A passionate couple from different sides of the Soviet divide avoids discussing their inevitable rifts in Yelena Moskovich’s sultry, wrenching novel-in-verse, "Nadezhda in the Dark". During a “black-milk,” mournful winter, as... Read More

About the value of travels abroad, "Bergen Spring" is a warm coming-of-age novel. Following his brother’s death, a man goes on a backpacking trip in Michael Cummings’s contemplative novel "Bergen Spring". In 1973, Erik, a theater... Read More

Generations of women wrestle with an inherited legacy of trauma in Celeste Mohammed’s sprawling novel-in-stories "Ever Since We Small". Split into two sections, “Then” and “Now,” the novel does a masterful job of capturing the... Read More

In Cho Haejin’s intricate, touching novel "Simple Heart", a transnational adoptee returns to Korea. Nana, an actor and playwright, grew up in South Korea. Abandoned by her mother at a train station, she lived with the conductor and at... Read More

An elder shares her story in Chi Zijian’s reflective novel "The Last Quarter of the Moon". An unnamed Evenki woman laments the loss represented by her home’s emptiness. Her family voted to leave their mountains; modernization... Read More

Generations whose stories are informed by the Holocaust converge at a sanitarium by the sea in Morris Collins’s surrealistic, affecting novel "The Tavern at the End of History". Brought together by chance, fate, or inevitability,... Read More

A first-time grandmother reckons with the ways she retreated from herself in Hollay Ghadery’s melancholy but hopeful novel The Unraveling of Ou. Minoo’s strict, conservative mother ingrained in her the belief that she was shameful,... Read More

In Emanuela Anechoum’s nuanced novel "Tangerinn", a Londoner returns to her Calabrian hometown after her father’s death, seeking closure and emotional clarity. Mina grew up in a “provincial mafia-run” town near the sea. Her... Read More