent precision and gorgeous, understated lyricism, Taia homes in on three events in Malika’s life that, taken together, contain the historical sweep of her life and her country. This is unforgettable. Agent: Marion Duvert, Clegg Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dunlap’s clever debut explores medical history, queer love, and the cost of progress in 1828 Scotland. James Willoughby’s patrician, cash-strapped English family wants him to choose a wealthy wife and a dignified career. Instead, he decides to become a doctor, a lowly profession at the time. James enrolls in the University of Edinburgh, where Scotland’s strict human cadaver laws make dissection all but impossible. To make do, he turns to a private program run by Dr. Louis Malstrom, who obtains corpses from body snatchers, or “Resurrectionists.” In lieu of paying the program’s steep tuition, James agrees to assist the crew of Resurrectionists led by Malstrom’s brilliant young assistant, a man named Nye MacKinnon. Exhilarated by his medical studies and convinced of body snatching’s scientific necessity, James has his first sexual experience with Nye and the two fall in love. James’s excitement over his new life is tempered by a visit from his sister, who demands he return home, and by two thuggish Irishmen who attempt to control the Resurrectionist network with threats and blackmail. Dunlap melds comic, tender, and macabre moments in her well-plotted tale, and makes hay with embellished historical facts. Readers will be entertained. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

The dynamic latest entry in O’Donnell’s gothic Victorian series featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Henry Cutter and Sgt. Gideon Bliss (after The House on Vesper Sands) finds the duo perplexed by a particularly macabre murder scene. After receiving word of Sir Aneurin Considine’s death, Cutter and Bliss arrive at his home to find not one but two bodies, Considine’s and his servant’s, and the bones of a child clutched in Considine’s hand. The pair seek help from journalist Octavia Hillingdon, a skillful investigator whose research leads her to conclude that the murders are connected to a decades-old fire that killed 36 children at an asylum. The body count rises with another murder, of a civil servant, and again a child’s bones are found at the crime scene. Soon, Bliss and Cutter discover evidence of abuse at the asylum and consider the possibility that the killer may be a survivor out for revenge. O’Donnell’s expert pacing never falters as he explores what makes his characters tick, including Cutter’s regret over letting a murderer go free years earlier and Bliss’s decision to hide his orphan roots. Along the way, the narrative also delves into the motivation behind murder and questions of morality when it comes to avenging abusers. Series fans will be captivated. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W Agency. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and takes care of her ailing father in this uneven offering from Navarro (The City in Winter). Adriana is preoccupied by everything but her unfinished thesis. She frets about her widower father’s ill health following a stroke and fixates on his daily habit of searching for hookups on dating apps. Adriana looks half-heartedly for love herself, drifting from one short-term relationship to the next and remaining hung up on an unnamed colleague known as the “bearded man” who abandoned his wife and children for Adriana before leaving her three years later. Much of the novel meanders, just as Adriana meanders through her life, but it greatly improves in the final section, which comprises three narratives ostensibly written by Adriana as part of her thesis, including that of her mother’s stifling childhood and later career as a pediatrician, her grandmother’s loveless marriage to a local medical assistant and farm owner during the Spanish Civil War, and Adriana’s infatuation with the bearded man. Navarro’s metafictional exercise intrigues, even if it doesn’t always hang together. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Goodman (Sam) delivers an engrossing if overlong account of French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval (1515–1542), who lived to tell the tale of her solitary exile on an island off the coast of New France. Orphaned by age three, Marguerite and her nurse, Damienne, are placed in the care of Marguerite’s duplicitous cousin, Jean-François. As Marguerite grows up, Jean-François treats her cruelly, cramming her into a corner of the Roberval’s ancestral home to make way for new tenants. He also squanders Marguerite’s inheritance to pay his debts and fund his naval expeditions, and takes Marguerite and Damienne with him on a ship bound for New France. Marguerite, now a young woman, is resourceful but impetuous, and she falls in love with Jean-François’s secretary, Auguste Dupré, during the voyage. After a furious Jean-François catches on to Marguerite and Auguste’s affair, he maroons them on an uninhabited island. Though the story drags in places and the ending is a bit too pat, Goodman brilliantly depicts Marguerite’s courage as she fights to survive the bitter Canadian winter. It’s a rousing portrait of an undaunted woman. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Colombian writer Silva Romero makes his English-language debut with a wrenching tale of murder and survival. Near the remote Colombian town of Belen del Chami, a mute man named Salomon Palacios is gunned down by hooded assassins in 1992. His distraught widow, Hipolita, sets off on a rambling odyssey of retribution, accompanied by their sons Max, 12, and Segundo, eight. Salomon, meanwhile, has become a ghost, and he meets with the ghosts of other victims of political violence. Romero captures the intensity of the family’s grief, as they’re poorly consoled by a gravedigger and are ignored by the police, all while Salomon shadows them, unable to intervene. Silva Romero seamlessly weaves lyrical depictions of Salomon’s afterlife, a “dense, black, clammy, stinking jungle that looked to him like hell,” with pointed observations of the country’s decades-long guerrilla war, which “continues to break the extraordinary open hearts of thousands of Colombians.” Meadowcroft’s crystalline translation introduces readers to an important Latin American voice. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Stern (The Village Idiot) delivers a droll dual narrative of a real-life Israeli historian tasked with salvaging the literature hidden from and seized by the Nazis during WWII and a man attempting to make light of his Polish village’s occupation by the Germans. Gershom Sholem (1897–1982) returns from Israel to his native Germany in 1946 to sift through a warehouse of Jewish books and ephemera collected by Allied forces during the liberation. Sholem’s literary excavation is alternated with chapters devoted to fictional “shtetl scapegrace” Menke Klepfisch. As Sholem becomes progressively disheartened by the bizarre evidence of the war’s horrors, Stern recounts episodes in the life of the resilient Klepfisch, who takes on the role of clown for the German commandant after the invasion and spends a “noxious night” in an outhouse with his lover as a means to keep warm. The juxtaposition of Klepfisch’s absurd antics with Sholem’s methodical seriousness gives the novel an intriguing frisson, and the intellectual complexity is shrewdly leavened by the author’s sardonic wit and pithy observations. Stern demonstates his literary finesse with this life-affirming tale. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Franklin’s fresh debut, inspired by her experience with autism, centers on an unnamed girl in southeast England known as Little Alien. She has only one friend, a boy named Bobby who stood up for her once at her previous school. As part of her desire to understand the greater connections between herself and life on Earth, Little Alien latches onto the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript, an indecipherable text believed by some to have been written by extraterrestrials. Hoping to translate it, she delves into the study of linguistics, and she and Bobby sneak off to London to see the manuscript while it’s on loan at a university. Their adventure sends their parents into fits of anxiety, particularly Little Alien’s mother, who suffers a mental breakdown. After she’s institutionalized, Little Alien schemes to break her out. Franklin delightfully renders her neurodivergent protagonist’s attempt to make sense of what’s “normal” and to understand how language works, as when she asks about the word interactive, “Does ‘inter’ mean between, just like ‘international’ means ‘between nations’? Does ‘active’ mean ‘exercise’? What would ‘between-exercise’ mean?” This has plenty of heart. Agent: Lisa Baker, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Celestin debuts with an intriguing if muted portrait of an art history professor and his early life in the Caribbean. A prologue set in 1995 Brooklyn sets the stage, as protagonist Robert Carpentier tries to dissuade a fellow partygoer who’s bent on returning to a besieged Sarajevo during the Yugoslav Wars. Robert’s protest is an expression of his own ambivalence toward home. The novel’s lengthy first section chronicles his early years in an unnamed Caribbean republic that “seemed suspended in perpetual peace and stable hierarchy” until 1963, when a doctor dubbed “the Mortician” for his resemblance to an undertaker was elected president. After the Mortician enacts an anti-communist and populist crackdown, an 11-year-old Robert flees with his family to New York City. Later sections cover Robert’s education in Europe in the 1970s, his return to the U.S. in 1980 for the professorship, and his marriage to UNICEF worker Eve. Robert reacts numbly to such catastrophes as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the novel explores the consequences of his emotional guardedness with elegance and ambiguity (“He had allowed no sorrow to touch him, steering recklessly toward a deceptive radiance”). Patient readers will find much to savor. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Children’s author Castoro (How to Keep Monsters out of Your Room, as Catie Cat) makes her adult debut with a winning portrait of a struggling Detroit single mother trying to make a better life for her daughter. Edwina “Eddie” Hest is evicted from the apartment she shares with her nine-year-old daughter, Grace, after the landlord sells the building, prompting Eddie to borrow money from her mother for a down payment on a small suburban house. She thinks their newfound stability will help her be a better mother to Grace, whose father is incarcerated. Structured as a series of transcripts from Eddie’s therapy sessions, the voice-driven narrative depicts how Eddie, a self-described “rebel” with tattoos and dyed purple hair, gradually loses the chip on her shoulder (“I don’t intend to hang out with suburbia,” she says early on) as she spends more time than she’d like with soccer mom Sheila, whose daughter is friends with Grace. The story takes a strange turn when Sheila blackmails Eddie, threatening to expose the fact that Grace’s father is in prison. Castoro skillfully raises the stakes all the way to the deliciously karmic ending. It’s a satisfying tale of redemption. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink