New York. Knopf. 2020. 264 pages.
THE PUBLICATION of Transcendent Kingdom follows Yaa Gyasi’s award-winning first novel, Homegoing (2016), and it doesn’t disappoint…
FICTION
Beijing. People’s Literature Publishing House. 2020. 380 pages. THE GERMAN WRITER Martin Walser once declared, “If one wants to talk about China, Mo Yan is a must-read.” Now, eight y…
New York. New Press. 2020. 256 pages. IN 2015, ALAIN MABANCKOU crafted a modern folktale with Black Moses. The novel followed the titular child’s odyssey through one of the…
Berkeley. Counterpoint Press. 2020. 177 pages. OPENING WITH THE DEATH of Kadare’s mother (the “doll” of the title) in 1994, rewinding to her marriage in 1933, then moving forwar…
London. Seagull Books. 2020. 273 pages. THE PREMISE OF MR. K RELEASED, written in prerevolutionary, self-imposed exile and published twenty years postfactum, is simple:…
Melbourne. Arden. 2019. 161 pages. CHANDANI LOKUGÉ’S new novel, My Van Gogh, winds its way from Australia to France with the lilt of an ancient pilgrim song. The novel,…
St. Paul. River Boat Books. 2020. 280 pages THIS NOVEL OF ANTICIPATION is set in Great Britain in the middle years of the twenty-first century, but by virtue of the heady mix of…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 144 pages. FAUNA, A COLLECTION OF dreamily surreal linked stories, is a recent contribution…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2020. 230 pages. THE SETTING OF SARA MESA'S Four by Four is as intriguing as its premise. Wybrany College is a boarding school for the…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 160 pages. THE DELIGHT IN CLASSIFICATION in classical Japan, or perhaps the taste for precision, extended even to the aesthetic appearances of m…
Castroville, Texas. Black Rose Writing. 2020. 311 pages. MICHELE LEVY'S debut novel, Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey, is a coming-of-age tale that follows the journey of…
East Lansing. Michigan State University Press. 2019. 174 pages. SAMIHA KHRAIS is a Jordanian novelist whose work has the imprimatur of those with heft, political and cultural, i…
Seattle, Washington. 47North. 2020. 546 pages. AFROFANTASY. It’s a largely unsung literary tradition in the making, one that grapples with the whiteness and westernness of mass-…
Paris. Albin Michel. 2019. 336 pages. SENEGALESE AUTHOR Fatou Diome’s latest novel, Les veilleurs de Sangomar (The watchmen of Sangomar), plunges the reader into young…
Berlin. Hansa Berlin. 2019. 243 pages. EVERY NOW AND AGAIN, you come across a book you instantly know you must read and will devour. This is exactly how I felt upon seeing Marzah…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 240 pages. FOUR DAYS BEFORE HER wedding to an elementary school principal, our protagonist, known only as the bride, is confronted by her g…
Boston. Mariner Books. 2020. 208 pages. ANDRÉS BARBA’S A Luminous Republic is a hell of a little novel. The Spanish writer returns to one of his favorite types of peopl…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Coffee House. 2020. 144 pages. IN HIS THRILLING NOVEL Ornamental, Colombian art critic, translator, curator, and renowned author Juan Cárdenas m…
Paris. Gallimard. 2020. 365 pages. IN 2016 LEÏLA SLIMANI won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious annual literary prize, for her novel Chanson douce (see WL…
New York. Random House. 2020. 368 pages. YIYUN LI, ONE OF THE MOST acclaimed contemporary American writers, continually reinvents herself. Her last novel, The Kindness of So…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 288 pages. MASTER STORYTELLER MIA COUTO frames an inspired tale with actual events in The Sword and the Spear. The novel illu…
Fredericton, New Brunswick. Goose Lane Editions. 2020. 240 pages. A CHARACTER IN Deni Ellis Béchard’s previous novel, White (2018), describes people as “clusters of exp…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 309 pages. THE GILEAD CYCLE is a series of theological novels (Gilead, Home, Lila, and now Jack) that explore the nature…
New York. Verso. 2020. 432 pages. OSAMA, THE BROKEN BUT learned Marxist in Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, delineates a way of looking at societies that provides a much-n…
Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. 2020. 186 pages. THE BELLE CRÉOLE, Maryse Condé’s twelfth novel, was originally published in French in 2001. The 2020 English…