Mexican writer Sangarcía’s fierce English-language debut portrays the misogynistic violence and religious rapture of a witch trial in the 16th-century Holy Roman Empire. Anna Thalberg, a 22-year-old peasant born to a family of devout Catholics, is taken from Eisingen to Würzburg to be prosecuted for witchcraft, having aroused suspicion because she has red hair and because of her status as an outsider. One of her neighbors, Gerda, becomes jealous of Anna’s youth and beauty, and denounces her, claiming she’s seen Anna riding a “wild goat back-to-front.” More testimonies follow, in which other neighbors swear Anna has lain with the devil, provoked miscarriages, and tempted local men into carnal sin. Sangarcía pulls together an astute account of Anna’s trial and sheds light on how witch hunts were rooted in the hatred and suspicion of women (“little girls like you only bring misfortunes and calamities”). The prose, lyrical and scarcely punctuated, matches the plot’s frenzied pace. Fans of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season will love this. (Sept.)

Correction: A previous version of this review mistakenly described Sangarcía as a Guatemalan writer.

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

It’s autofiction on the autobahn in this incendiary outing from Kracht (Imperium). A middle-aged writer named Christian Kracht visits his mother in Zurich, where she’s been living alone and subsisting on vodka, phenobarbital, and cheese slices since divorcing her rich husband. Disgusted by the “city of poseurs and braggarts and debasements,” by his estimation, he proposes a road trip, determined to coax her out of her claustrophobic apartment and her “spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness.” She accepts, on the condition that he help her “squander” a substantial amount of cash from her bank account, and he agrees (“the only way to deal with money sensibly was to give it away,” Christian reflects). Thanks to their liberally paid taxi driver, they visit an eerie commune, head to the mountains in search of wild edelweiss, and visit Borges’s grave in Geneva, the only city Christian detests more than Zurich. All the while, the two warily circle around their simmering resentments and Christian’s disgust with his “dead and soulless” family’s Nazi connections. A playful tale of reconciliation that never becomes saccharine, this is one readers won’t want to miss. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Filipino family forges a new life and uneasy reunion in Sy’s astonishing debut. Queenie, the 17-year-old narrator, arrives in New York City from the Philippines with her father to live with her mother, Mel, a nurse who came to the country five years earlier. The bookish and observant Queenie is quickly disenchanted by America: their Brooklyn building is grimy and graffiti-ridden, and she barely recognizes Mel, who was once earthy and nurturing and now wears heavy makeup and prizes money above all else. To make matters worse, Queenie’s dream of attending college is waylaid when Mel informs her she must work as a nurse’s aide for Ms. Flor, the wealthy Filipina American woman who paid for Mel’s nursing education. Silence casts a pall over the home (“words of endearment fester in our throats and render us incapable of saying anything”) as her father struggles with Mel’s closely guarded independence and her role as the breadwinner while he toils as a part-time janitor. The plot ramps up after Mel encourages Queenie to consider a romance with Ms. Flor’s grandson and she loses her virginity to him. Sy skillfully lays bare Queenie’s wide-ranging emotions, from rage to sadness, and reveals the nuances of the family members’ relationships. Rich details of Filipino culture such as folk stories and religious iconography are interwoven with gritty depictions of the compromises made by the immigrant characters, some of whom work in seedy massage parlors. It’s a knockout. Agent: Amanda Orozco, Transatlantic Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Nao (Swimming with Dead Stars) delivers an incisive epistolary novel about a Vietnamese American writer’s economic hardship and queer desire. The unnamed narrator, who’s broke and desperate after losing her bid for a professorship, writes, but does not send, a series of letters to her poet friend in London. In them, she mixes quotidian details of her everyday life with rants on the pitfalls of academia and sorrowful descriptions of her mother’s severe pain from bronchitis and suicidal feelings. Only in these unsent letters does the narrator confess her lust for her friend, as she’s worried her feelings are unrequited and doesn’t want to damage her friend’s marriage. The narrator’s missives are full of complex issues lacking easy solutions: her inability to feel an emotional connection in romantic relationships due to being abused; her mother’s tendency to make the narrator feel guilty for her suffering; and her precarious living situation with a friend who lets her slide on rent in exchange for sex and household chores. In fluid stream of consciousness, the narrator conveys her external struggles and her inner passion. The result is a one-sided exchange that explodes with feeling. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the immersive latest from Segal (The Innocents), a British woman ventures to the fictional South Atlantic island of Tuga, hoping to learn about her origins. At the outset, veterinary researcher Charlotte Walker plans to study the endangered gold coin tortoise species essential to the island’s ecology. She also hopes to investigate her suspicion that her father, whom she never knew, came from Tuga. She travels by boat from England, and on her voyage she meets and falls for Tuga native Dan Zekri. Upon arrival, Charlotte discovers that Dan is engaged to a physiotherapist on the island. She tries to avoid Dan, paying more attention to her attractive host, Levi Mendoza, and his “distracting abdominals.” She also encounters roadblocks to her research, such as from island elder Grand Mary, who bars Charlotte from viewing historic records in her personal library. Eventually, Charlotte secures access to the records in exchange for treating Grand Mary’s cat and endears herself to others by helping with their pets and livestock. Tensions flare when she’s torn between Dan and Levi, fueling island gossip. Though some of the plot points feel unresolved, Segal vividly portrays life in a close-knit community, where people like Charlotte are labeled FFA (Folk From Away). This is worth a look. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Berkhout (Why Birds Sing) offers a stirring tale of the Great Depression on Canada’s Alberta prairie. In 1939, 26-year-old farmer Abel Dodds is barely surviving in the forgotten town of Grayley, where a drought has displaced many of his neighbors. Abel has stayed behind to look out for Una Wishart, his former classmate and secret crush, who lives on a nearby farm with her eight-year-old son, Toby. When news comes that the king and queen of England will tour Canada by train in the spring, Una fills Toby’s head with ideas that the royals will stop in Grayley. Abel, irate that the pomp and circumstance will do nothing to help the dispossessed, vows to protest the tour. As the royals’ arrival looms, Berkhout builds tension out of Abel’s outrage and Una’s need for hope. Along the way, she portrays the beauty of flowering wheat fields and the danger of dust storms in stark prose, and she grounds the narrative in themes of neighborliness and self-sacrifice. Readers will be moved. Agent: Sam Haywood, Transatlantic Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Translator Dantas Lobato debuts with a delicate story of a student’s first year at college and the pain of separation between her and her mother. After the unnamed narrator arrives at her Vermont dorm room, she calls her mother in Brazil every day, regaling her with updates about the New England weather, especially the first snow. The gulf between them widens as the narrator acclimates to college, while her mother remains consumed by chronic migraines and depression. By the spring semester, the mother’s health rebounds while the daughter’s zest for her new environment wanes (“Snow had started to leave a tinge of lifelessness on everything, and I stopped going outside”). The novel’s arc is shaped by a sudden inversion in the mother-daughter dynamic, as the narrator finds herself in need of comfort rather than obliging her mother’s needs. Throughout, Dantas Lobato crafts atmospheric details of the pastoral setting and of the ersatz intimacy of video calls (“My mother stayed in the shade for a moment longer, her cheeks glowing with the blue light of her computer screen”). This shines. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

An undocumented Harvard student faces an uncertain future in the scorching first novel from Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans, a memoir). Catalina Ituralde, who was born in Ecuador and has lived in the U.S. since she was five, begins her senior year in fall 2010 with cautious hope, because the DREAM Act bill, which would offer her permanent protection from deportation, is expected to finally be taken up by Congress. Flashbacks reveal her painful life story and determination to succeed. When she’s a baby, her parents die in car crash in Cotopaxi and she’s eventually brought to her grandparents in Queens. As a student, she quickly becomes an overachiever, and by high school she’s a published journalist. While working at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, she meets legacy student Nathaniel Wheeler, who’s obsessed with his anthropological research on the Incas but struggles to understand the experience of contemporary Ecuadorians. When the DREAM Act fails in November, Catalina spirals into a mental health crisis (“All my body felt was a sinking tired dread”). Villavicencio expertly illuminates Catalina’s precarity and Nathaniel’s tokenizing of other cultures. The result is a moving coming-of-age novel that doubles as a no-holds-barred cultural critique. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Dineen’s exciting and unsettling dystopian debut, a mother strives to protect her children amid climate devastation and political violence. The story takes place in an unnamed English-speaking city, where Cass raises her 10-month-old daughter Daisy and two young stepchildren­­ while her doctor husband, Nathaniel, works abroad in a war zone. The city is terrorized by a group of male climate activists who ironically call themselves Gaia, and when they start murdering people at random in their twisted bid to save the planet, Cass makes her escape. Her controlling mother-in-law, Eden, convinces her and the children to settle with Eden’s family in a “special small” utopia called Eigleath. There, Nathaniel’s brother Arthur introduces Cass to a group of people who blame capitalism and monogamy for the planet’s woes and believe Earth can be healed only by “connect[ing] humankind back to the religion of the Great Mothers.” Then their idealistic community collapses and its members find themselves ruled by a drug cartel. Not all of the plot points are fully developed, but Dineen delivers plenty of bracing details of extreme heat and water shortages, making her portrait of Cass’s dedication to her family all the more wrenching. Readers will be eager to see what Dineen does next. Agent: Eleanor Birne, PEW Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

For this spellbinding debut novel, historian Desprairies draws on her family’s collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of France in WWII. Narrator Coline pieces the story together gradually, recalling how as a young girl in 1960s Paris she often heard her mother, Lucie, disparaging Jewish people and claiming that the city’s 1944 liberation was “the end of everything.” Through research, Coline learns that Lucie worked on a German-sponsored antisemitic art exhibition during the war, and that her great-uncle Gaston, a newspaper editor, published German propaganda. Coline also discovers photographs of her aunt and grandmother at the German embassy. Another great-uncle, Raphaël, financed his stylish lifestyle by sleeping with wealthy married men, including Nazis. After Raphaël died, the family inherited treasures stolen from displaced Jewish families. Through it all, Lucie remained loyal to her first husband, a Nazi geneticist, whose grave she regularly visited, prompting her second husband, Coline’s father, to request that his own gravestone make note of Lucie’s divided loyalties. With a sardonic tone and an uncompromising vision, Desprairies lays bare the inequities of Vichy France. This will stay with readers. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink