Daré’s harrowing sequel to The Girl with the Louding Voice chronicles 14-year-old Adunni’s flight from the indentured servitude she’d fallen into after fleeing her husband. Having escaped her abusive employer Big Madame, Adunni now lives with Big Madame’s neighbor Tia in Lagos, Nigeria. Adunni’s plans to start school are interrupted when she’s forced to return to the village of her birth to atone for the death of her husband’s second wife. Tia, a young professional with painful secrets of her own, accompanies Adunni back to her village, and in alternating narration, the two recount the hours leading up to what could be a mortal reckoning for Adunni and several other girls, who have been accused of causing a drought. While Tia desperately tries to phone for help, Adunni and the others are paraded through the village, then left in the forest, with fatal consequences. The juxtaposition of Tia’s urbane voice and Adunni’s heavy dialect lends itself to Daré’s unforgettable contrast of urban, modern Nigeria with its rural, tribal counterpart. Moreover, Adunni’s natural lyricism is as powerful as her resilience. It adds up to an indelible portrait of a turbulent girlhood. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown U.K. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Roffey (The Mermaid of Black Conch) begins her stirring if uneven latest as a police procedural before swerving into a treatise on femicide in the Carribean. At the end of Carnival, the body of a Japanese musician is found slashed, bitten, and strangled under a sacred cannonball tree on the island of St. Colibri. Inspector Loveday, a corrupt policeman in charge of finding the woman’s killer, has no evidence. Fed up with the island’s institutionalized misogyny and rampant rates of femicide, three local women—a reporter, a gay activist, and a sex worker—stage a protest. Their action attracts support from more women, who converge in the town square. At first, the demonstration is no more than an annoyance to the police and the prime minister, but a movement gathers steam after the mayor blames women for the violence against them. When the prime minister’s wife expresses her solidarity with the protestors, the mayor places her under house arrest. Roffey enlivens the proceedings with details of the women’s righteous organizing and colloquial dialogue (“Doh shoot the messenger”), but the narrative structure feels disjointed, and multiple story lines are left unresolved as the novel morphs into a social manifesto. Still, Roffey’s vital message is hard to shake. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Florian Herscht, the simpleminded hero of this magnificent single-sentence opus from Hungarian postmodernist Krasznahorkai (Satantango), desperately attempts to warn German chancellor Andrea Merkel of a looming apocalypse. As is often the case in Florian’s life, his conviction is born from a misunderstanding, having interpreted a lecture on the big bang theory to mean the planet will imminently collide with pure antimatter. By day, Florian is a flunky to “the Boss,” a neo-Nazi gang leader in their Podunk town. A Bach obsessive, the Boss regulary slaps Florian and makes him scrub graffiti from monuments to the composer. The mistreated Florian elicits sympathy from kindly librarian Frau Ringer, whose husband vocally opposes the gang and its alleged influence on the community: “Almost everyone here is a Nazi, even the ones who don’t realize it yet.” After the Boss is murdered, the Ringers fall under suspicion. Then wolves begin attacking the locals, and Florian moves into a cave, where he nurses an obsession with one-eyed gang member Karin. “Apocalypse is the natural state of life,” Florian writes to Merkel, a line that doubles as an artist statement for Krasznahorkai’s brilliantly cacophonous novel, which conveys the sense that the end is already here, and that the trappings of civilization are easier to scrape away than paint from stone. This stands with Krasznahorkai’s best work. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this intelligent family drama from May (Wahala), a British Nigerian girl is twice dislocated from home amid tragedies. Funke Oyenuga grows up in Lagos until she’s nine, when, in 1978, her English mother and younger brother die in a car accident. Her Nigerian father then sends her to England, to live with her maternal grandparents, whom she’s never met. Her older cousin, Liv, who also lives in the family home with her mother, Margot, eagerly welcomes Funke, though Margot resents the financial burden she places on the family. Margot treats Liv harshly, too, and dotes on her wild son, Dominic, who’s away at boarding school. Funke accedes to pressure from the family to go by her middle name, Kate, and she excels at school. The story jumps to 1986 London, where Kate has secured a university scholarship and Liv, an aspiring model, is blackmailed by a fraudulent modeling scout following a racy photo shoot. After Kate refuses to give Liv her scholarship money to bail her out, Liv steals Margot’s prized pearl necklace. More crises befall the family, which, in a lesser writer’s hand, might play as melodrama, but May keenly portrays how Kate’s relatives make her a scapegoat for their problems, resulting in her return to Nigeria. This is worth a look. Agent: Catherine Cho, Madeleine Milburn Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cardinal (The Storyteller’s Death) explores grief and spiritual ecstasy in this uplifting story of a woman’s new lease on life. Sixty-year-old Tere Sánchez is still in mourning a year after her husband’s death, when she begins levitating in his garden. The experience terrifies her, and she’s troubled by her lack of control when it happens again. Then she remembers her family is related to a medieval saint, Teresa of Ávila, who experienced episodes of spontaneous levitation. Tere sets out to visit her cousin Isabella, a nun in Ávila, Spain, to learn more about their ancestry. While in Spain, Tere makes a series of acquaintances who help her overcome her grief, including a homeless man named Juan, who she helps apply for college, and Roderigo Romero, the owner of a bike shop who makes a pass at her before settling for her offer of friendship. She also visits reliquaries and other sites dedicated to Saint Teresa, and though Isabella can’t explain Tere’s levitation, she offers useful insights (“The experience of levitation comes at times of great change. The best kind of change. The evolution of self”). Aided by her vibrant characters’ sense of humor, Cardinal thoroughly explores themes of mysticism and friendship. It’s an enlivening tale of second chances. Agent: Linda Camacho, Gallt & Zacker Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bowring follows The Road to Dalton with another engrossing tale that tracks the residents of Dalton, Maine, as they wade through grief and interpersonal drama. It’s 1995, five years after the suicide of Bridget Theroux, who dealt with postpartum depression in the previous novel. Bridget’s widower, Nate, has left his job with the local police department for a less demanding gig at the lumber mill, to better raise the couple’s five-year-old daughter, Sophie. Meanwhile, Nate’s mother-in-law, Annette, deals with her addictions to shopping and alcohol, and his mother, Bev, who’s carried on a long-running secret romance with Trudy, the library director, contends with the limits of Trudy’s devotion as Trudy cares for her husband following his heart attack. Other plot threads are given equal weight but have less traction, among them the stories of bisexual college student Greg Fortin, who’s expected to take over his family’s hardware store but would rather pursue his interest in horticulture, and Rose, a single mom who’s dodging her abusive ex-husband while building a friendship with Nate. Still, Bowring effectively conveys the ways in which Bridget’s suicide reverberates in the characters’ lives, reshaping their perceptions of love and death to a degree that disproves what a doctor tells Annette in an attempt to be comforting: “Suicide is just a moment.” This slice of life cuts deep. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Knapp’s pensive debut chronicles a year in the life of a couple as they struggle to conceive. In summer 2015, the unnamed American narrator and his French wife, Ella, are living in Paris, having traveled there from Brooklyn for an artificial insemination procedure. When it fails, the narrator, a writer, returns to the U.S., having enrolled in an MFA program in Virginia, while Ella remains in Europe, working as a casting assistant on films in Macedonia and France. After they briefly reunite over Christmas, Ella gets pregnant, using the narrator’s frozen sperm without his knowledge. She loses the baby, and the narrator spends the next summer with her in France, where they again try to conceive, this time with IVF. The author tends to spin his wheels with digressions on such subjects as the plots of 1970s Japanese films, but he keenly captures the highs and lows of the couple’s relationship as they drift in and out of each other’s orbit (“Our whole marriage is this one conversation,” he notes, “repeated with variations at appalling length”). Throughout, the author intriguingly juxtaposes his characters’ complex feelings about becoming parents—a mix of fear and desire—with meditations on global turmoil, such as Greece’s austerity measures, the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Knapp shows plenty of promise. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Cherin debuts with the tender story of a radio-sponsored treasure hunt in Southern California. In 1981, a floundering pop radio station hatches a weeklong campaign to drum up ratings by burying $50,000 and offering one clue per day about the treasure’s whereabouts. Among the competitors are Sally Lang, a single mother and bank teller, who hopes to replace the money she’s been stealing at work to make ends meet; aging motorcycle racer Danny Baker, who eyes the cash as his path toward retirement; and Holocaust survivor and synagogue janitor Augie Kloptman, who faces unemployment and eviction when his temple announces plans to move. Augie later teams up with Jason Schneidman, a 13-year-old congregant adrift in the wake of his parents’ divorce, who plans to use his share of the money to impress girls. As Sally worries her theft will be discovered in an upcoming audit, Danny dreams of opening a motorcycle shop, and Jason warms to the lonely Augie, Cherin strikes a balance between frothy entertainment and thoughtful examination of his character’s fears, desires, and need for connection. Readers will be rooting for everyone to win in this impressive tale. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Attenberg (The Middlesteins) chronicles the lives of the dysfunctional Cohen family over four decades in her nuanced latest. The opening scene, set in 1971 Chicago during a game of Scrabble, delineates their fraught dynamics. Frieda, the mother, sneaks away to take shots of Slivovitz, then berates her 16-year-old daughter, Nancy, for playing a three-letter word (“That’s all you have to show me”?). Her husband, Rudy, a gay Holocaust survivor and loving father to Nancy and their brainiac younger daughter, Shelly, wonders if the couple made the right decision to be together. After Rudy dies the next year from heart failure, Frieda grows more critical of the girls, prompting Nancy a few years later to move in with her college boyfriend, Robby, with whom she’s unexpectedly pregnant, and Shelly to accept a scholarship to UC Berkeley. In the late 1980s and ’90s, Nancy and Robby’s daughter, Jess, becomes enamored with Shelly, an innovator in cell phone technology, while Frieda lives in Florida and works in elder care. Attenberg brings the disparate threads together as Frieda falls ill in the 2000s and the sisters must decide whether they’ll care for her. There isn’t much of a plot, but the novel is carried along by deliciously realistic descriptions of the Cohens’ complex relationships. It’s an admirable portait of a distinctly unhappy family. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown Ltd. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Haig’s magnificent latest (after The Midnight Library), a retired math teacher unexpectedly inherits property in Ibiza and escapes her static life in Lincolnshire, England. Upon hearing the news, widowed Grace Winters takes up residence in the ramshackle house left to her by her old friend Christina. In a note, Christina suggests Grace find a man called Alberto to show her the miraculous seagrass meadow beneath the Mediterranean. Grace, who doesn’t know how Christina died, determines to follow her late friend’s advice but is unable to appreciate the island’s scenery due to her guilt over her 11-year-old son’s death in a bicycle accident 30 years earlier. Her mood changes, though, when Alberto takes her scuba diving and she’s touched underwater by a shape-shifting blue light, which Alberto calls La Presencia and claims is a portal to another planet. Her encounter with the light also gives her mind-reading and telekinetic powers, which she first tries out in quotidian situations, often to humorous effect, such as when she makes an obnoxious restaurant patron stab himself with a fork. Soon, though, she applies her newfound abilities to a higher purpose, joining a battle to save the island from an unscrupulous developer. Haig’s spellbinding descriptions of the portal and its powers lend themselves to the convincing conceit that Grace, thanks to her encounter with La Presencia, is not only able to change her life but to make a difference in her new community. In Haig’s sure hands, magic comes to breathtaking life. Agent: Clare Conville, C&W Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/19/2024 | Details & Permalink