Synopsis

From one of America’s foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love.

What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O’Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond.

O’Rourke’s story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother’s illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes …read more >

Synopisis

From the Publisher
Journalist Peter Godwin has covered wars. As a soldier, he’s fought them. But nothing prepared him for the surreal mix of desperation and hope he encountered when he returned to Zimbabwe, his broken homeland.

Godwin arrived as Robert Mugabe, the country’s dictator for 30 years, has finally lost an election. Mugabe’s tenure has left Zimbabwe with the world’s highest rate of inflation and the shortest life span. Instead of conceding power, Mugabe launched a brutal campaign of terror against his own citizens. With foreign correspondents banned, and he himself there illegally, Godwin was one of the few observers to bear witness to this period the locals call The Fear. He saw torture bases and the burning villages but was most awed as an observer of not only simple acts of kindness but also churchmen and diplomats putting their own lives on the line to try to stop the carnage.

THE …read more >

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly
Aboulela’s third novel, inspired by the life of her uncle, the poet Hassan Awad Aboulela, offers a delightfully quixotic view of northern Sudan in the 1950s on the brink of its independence from Britain and Egypt. Nur is the favored son of the wealthy Abuzeid family, destined to take over the family business, until he is severely injured in an accident. Mahmoud, Nur’s father, is both optimist and pragmatist, eager to embrace contemporary mores yet firmly rooted to his homeland. Mahmoud’s two wives—Nur’s deeply traditional and veiled mother, Waheeba, and Nabilah, a young and homesick Egyptian—have conflicts that swell and erupt in both predictable and surprising ways. The characters are lovingly and precisely rendered, and Aboulela (The Translator) describes the impact of Nur’s disability with keen detail and noteworthy empathy. Though the novel offers few glimpses into life outside the Abuzeid’s …read more >

Synopsis

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards.Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After …read more >

Balram Halwai is the consummate entrepreneur, an unapologetic “white tiger” who has hoisted himself out of a life of servitude using nothing but his own ingenuity and ambitious spirit—and seven hundred thousand rupees stolen from his murdered master. Balram’s improbable success story begins in a poor village in rural India, where he works in a tea shop and dreams of nothing more than wearing a khaki uniform like the local bus driver. His fortunes seem to be on the rise when he lands a job as a chauffeur for a rich man in New Delhi, but as his experiences in the Indian capital awaken him to the fundamental injustices of one man serving another, he begins to plan his great escape. Through the eyes of his wise-fool hero, Adiga crafts a scathing portrait of modern India as a nation whose true entrepreneurs are forced to cheat, steal, and even kill to overcome the nearly insurmountable barriers of social stratification.

Book Review by Anna Ziajka …read more >

Lovely and methodical, Gilead captures the quiet moments of reflection at the end of a life. A preacher who has rarely ventured beyond the confines of his small hometown in rural America, John Ames is now in his seventies and in ill health. His greatest sorrow is that the child borne to him by his second wife will never have a chance to know his father, and so Ames sets down to write a letter that will explain himself to his young son. In the course of this missive, part apology, part magnum opus, the preacher ruminates  on the people he has known, the beliefs he has held dear, the truths he has gleaned during his years on earth, where he has succeeded and where he has failed in his attempt to live according to God’s will. Eschewing the rapid pacing of many modern novels, Robinson calibrates her prose to the meandering whimsies of an old man’s thoughts, and the rewards she offers to the patient reader are abundant.

Book Review by Anna Ziajka …read more >

Zadie Smith’s sprawling, splashy, rambunctious first novel, like the vision of London it conjures, is crammed full of immigrants and misfits, pubs and back alleys and dubious beauty parlors where a self-conscious half-Jamaican teenager can find solace in straightening treatments for her unruly hair. This particular teenager is just one of the quirky, vividly sketched figures to whom Smith introduces us, each one struggling to craft his or her own destiny in a city where racial, cultural, and religious identities are frighteningly malleable, where a womanizing, pot-smoking bad boy can transform overnight into a radical Muslim activist and the nerdy son of a geneticist can grow into an eco-terrorist dedicated to destroying his own father’s work. Deftly managing the many disparate plotlines that traverse the novel’s narrative space without shortchanging any of their colorful protagonists is no minor accomplishment, not least for an author as young as Smith, who started writing the …read more >

Despite being banned in Saudi Arabia for its biting critiques of upper-class Saudi society and the revelations it contains about the lives of young women in modern Riyadh, Alsanea’s 2005 novel was a bestseller across the Middle East and catapulted its author to international fame. The newly available English edition, translated in part by Alsanea herself, offers Western readers a rare glimpse into the Muslim world’s most impenetrable society. In a charmingly innocent twist on chick lit that leaves sex far out of the picture, the novel follows four twenty-something Saudi girls as they struggle to find love within the confines of the Kingdom’s strict social mores, relying more on horoscopes than on life experience in their quest to meet and marry their own versions of Mr. Right. But don’t be fooled by the novel’s whimsical style and fluffy subject matter—for these young women in the Saudi capital, there is much more than romance at stake.

Book Review by Anna …read more >

Never has the rugged northeast corner of India appeared as it does in Desai’s gorgeous, vivid prose, which evoke a land perpetually shrouded in wet, moldering fog, perched precariously at the feet of the craggy snow-capped peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas. In a rotting colonial villa in the border town of Kalimpong, teenage Sai lives with her grandfather—a retired judge whose student days in London left him soured with hatred for the backwardness of his own race—their dog, and their cook. It is a dull existence for Sai, until first a budding romance with her math tutor,  and then ominous stirrings of rebellion from the ethnic Nepalese in the area arrive to turn her sleepy world on its head. In a parallel story, which Desai spins with just as much care and imagination as the principal one, the cook’s son struggles to make ends meet in New York City, where he works thankless hours as a waiter and dreams of the day he will return to Kalimpong.

Book Review by Anna Ziajka …read more >

With this spirited, ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed short story collection Drown, Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz secures himself a place as a major new talent on the literary stage. The central characters in this wise, funny, gleefully unconventional debut novel are three young Dominican-Americans growing up in suburban New Jersey: the eponymous Oscar (nerdy and overweight, with a penchant for writing science fiction stories and an unfortunate habit of falling for the wrong girl), Oscar’s beautiful and rebellious sister Lola, and Lola’s womanizing but good-hearted sometime boyfriend Yunior, who is also the novel’s hip-hop spouting, proudly bilingual narrator. Making liberal use of footnotes, cultural referents, dialects, and forays into the history of the Dominican Republic that are at times pseudo-academic, at times inflected with colorful hints of magical realism, Díaz muses on the lasting repercussions of imperialism, the undying power of myths, and …read more >