From the turn of the twentieth century into the present, the defiant and vivacious characters of Sarah Leipciger’s "Coming Up for Air" refuse to be suffocated by others’ expectations. In Paris, the haunting death mask of an unknown... Read More

Fantasy is an outlet for grief, fear, and transformation in the pop culture-inflected novel "Evie of the Deepthorn" from André Babyn. A single story becomes the emotional outlet for three very different people who are drawn together in... Read More

Kristen Millares Young’s novel "Subduction" is rife with personal struggles, confrontations, and the pain of memory. Claudia, a Latinx anthropology professor, escapes a barren marriage and the life that she built in Seattle after... Read More

Nino Haratischvili’s multigenerational Georgian novel "The Eighth Life" spans the years between the Bolshevik Revolution and the early twenty-first century. It all begins with a master chocolatier and a magical hot chocolate recipe for... Read More

A story about sisters and undocumented immigrants, Julia Alvarez’s "Afterlife" evokes the loneliness of grief. A recent retiree and a writer, Antonia is coping with the loss of her husband. She’s also helping a young Mexican... Read More

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