Kim makes her English-language debut with the tantalizing story of a Korean hired bride and the company that employs her. Noh Inji, 29, works as a wife at New Marriage, a secret division of a matchmaking service that allows clients to live as if they’re married while providing the option to terminate the relationship without having to go through a real divorce. After the end of her fourth marriage contract, to music producer Han Jeong-won, she’s set up on a date outside of her company’s client pool with a man named Om Tae-seong. When Inji rejects Tae-seong, he keeps pursuing her—even after she enters into a rematch marriage with Jeong-won. Tae-seong’s disruptions ring alarm bells at New Marriage, and they dispatch a team of agents to scare him off. While happy to be rid of her stalker, Inji can’t shake the guilt she feels about Tae-seong’s fate, and she asks Jeong-won to help her find him. The investigation takes her deep into New Marriage’s secrets, and as she learns unsettling details about its operations, she reflects on her lingering grief over a childhood friend’s suicide. Kim’s layered and well-constructed novel is packed with intrigue and surprising twists. Readers will be on the edge of their seats until the final page. Agents: Jackie Yang, Eric Yang Agency; Emily Randle, Randle Editorial. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Howell debuts with a beautiful and striking collection about friendship, secrets, and unspeakable desires. “Lobes,” the outré opener, explores the narrator’s obsession with her lover’s earlobes, to the point that she fantasizes about biting or cutting them off (with his consent) and keeping them as trophies. In “Cherry Banana,” a woman takes a receptionist job at a seedy hotel, where she begins shacking up with long-term guest Henry, who pines for his runaway daughter and lives in the room she’d once checked into with her deadbeat lover. The fantastical “Age-Defying Bubble Bath” follows middle-aged Alda, who’s anxious about her wrinkles. After Alda overdoes it with a bottle of high-strength de-wrinkling bubble bath, the bubbles’ serum causes her to reverse-age into a little girl. “Kitty and Tabby” concerns one girl coping with body dysmorphia and another who claims to be a shape-shifter yearning to give birth to a boy. Throughout, Howell’s discontented characters often settle for a twisted sense of intimacy (as a character in “Devil’s Juice” says to her friend about her lover: “I don’t know if I love him. I just hate him less than everyone else”). These vivid and harrowing stories are tough to shake. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this unfinished novel, Hurston (1891–1960) attempts a biblical retelling similar to her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, unspooling a stimulating if rushed revisionist narrative of Herod the Great. It opens with a 25-year-old Herod appointed as governor of Galilee by his father. The young leader quickly rids Galilee of bandit Hezekiah and his followers. The killings earn Herod adoration from Galilee’s residents but ire in Jerusalem, where some see his actions as reckless. Jealous Judean king Hyrcanus puts Herod on trial for the murders, but his powerful presence in court strikes his accusers silent and he’s set free. His strained relationship with Hyrcanus continues as Herod battles new enemies, grieves his father’s death by poisoning, gains the trust of Mark Antony, and becomes co-governor of Judea. After Hyrcanus is captured by an invading Parthian army, Herod saves hundreds of women from danger and then travels to Rome, where he demands to be named king of Judea. Because Hurston left the manuscript incomplete, chunks of the plot are missing, particularly toward the conclusion. Still, she delivers an intriguing counterpoint to the biblical “massacre of the innocents” story, framing Herod as a strong and complex protagonist, one who balances his political ambitions with his loyalty to his people. Hurston completists ought to snatch this up. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this sweeping and heart-rending debut, Chen brings to life more than 60 years of Chinese history through the tale of childhood sweethearts separated by war and reunited decades later in America. Haiwen, a recent widower, and Suchi, who helps raise her grandkids, cross paths while shopping in 2008 Los Angeles. The two first met as kindergartners in 1930s Shanghai and fell in love as teenagers but were separated by the war between Mao’s Communists and Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists. In the historical timeline, Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist army in a misguided effort to help his family, a decision that will tragically reverberate through succeeding generations. Suchi, meanwhile, is sent to Hong Kong with her older sister to escape the war. At times, Chen relies too much on expositional dialogue to capture historical nuances, such as mainlander suppression of native Taiwanese culture, but in tracing Haiwen’s and Suchi’s diverging paths, she conveys the breadth of their sacrifices, making their eventual reunion all the more poignant. As she writes about Suchi’s realizations: “Home wasn’t a place.... It was people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, of places long disappeared.” For the most part, Chen scales the heights of her ambition. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

British writer Cronin (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot) serves up an enjoyable story of an unlikely friendship forged at a Birmingham thrift store. Eddie Winston, a 90-year-old store employee, meets Bella, 24, when she comes in with a donation of clothes left by her late boyfriend, Jake, whose death a year earlier she still hasn’t recovered from. The pair hit it off and soon get together for lunch in a local park. When Bella learns Eddie has never been kissed, she makes it her mission to help him find love, and signs him up for dating apps. But Eddie still pines for Birdie, the wife of a philandering professor at the university where he taught in the 1960s. Despite their strong mutual attraction, both Eddie and Birdie respected her wedding vows. As the narrative builds toward a sweet finale, Cronin flexes her deadpan wit, particularly in scenes where Bella encourages Eddie to take risks (“Bella promises that if I do die,” Eddie narrates before joining her on a roller coaster, “she will help the ride operator to drag my body off the ride and throw it into the sea and then they will call the authorities and say that I fell off the pier while clutching my chest”). It’s a winning tale of second chances. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

British actor Everett debuts with an appealing collection of stories, many of them culled from his ideas for scripts, that address themes of loss, love, and the pitfalls of fame. The title entry, which takes the form of a rant, bemoans the fickleness of Hollywood (an “American no” is when a director gushes over an idea, then ghosts the creator). In “Hare Hare,” set in present-day London, the narrator runs into a failed producer who’s taken up with the Hare Krishnas. Everett’s wide range of settings include mid-19th-century India, where, in “The Last Rites,” an unhappily married Englishwoman is widowed, captured by revolutionaries, and presumed dead, only to secretly live as a Muslim wife. A new life is also in store for the protagonist of “Ten-Pound Pom,” a young Irishman who abandons his careless family for a fresh if turbulent start in 1952 Australia. The standout “Sebastian Melmouth, the Morning After and the Night Before” portrays Oscar Wilde’s final night in Paris before his death, an inspiration for Everett’s film The Happy Prince. With these astute character-driven tales, the author proves to be a storyteller of many talents. Everett’s fans have cause to celebrate. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the sharp-witted and weighty latest from Berlinski (Fieldwork), #MeToo allegations roil an off-off-Broadway Shakespeare company, prompting a 50-something actor to reevaluate her life. Mona Zahid is already grappling with the difficult new role of Cleopatra and what it says about her career; after playing everyone from Juliet to Lady Macbeth, being cast as the Egyptian queen means she’s just about aged out of Shakespeare’s heroines. Mona’s also dreading hosting Thanksgiving dinner, especially after the death of her younger sister, Zahra, whose daughter, Rachel, will be in attendance. Recently, Mona learned that Rachel, following an internship at the theater company, was one of the women who accused its octogenarian founder, Milton, of sexual misconduct. On Thanksgiving Day, Mona escapes her cramped Upper West Side apartment for a last-minute grocery run, during which she frets over a recent postcard message from Milton, in which he claimed to be dying. She decides to make a detour to Brooklyn to see him, and on the way, she burrows deep into memories of her younger years as a player in Milton’s company, when scoring an audition at his dingy Avenue C squat was akin to “winning one of Willie Wonka’s Golden Tickets.” Mona’s thoughts are laced with scathing humor and piercing insight into the actor’s craft, resulting in a surprisingly moving exploration of the courage required to play life’s many roles. Berlinski deserves a standing ovation for this bravura performance. Agent: Susan Ginsburg, Writers House. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ngamije (The Eternal Audience of One) serves up an occasionally dazzling but ultimately diffuse collection about the woes of a 20-something novelist. It’s framed as a “literary mixtape” and arranged by alternating A-side and B-side stories (the former comprise a linked narrative while the latter each stand alone). The unnamed novelist reflects in “Crunchy Green Apples” on how he grew apart from his mother as he entered into a “tribe called cool.” “The Sage of the Six Paths (Or, The Life and Times of the Five Os)” covers his teen years, as he gets into trouble with his fast-moving and mischievous friend group before finding “another way of being” through literature. In “The Hope, the Prayer, and the Anthem (Or, The Fall So Far),” he considers his elusive dreams for “a modern house,” “a wife,” and an “acclaimed novel.” B-Side tales include “Wicked,” narrated by a woman who feels a “selfish hope” that her married lover won’t leave her. Ngamije turns heads with his clever and energetic wordplay (the novelist’s promiscuous milieu is prone to “souped-up STI Golfs revving from gonorrhea to HIV in sex seconds flat”), but the structure is a bit confusing, leaving readers who remember mix tapes to wonder why the A-side and B-side tracks are alternated, and the conceit feels more gimmicky than essential. Ngamije has done better. Agent: Cecile Barendsma, CBL Agency. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Black (Don’t Cry for Me) offers a moving chronicle of a grieving queer Black man reflecting on growing up in Chicago. Having endured his mother’s death years earlier and now, in the 2000s, the loss of his father, from whom he was estranged, Isaac finds himself at 35 unfocused and coping poorly. A therapist encourages him to write down his life story as a means to move forward. Retracing his youth in the 1980s, when he cowered from his abusive and homophobic father and dealt with his mother’s alcoholism, Isaac makes peace with his regrets and rejects the shame he internalized over his sexuality. He then turns to his college years, when he experimented with dating men, and considers how after graduation, while reeling from the Rodney King beating and the AIDS epidemic, a degree couldn’t save him from the pain of racism and the danger of being queer. The writing is lyrical (Isaac adored the “syrupy cadence” of his mother’s voice), and the character portrait takes on greater dimension as Isaac struggles with forgiving his late father. The author’s fans will love this tale of hard-won self-acceptance. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this electrifying collection of three stories and a novella from Peters (Detransition Baby), trans characters explore desire, identity, and love. “Infect your Friends and Loved Ones,” the postapocalyptic opener, follows patient zero in Seattle during a pandemic that halts humans’ production of sex hormones. The narrator, once a loner in the area’s trans community, considers who she can trust. In “The Chaser,” an evocative coming-of-age tale, a boarding school junior forms a secret relationship with his femme roommate, Robbie. Peters expertly builds tension as the narrator questions his sexuality, rationalizing that he’s not gay because he’s not turned on by any of the more masculine guys in the dorm. The funny yet heart-wrenching title novella, set sometime during the primacy of steam engines and written in the style of a tall tale, may be Peters’s best work yet. When the boss at an illegal logging camp announces a dance, which anyone can attend as a woman, Babe, the strongest and ugliest lumberjack, taps into a long-suppressed yearning: “I had many times wondered in earnest about being courted as a woman.” In the unsettling closer, “The Masker,” Krys attends a trans feminine gathering in Las Vegas. When one guest arrives in a full body silicone woman suit, Krys contemplates who counts as trans and what she is willing to sacrifice for her transition. Peters explores her characters’ conundrums with striking honesty, revealing how they’re bound by indecision and insecurities from finding happiness, and she exhibits spectacular flexibility with language and form. It’s a marvel. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink