Sugar, Smoke, Song

The nine linked stories in Rajbanshi’s sterling debut collection blend snapshots of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and South America in New York and California, as well as flashing back to experiences in their home countries. The layered “The Stars of Bollywood House” is studded with Indian recipes that break up the story’s puzzle pieces, which include a grief-stricken daughter, a desperate father, and the characters’ periodic escape from life’s anguish in the U.S. and India via the romance of Bollywood. In “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughter,” a storytelling contest makes a little girl aware of subtle racial tensions among the various immigrants who live around her. The ending is both violent and emotional. “Blues: A Dance Manual for Heartache” weaves mythological snippets, descriptions of dances, and stops on a New York City subway ride into a tapestry of memory, discovery, hope, and sadness. The title story is told in fragments headed in turn by the three words, mixing an unstable romantic relationship against a backdrop of family turmoil. The book’s title hints at the elegiac nature of Rajbanshi’s prose, but she also brings polish and precision. Her sentences are crisp and economical but also poetic and full of imagery. Each story contains a fully realized world, often revealed in elliptical pieces, and the collection coheres beautifully. This is a stunner. (June)