Afghani American Fowzia Karimi immigrated to the US with her family after the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and grew up in Southern California. Negotiating the before and after of that seismic childhood event requires reckoning... Read More

In the febrile heat of an Australian summer, a girl learns that whole worlds lie beneath her hometown and family’s careful facades. Martine Murray’s novel "The Last Summer of Ada Bloom" travels landscapes that are metaphors to... Read More

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel "Starling Days" is a gentle treatise on the anatomy of sadness, wherein the many manifestations of modern melancholy raise questions about what it truly means to be “okay.” Mina wants to silence the... Read More

A family grapples with prejudice and impending loss in Carter Sickels’s historical novel "The Prettiest Star". In 1980, Brian ran away from his conservative hometown and arrived in New York City, where he could live openly as a gay... Read More

Credited with igniting Korea’s next feminist wave, "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" censures patriarchal cultures with its rage-inducing stories of everyday abuses. One ordinary night in his ordinary home, Daehyun notices that a change has... Read More

The faithful girls of a struggling California town are asked to sacrifice an ungodly amount in Chelsea Bieker’s "Godshot", a blazing novel about the messes made when blind faith metastasizes into madness. In the heat of a deep Central... Read More

Buried beneath The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’s mounds of Southern-style humor and horrific plot twists ripples a coming-of-age story featuring the least likely of heroines. When real, imagined, and metaphorical... Read More

"The Moon Always Rising" is a complicated and memorable supernatural romance. In Alice C. Early’s unusual romance "The Moon Always Rising", an investment banker buys a haunted West Indies estate, filling it with hope for her future.... Read More