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We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
“We are on our way to Budapest,” 10-year-old Darling announces as NoViolet Bulawayo‘s 2013 Booker longlisted debut novel opens. ‘We’ includes “Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina,” banded...
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Author Profile: Kim Thúy
Kim Thúy’s Ru: An Apple for the Reader Ah, well . . . better start with true confessions: my words appear on the back cover of the U.S. edition (at least the first printing) of Vietnamese Canadian...
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Author Interview: Kim Thúy
Kim Thúy is one tough writer to get to, although she declares in our first email exchange when I finally track her down, “I am not at all the kind who plays hard to get .” Attempts to contact her...
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Beirut 1990: Snapshots of a Civil War by Sylvain Ricard, Bruno Ricard,...
Almost a quarter century has passed since two French brothers – in their early 20s at the time – decided to visit their Aunt Thérèse in Lebanon. In September 1990, the country is a 15-year-old war...
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In the Sea There Are Crocodiles: Based on the true story of Enaiatollah...
Although the cover bears the designation, “A Novel,” Enaiatollah Akbari – whose name also appears on said cover (who is not the book’s author, Fabio Geda) – is a real person. A kid, really. In case you...
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The Keeping Quilt and The Blessing Cup by Patricia Polacco
Although published a quarter century apart, these are two books that tell a single tears-of-joy-inducing family story. If chronology is important, you might read Patricia Polacco‘s multi-generational...
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Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb
Raised as a Roman Catholic convinced of at least one past life as a Jewish grandmother, I find myself in my old age utterly wary of institutionalized religions, repeatedly alarmed at what we human...
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Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick
I admit I had a few false starts before I finally settled into Patricia McCormick‘s latest, which was a 2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People’s Literature. Based on the horrifying...
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Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley
In Susan Conley’s debut novel defined by deep relationships, the most intriguing alliances get neglected and overlooked for the more commonplace and predictable. Willow – called Willie – moves to Paris...
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The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
Small-town Maine, where Elizabeth Strout was born and raised, has been home to her four novels. In her first title since she won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for her novel-in-13-stories, Olive Kitteridge,...
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One Step at a Time : A Vietnamese Child Finds Her Way by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Introduced to U.S. readers by award-winning Canadian author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch in last year’s Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War, Son Thi Ahn Tuyet’s story continues – literally...
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Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Above all else, Janie is a survivor. She escaped the horrifying deaths that took her entire family in her native Cambodia. She’s outlived her adoptive Canadian mother who passed away just last year....
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The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith
*STARRED REVIEW What is most haunting in Kupersmith’s nine multi-layered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured...
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I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban...
“‘Who is Malala?’” the gunman demanded on that fateful day, October 9, 2012, before he shot three bullets into a bus carrying teenage girls to school. Unable to answer then, Malala answers now in her...
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How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Anthology edited by the Hmong American...
“For any serious artist, it is a terrible feeling of surrender when you realize there is no place in the world for your voice, when all that you express seems marginalized or in vain … But this isn’t a...
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