Three troubled but tough generations of women, all molded and wounded by the Pentecostal culture around them, are celebrated in Kelli Jo Ford’s masterpiece, patchwork novel, "Crooked Hallelujah". Religion became a source of both... Read More

A sabbatical trip leads to unearthed family secrets in Farzana Doctor’s luminous novel, "Seven". Sharifa and Murtuza’s marriage has settled back into comfortable routines following her emotional affair years prior. Still, Sharifa... Read More

"The Self-Empowerment Journal" is an appealing motivational text whose optimism and sense of surety are contagious. Karamokoh B. Wurie’s encouraging "The Self-Empowerment Journal" centers its notions of self-improvement in... Read More

A lost and audacious girl’s life story is reconstructed by the yearning child and grandchild she left behind in Sheila O’Connor’s poetic and precise semi-biographical novel, "Evidence of V". In 1935, a fifteen-year-old girl with... Read More

“At a certain point,” writes Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri, “the nightmare becomes home.” The entries of Petri’s collection are satirical dances through the most baffling moments of the Trump presidency, wherein... Read More

Though much of it is set among the dead, Valérie Perrin’s "Fresh Water for Flowers" is an exuberant novel whose thoughtful treatments of family tragedies are alchemistic. Abandoned at birth, Violette was shunted between disinterested... Read More

"Feasting Wild" is a fascinating record of ecological travesties committed in the name of pleasing humans’ insatiable appetites. There’s an otherworldly sensibility to Gina Rae La Cerva’s accounts of the lands, airs, and seas as... Read More

Imagination is a lifeboat, and complacency an albatross, in Lydia Millet’s visionary novel A Children’s Bible. A gaggle of families converge at an ocean-adjacent mansion for a summer of revelry and reconnections, bringing with them... Read More