Late one evening, Driss, an older man, is hit and killed in a dark intersection near his restaurant in a small town in California. His death is at the center of Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Other Americans. She assembles Driss’s family, the police, a potential witness, and nearby business owners—each with their own perspective—and lets them tell their story, not just of the ... Read More...
Women Talking: A Novel by Miriam Toews
In the Mennonite community of Molotschna eight women gather in a barn to talk. Their meeting is a secret, made possible only because the men have gone into the city to bail out eight men who have been accused of a heinous crime: that of drugging and raping over 100 of the community’s women and girls repeatedly over a two-year span. It will take two days for the men to return ... Read More...
A People’s History of Heaven
It’s funny, being a girl. That thing that’s supposed to push you down, defeat you, shove you back, back, and further back still? Turn it the right way, and it’ll push you forward instead. A People’s History of Heaven was one of my winter picks. It’s set in a 30-year-old slum called Heaven in Bangalore, India and centers around the lives of five young girls: Banu, Padma, Joy, ... Read More...
If, Then by Kate Hope Day
It feels a bit as if alternate realities are all the rage in fiction this year, which is not too surprising if you pay attention to what’s happening in the real world. First, there was The Dreamers, where people fell asleep and dreamed of different lives. Dreams so vivid that upon awaking they believed their dreams were real. Kate Hope Day takes things further in her debut ... Read More...
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
It’s the end of the 19th century when Bertha Truitt appears in Salford, Massachussetts. Literally, just appears. If she has a past she doesn’t want to talk about it. What she does want to do is open her own candlepin bowling alley and with the money she has she does. This is just the first of Bertha’s actions that make her the most intriguing character in Elizabeth McCracken’s ... Read More...
The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin
I believe now that certain events are inevitable. Not in a fateful way, for I have never had faith in anything but myself, but in the way of human nature. It seems as if there’s a trend in winter fiction about a parent dying, an absentee parent, and a determined oldest daughter raising their siblings. I noticed it first in Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of ... Read More...
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