In this wry debut from Tominaga, a Japanese woman navigates single parenthood after her American husband’s untimely death. Kyoko is visiting her parents in Japan with her 18-month-old son, Alex, when her husband, Levi, is crushed to death in their San Francisco garage by the antique car he was working on. Kyoko had stopped working after Alex was born, and she struggles to see how she’ll afford her life in San Francisco. She cuts down on her costs, finds work at a preschool, and receives emotional support from her blunt and loving mother-in-law, Bubbe. The women’s relationship forms the heart of the episodic narrative, which includes a visit to a psychic who claims Levi wasn’t happy with Kyoko. At one point, Kyoko suppresses the urge to tell Bubbe how little she misses Levi, thinking, “The greatest gift he gave me was the opportunity to raise Alex alone”; at another, Bubbe affectionately calls Kyoko her daughter, not her daughter-in-law. Tominaga depicts the women’s tensions, misunderstandings, and affection with refreshing honesty and piercing insights (“Regret, resentment, and shame would build a wall around you, [Bubbe] believed, and by telling the truth we would break the wall and unite”). Tominga impresses with this distinctive slice of life. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Frazier debuts with the delightfully offbeat yet weighty story of a Chinese American college dropout turned limo driver and a Uyghur Muslim girl fleeing Chinese persecution. After Mĕi Brown’s father dies, she returns from Dartmouth to Oakland, where she struggles with her mother’s refusal to grieve. Her limo-driving job attracts the attention of her eccentric lǎoyé (Mandarin for “grandfather”), who lives in the garage and spends his days smoking weed and playing video games. Lǎoyé connects Mĕi with under-the-table clients, mainly sex workers, and eventually with the mysterious and handsome Henry Lee, who hires her to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse. Along the way, Mĕi discovers Henry is smuggling an 11-year-old girl, Anna, in his suitcase to reunite her with her professor father. Later, Mĕi learns that Anna and her mother were planning to leave China together, until her father’s incendiary articles about Uyghur persecution in Xinjiang led to her mother’s detention by Chinese authorities. The character work is top-notch, as Frazier shows how Mĕi offers Anna the kind of support she wished her own mother had provided, and the narrative structure (each chapter recounts a different leg of the journey) creates plenty of forward momentum. It’s a fresh take on the classic American road novel. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The colorful latest from Joella (A Quiet Life) finds 52-year-old Jack Schmidt at a crossroads in his diligent management of his family’s restaurant in Rehobeth Beach, Del., which he took over from his father decades earlier. When corporate bully DelDine, which has been scooping up dining establishments up and down the Delaware coast, approaches Jack with a lucrative offer, he’s tempted to take it. Though his high school buddy Deacon and others urge him not to sell, Jack remains torn. Meanwhile, he rekindles his romance with former fiancé Kitty, and the narrative flashes back to the 1980s, when the pair fell in love as teens. Eventually, Jack enters into negotiations with DelDine, but revelations about the developer’s true intentions complicate matters. The plot is predictable and sentimental, but Joella adds in meaty themes of gentrification, corporate greed, and the burdens and privileges of family tradition. Those in search of a feel-good summer tale will find what they’re looking for. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this compact and characteristically biting denunciation of French hypocrisy from Céline (1894–1961), WWI soldier Ferdinand is plagued by a “horrific din bashing my head... like a train” after being wounded in battle. Stumbling around in a delirium, Ferdinand hallucinates dead friends, three of whom appear before him “completely armless... you could see daylight through his head... he had guts that were sliding from his ass far into the countryside.” Brought to convalesce in a hospital in the town of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys, Ferdinand is protected from a doctor who wants to operate on him by a necrophiliac nurse, and befriends a fellow convalescent whose attempt to put his girlfriend to work as a prostitute threatens to backfire. For the maimed and embittered Ferdinand, the real enemy is the French establishment, including his bourgeois parents. Céline fled France in 1944 to avoid being charged as a collaborationist and left this unedited manuscript behind; Mandell’s faithful translation preserves some of the peculiarities of the original, including a few character names that change over the course of the narrative. Céline’s furious style is in full force, and is well served by the brevity of the text. Devoted fans will rejoice. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Laurie’s compassionate debut revisits the 1927 execution of Italian immigrant and suspected anarchist Ferdinando “Fred” Nicola Sacco. The narrative opens with his wife, Rosa, recounting the history of their relationship in a letter to her seven-year-old daughter, Ines, written shortly after his death. Laurie then flashes back to 1911, when Rosa first meets Fred at a dance in Milford, Mass. The two begin dating under the watchful eye of Rosa’s grandmother, but their wedding plans are derailed when Fred refuses to get married in a church and informs her father that he lost faith in God after seeing how poorly workers are treated in the U.S. Despite her family’s objections, Rosa and Fred eventually marry and start a family. The couple join a theater company, whose members, including fellow immigrant Bartolomeo Vanzetti, share Fred’s leftist leanings and introduce him to the anarchist movement. After the fatal 1920 armed robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree, Fred and Bartolomeo’s involvement with anarchists draws suspicion from the police, who charge them with the crime based on questionable eyewitness identifications. Laurie effectively conveys the emotional toll of the investigation, prosecution, and execution on Rosa, who remains unsure of the extent of Sacco’s involvement with the anarchists. Readers will look forward to more from Laurie. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dillsworth (Theatre of Marvels) delivers a crisp Victorian gothic about a former slave owner and the Black doctoress who treats him on his deathbed. In 1833 London, Hester Reeves worries about her younger sister, Willa, after she catches the eye of wealthy rogue Rowland Cherville. Hester begrudgingly agrees to treat Rowland’s father, Gervaise, for the enormous salary of £10, enough to move her and Willa somewhere safe from Rowland. Because Hester regularly treats sex workers, she recognizes that Gervaise has syphilis. Sensing he’s near death, he confesses to Hester that he made his fortune from plantations in Honduras and that he wishes to atone for his sins. He then charges Hester with finding two women, Aphrodite and Nyx, who were enslaved on one of his plantations many years earlier and later worked as servants in his London house until they ran away, so he can make amends. When Hester learns there was a third woman who left the house with Aphrodite and Nyx, she begins to question Gervaise’s motives. Much of the plot is predictable, but Hester is a heroine worth rooting for, and her search leads to the discovery of some surprising connections between her family and the women who escaped. Historical fiction fans will be pleased. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Butler’s cutting latest (after The New Me), an aimless young woman leaves Chicago for the Midwestern university town where she grew up. Fleeing her toxic boyfriend, Nick, and a city she’s come to see as an “enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect,” Moddie plans to reconnect with her high school friends and make new ones, but she frequently alienates people with her unfiltered speech and strong opinions (her criticisms of “tedious” celebrity interviews on NPR causes her friend Pam to look at Moddie as if she were “incoherently ranting about the CIA”). The men in the novel—other characters’ partners and an artist who claims he invented New Media, whom Moddie humiliates during a game of air hockey—are for the most part cartoonishly vile. There are tender moments, too, as Moddie opens up to Pam about Nick’s emotional abuse and her failures as an artist. For all of Moddie’s anarchic energies, her character arc feels conventional, though it serves as a vehicle for Butler’s laser-sighted satire of Millennial conformity. This sharply funny novel pulls no punches. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Sullivan (Friends and Strangers) toys with gothic and supernatural elements in her propulsive latest. After a drunken faux pas lands Harvard archivist Jane Flanagan in trouble at work and on the rocks with her husband, she moves back into her recently deceased mother’s house in coastal Maine. Grief and shame weigh heavily on her, so when Genevieve, the new owner of a neighboring cliffside mansion, offers Jane a research project, she jumps at the chance for a distraction. Genevieve has overheard her young son talking to someone in an upstairs bedroom who might be a ghost, and she asks Jane to investigate the house’s history, terrified that her renovations—including digging up graves to make room for a swimming pool—have disturbed the spirits of those buried on the property. The stories Jane discovers reach back through the Victorian era to encounters between Indigenous people and colonists, and include a rewarding twist that sheds light on long-held mysteries from Jane’s childhood. Sullivan leans on many pages of exposition and a few too many coincidences to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, but, for the most part, the plot motors along like a well-oiled machine. This satisfies. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sestanovich's leisurely debut novel (after the collection Objects of Desire) traces the divergent paths of two friends from different socioeconomic strata. After college, middle-class Brooklynite Eva moves to Washington, D.C., where she hopes her “boring internship at an exciting newspaper” will lead to a real job. Though she's eventually hired as a researcher, her tasks remain rote and unsatisfying. In D.C., she reconnects and begins sleeping with her ambitious college boyfriend, Eli, but is similarly bored by details of his work for a U.S. senator. Eva's story plays out in counterpoint to that of her wealthy Upper East Side friend Jamie, who embraces the Occupy movement during college, refuses to accept money from his family, and joins a cult-like church in Brooklyn. By the end of the novel, Jamie's well-meaning desire for community, which drives him to purchase an abandoned warehouse where he illegally houses artists, leads to disaster. While readers hungry for plot and resolution may be left unsatisfied, Sestanovich captivates with her distinctive characterizations—including of Eva's parents, who offer Jamie financial support and show more interest in him than their daughter—and insights into the reverberating consequences of a gap between one's intentions and one's actions. The result is an intelligent exploration of lives in the making. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this scintillating collection from Indigenous Canadian author Belcourt (A Minor Chorus), queer Cree men grapple with the legacy of colonialism. “Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century can mean that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness,” says the narrator of “Lived Experience.” Such conflicting emotions play into his ambivalence about sex, but after swearing off encounters with other men, he falls for a painter named Will, and shows up at Will’s art gallery opening wearing a denim jacket emblazoned with the phrase “GAY 4 PAY JK ABOLISH WORK.” Amorous and economic concerns also overlap in “Poetry Class,” about a poet who believes in the “revolutionary demand” of his craft, while his ex was obsessed with satisfying the market. In the gritty and moving “Outside,” a restless young man named Jack beats a drug trafficking charge, returns from jail to his grandmother’s trailer on the reservation, and matches on Tinder with a neighbor named Lucy. Throughout, Belcourt sheds light on the transformative potential of love, describing, for instance, how Jack is changed by Lucy when she invites him into her life, which “open[s] space inside his mind for different memories” and drives him to “give [himself] over to new pasts, future emotional histories.” These wise and open-hearted stories astonish. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink