Originally published in Japan in 1950 and appearing in English for the first time, this meandering family story from Nobel winner Kawabata (1899–1972; Snow Country) concerns a disjointed household in Tokyo. Mizuhara, an architect, is the patriarch. He has three daughters, born of three different mothers. The eldest, the rebellious Momoko, is taken in by Mizuhara after her mother died by suicide. Mizuhara raises Momoko alongside Asako, his daughter by marriage. He’s met his third daughter, Wakako, only once; she still lives with her courtesan mother in Kyoto. The novel is driven chiefly by Asako’s desire to find Wakako, whom she has never met, but learned about from her own mother, and by the scandalous behavior of Momoko, who allows herself to be seen in public with lovers and is distraught over the death of her former lover in WWII and her mother’s suicide. The book feels like a product of its era; at times it’s slow-moving and formal, punctuated by scenes of strong emotion almost theatrical in tone. This slim volume will be most appreciated by Kawabata completists. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

A Los Angeles–based ghostwriter revisits his past in Israel in the elegant if uneventful latest from Liebrecht (Apples from the Desert). As a nine-year-old boy, Micha is the only member of his family to befriend Adella, 18, the arranged bride for his Uncle Moshe. The kindly Moshe is handsome but a bit of a nebbish, and the owlish, bespectacled young woman was far from the family’s first choice. To Micha’s surprise, Adella selects him to be her bridesman. He accepts, and his mother is outraged when she learns Adella tried on her wedding dress in front of him. Two years later, Micha moves to Los Angeles with his mother to join his father. In the second part, set 24 years after Micha left Israel, Adella invites Micha back. The reason isn’t clear, but he assumes it’s because she knows he’s a writer and wants him to help tell her life story. Micha’s bubble is burst, though, after Adella recounts her experiences since he left the country as well as her version of the time they spent together. With subtlety and grace, Liebrecht depicts how his characters fashion the narratives of their lives out of experiences they don’t understand. This wisp of a story somehow leaves readers with plenty to chew on. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

With this exciting and intelligent family drama, Graff returns to the Wisconsin Northwoods terrain of Raft of Stars. In 1993, Chicago transplants Sam and Swami Brecht arrive in the tiny town of Thunderwater to take over a white water rafting company from Sam’s uncle. The couple met when they were both in college, working as rafting guides in West Virginia over summer break. After getting married, they’ve drifted far from their old lives (“They’d just changed, subtly as weathering rock”). Sam became an art teacher while Swami, who studied geology, has been consumed with motherhood. Now, in Thunderwater with their three young children, Sam hopes running the rafting company and living in a camper van will more closely resemble the setting where they met and fell in love. Their hopes for a pristine life are compromised, though, by a rival company aptly named X-treme Outdoor Adventures for its brazen marketing to the Mountain Dew crowd. Dangerous flooding and a mining company’s ominous plans for the region add to the plot, which takes a tragic turn near the end. Graff expertly balances his character-driven domestic fiction with an exciting adventure story. Readers will enjoy the ride. Agent: Maggie Cooper; Aevitas Creative Management. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Poet Zarin (Orbit) offers a sly and beguiling love story doubling as a meditation on the nature of time. Caroline, a middle-aged mother of two, stands in Central Park on a snowy evening, waiting for a call on her cellphone from her old love Alastair. Interspersed with this waiting, which takes up the bulk of the present-day narrative, are scenes of Caroline at different ages: as a child, an older mother at some point in the future, and a 20-something woman falling in love with Alastair. The novel slips through time and space at a sometimes dizzying pace, exploring the avenues of memory and desire in Caroline’s mind beneath her snow-dusted fox-fur hat. The omniscient narrator occasionally zooms out to explore questions about the identity and meaning of a fictional character like Caroline, and what her story can offer to readers. Though Zarin gets off to a slow start—readers familiar with the plot of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” or the workings of a rotary phone might be tempted to skip passages that describe such things at length—she speeds up soon enough to match the quickness of Caroline’s inner life. This is an ambiguous and often lovely exploration of the limits of love and the unlimited scope of memory and imagination. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

The tumults of the Russian Revolution are recounted in Yakhina’s laborious epic of a German-speaking Soviet republic (after Zuleikha). In the 1910s, schoolteacher Jakob Bach is a citizen of Gnadenthal, a colony of German immigrants who have settled on the Volga River in Russia. His quiet life is forever altered when he’s summoned by rich, reclusive landowner Udo Grimm to teach Udo’s sheltered 17-year-old daughter, Klara. During private lessons in which Klara is concealed behind a curtain according to Udo’s dictates, student and teacher fall in love. Klara then runs away from her family to be with Jakob, but the couple’s scandalous relationship isn’t accepted by the Gnadenthalers. The two retreat to the forest, where Jakob and Klara learn to live off the land and bear witness to starvation, war, and the Communist takeover. Yakhina uses Jakob as a Forrest Gump figure, a sensitive observer of the phases of the revolution, from bodies of mass casualties floating in the Volga to the earnest attempts of a minor Communist Party functionary to create a new ideology for Soviet citizens. Unfortunately, the action stalls halfway through after Jakob and Klara face a tragic event, and the narrative seems intended mainly to serve as a vehicle for historical information. As fiction, this comes up short. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Canadian Romanian writer Guiasu debuts with a poignant if murky portrait of four young men struggling under the pressures of communist rule in an unnamed Eastern European country in the 1980s. Three of them­—Alex, Dan, and Victor—are hiking together in the Carpathian Mountains to send off Alex, whose application to leave for Canada has finally been approved by the government. The others will remain “on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.” Victor wants to stay and make things better while Dan envies Alex’s luck. Not much happens on the hike, beyond a close call with a bear and inclement weather. The novel’s second half delves into the friends’ experiences in the capital city after they return from the mountains and Alex prepares to leave. Interspersed through both sections are confusing glimpses of a young pianist named Gabriel, Alex’s best friend and the fourth member of the group, whose body was discovered a year earlier in the region where the others took their hike. In flashbacks, Guisau establishes that before Gabriel died while hiking alone, he was arrested and tortured by the police. While the narrative is dense and the dialogue feels stilted, Guiasu addresses his characters’ yearning and their complex feelings about their fates with great care. This succeeds as a story of fractured friendship. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Saintclare debuts with a provocative tale of a 21-year-old cleaner drawn into sex work. Agnes, who is Black, cleans for a rich white woman named Camila and lives in a deteriorating suburb outside of London with her Pentecostal Christian mother, Constance. While on the job, Agnes rummages through Camila’s adult daughter Emily’s childhood room and steals a sky-blue suspender belt, before encountering the blonde and alluring Emily in the house. Emily sees potential in Agnes and offers to show her the ropes of high-paid “sugaring,” in which a client pays for a steady relationship. After Agnes shares a night out with a client named Matthew, Constance catches her in a lie about babysitting for a cousin and kicks her out of the house. Agnes moves in with Emily and three models in their flat in South Kensington, where she transforms herself with lip injections, a new hairstyle, and borrowed clothes. Though she enjoys the work’s perks—Matthew buys her an expensive bag and pays her handsomely in exchange for sex twice a month—the other end of the bargain begins to weigh on her. Things come to a head after Agnes travels to Miami with another client and is pushed into a compromising situation by his jealous wife. Saintclare is best when portraying sex work’s mental toll on Agnes as she struggles to keep herself from having feelings for her clients and starts remembering Constance’s “God is watching you” refrain. This powerful story makes Saintclare one to watch. Agent: Hattie Grunewald, Blair Partnership. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Gornick (The Peacock Feast) spins an immersive story of a Manhattan editor on her 60th birthday. Among those invited to Ana Koehl’s celebratory dinner are her stoner anesthesiologist husband, Henry; her best friend Fiona; her son, Simon, who has begun questioning his gender identity; and Lance, her long-term lover and proof positive that Ana is a “careful cheat.” Also invited are Ana’s semi-estranged brother George and her caustic mother, Jean, who sends her a terse email on the morning of her birthday detailing how much it cost to raise Ana (“Had I invested that money starting at your birth rather than spending it year by year on you, it would have grown with compound interest”). Gornick complicates the story by alternating Ana’s perspective with those of the other characters, including Henry, who meets with Fiona for lunch before Ana’s party. It turns out the two once had an affair, and Henry thinks they should tell Ana (“You need to be a bit less shtetl and a bit more français,” Fiona responds). Crisp and clever writing abounds, and Ana’s response during the climactic dinner scene to her mother’s cruelty is particularly piercing. Gornick strikes all the right notes in this complex and moving character study. (Nov.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the protagonist’s occupation and mischaracterized the relationship between two other characters.

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Belle (High Maintenance) returns with a funny and intimate portrait of a precocious 14-year-old girl whose family life is ruptured in 1982. At summer camp, Swanna is relieved to be free from the stress caused by her parents’ recent separation. But when her mother, a self-involved poet, pulls Swanna from the bus back home to New York City, she’s horrified to discover that she’s not going to see her Upper West Side apartment anytime soon. Swanna and her nine-year-old brother, Madding, are heading north to Vermont with her mother and her mother’s new boyfriend, an Elvis-obsessed artist named Borislav, who has been awarded a spot in an artists’ colony there. Children aren’t allowed in the colony, however, so Swanna and Madding are forced to sleep in the bed of Borislav’s truck. Unable to reach her dad in New York, Swanna sees herself as the only adult in the situation: “I hated when strangers talked to me like a child.... I took the subway every day with lunatics.” One day at a bowling alley, she meets a man named Dennis, a 37-year-old married doctor and father of two. A few days later, Dennis picks Swanna up while she’s on an angry walk near the artists’ colony, and she turns up her charm, recognizing him as her way out. Soon, they’ve embarked on an affair as head-spinning as it is ill-considered. Whip-smart dialogue and a convincing teenage perspective add heft to this comic novel. Belle breaks hearts with the story of Swanna’s first love. Agent: Douglas Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink

Cooke makes an assured debut with the story of a queer Jamaican Canadian woman reckoning with her roots. In 1996 Vancouver, 20-year-old narrator Akúa loses her beloved 12-year-old brother Bryson to sickle cell anemia, the same illness that killed their mother when Akúa was nine and the family still lived in Jamaica. Overcome with grief, Akúa takes her brother’s ashes home to her stubborn older sister, Tamika, in Jamaica. Tamika’s prior refusal to visit a dying Bryson continues to upset Akúa and exacerbates the sisters’ strained dynamic, as does Tamika’s homophobia. There’s still love between them, though, and Cooke uses Akúa’s return to examine the meaning of home, be it familial or geographic. “Am I Jamaican?” Akúa asks herself as she struggles to understand patois after Tamika labels her “foreign.” The god-fearing Tamika also hits Akúa and demands she “renounce” her sexuality. Defiant, Akúa strikes up a relationship with a stripper named Jayda. Akúa’s chronicle of self-determination is stirring, as are the flashbacks to her childhood in Texas, where the family first moved from Jamaica and where Akúa resisted her teachers’ attempts at assimilation. Cooke successfully evokes the temerity and rebellious intelligence of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/13/2023 | Details & Permalink