BookBrowse Editorial Review
How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
(5/20/2020)
Throughout the 14 stories collected in How to Pronounce Knife, nearly all of which follow Lao immigrants and refugees building new lives in unnamed towns across Canada, not once do we encounter a character homesick with nostalgia. By limiting cultural particularities, Thammavongsa steers the reader closer to a general experience of alienation bound up with the immigrant experience. These stories never rely on twists or a-ha moments. They are deeply affecting, humorous and heartbreaking in
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata
(4/8/2020)
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is a novel that's positively crammed with stories; there are enough here to fill several books and then some. Much like Maxwell's childhood favorite The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Michael Zapata's luminous novel is set up in a stories-within-a-story framework. As Zapata shows again and again, stories offer insight into people's lives; give a voice to history's forgotten; and above all, have the unique ability to connect people from dispar
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
(3/4/2020)
Anappara's India lives and breathes on the page. Every tin-roofed hut, abandoned alleyway, and overcrowded bazaar fizzes with a richness of detail that could only be rooted in the author's intimate knowledge of her setting. Anappara earns her right to eschew any happy endings. In an India where as many as 180 children go missing every day, with the vast majority of cases remaining unsolved, the enthralling Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is unafraid to lay bare the country's grim realitie
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford
(2/5/2020)
At its core, Follow Me To Ground is a story about a daughter on the cusp of womanhood carving a life for herself away from her well-meaning if overbearing father. This could have so easily been just another fantastically-tinged tale of a girl seeking and attaining her own agency. Thankfully, it's much stranger than that, and all the more powerful for it— a haunting, intoxicating debut that establishes its author as one to watch in the future.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
(1/8/2020)
Celestial Bodies is a novel that is perhaps greater than the sum of its parts. Alharthi weaves it like a tapestry—a curious patch here, a perfunctory detail there. It's when you pull out to look at the creation in its entirety that you can truly appreciate its majesty. Once you get into the rhythm of the author's see-sawing, non-chronological storytelling, you'll realize that all mysteries will be unraveled in due course, always satisfyingly and often to startling effect.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
(10/2/2019)
Coates skillfully explores the many horrors of slavery. Through his journeys, Hiram comes in contact with countless former slaves who share their heartbreaking stories in great detail. These voices widen the scope, and it's in these testimonials where this novel truly comes alive.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott
(10/2/2019)
The World Doesn't Require You is that rare short story collection – a unified work in which stories interweave and each successive chapter sheds light and adds deeper contexts of meaning to what came before. Once you reach the twists and turns of its climactic pages, you'll want to flip back to the beginning and read it all over again.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Inland by Téa Obreht
(8/21/2019)
Attempting to encapsulate Inland's many sprawling story-tendrils within a neat synopsis is to do this bewitching novel a great disservice. We may only follow two central protagonists, but from the get-go Obreht gives voice to a legion of lives and spirits that put flesh on the bones of a majestic, untamed American West unburdened by stale cowboy-and-Indian tropes. Episode after suspenseful episode fizzes with life thanks to shimmering prose and rippling turns of phrase.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Costalegre by Courtney Maum
(7/31/2019)
The plot is pretty spare but its form is endlessly inventive. Maum imbues Lara's diary vignettes with postmodern stylings, offering insight into her young protagonist's mindset. Through this bricolage we become intimate with all of Lara: her intelligence, artistry, perceptiveness, naivety, hopes and insecurities. Costalegre is a dazzling read that deftly questions the modern world's blind obsession with the cult of the artist.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Capital: A Novel
by Robert Menasse
(6/19/2019)
Menasse clearly has a deep-rooted affection for what the E.U. represents at its core. The Auschwitz celebrations may be a cynical political ploy to curry favor with the public, but the continual references to the Holocaust and its survivors demonstrate how easily feuding nations can lead to genocide and why a federation is needed to safeguard and unify European citizens. The Capital is a multi-faceted novel of ideas that will inspire great debate about the E.U.'s evolving role in contempo
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield
(1/9/2019)
Setterfield possesses a rare gift. She is able to endow even the most bit-part actors with rounded, intriguing backstories that never overstay their welcome and never read dry. Once Upon a River is a spellbinding feat in storytelling.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Melody by Jim Crace
(8/29/2018)
The Melody has the illusory effect of a siesta in the afternoon sunshine...a hazy quality that invites the reader to fall into its dream-like prose and embrace its ambiguities.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Treeborne by Caleb Johnson
(7/11/2018)
At times Treeborne reads like a Southern Gothic novel by the numbers. This is a book of rattlesnakes and corn liquor, of a cursed backwoods family living on cursed backwater soil. Johnson appears to relish giving voice to the gross and grotesque. As such, a cynical reader may deem much of what's on offer as mere genre box-ticking. Thankfully, Johnson's fecund language – "The Seven more gorgeous than any piece of land she'd ever traipsed." – rooted in an earthy Southern vernacular render t
BookBrowse Editorial Review
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
(5/30/2018)
Attempting to distill Elaine Castillo's debut novel America is Not the Heart into a neat synopsis is a little like trying to explain the plots of several books all at the same time. Yes, this is first and foremost a tale of new beginnings in a foreign land. But it is also a document of a nation's political upheaval that spans several decades. America is Not the Heart is a bisexual romance, a story of survival, a celebration of Filipino culture, and more besides. Thankfully Castillo
BookBrowse Editorial Review
West by Carys Davies
(5/2/2018)
While West is a slim novel, it rarely feels slight. The search for the unknown is the thematic backbone here and Davies has done well to present Cy's ambition as both noble quest and fool's errand. There was perhaps an opportunity for West to be a weightier, more immersive book. As such its brevity never thoroughly explores the sheer scale and vastness of Cy's expedition across America. Too much of the journey is glossed over in stark, unadorned sentences which at times robs the al
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Circe by Madeline Miller
(4/18/2018)
Much of Circe is an exploration into what it means to be female in a world of men and monsters. While it is usually tenuous to compare an author's latest novel to previous work, it does feel as if Miller wrote Circe as a conscious inversion of her prize-winning debut The Song of Achilles in nearly every aspect. The pool of inspiration may be the same – primarily Homer's epics – but whereas Achilles was very much a book about mortal men coming to grips with their own v
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Driest Season by Meghan Kenny
(3/7/2018)
While The Driest Season is not perfect, it manages to be an affecting novel because of how it interprets the grieving process through prose and finds hope and goodness in a world that can all too often appear exhaustingly bleak. Time may not erase, but it does heal. The dry season is just that, a season that will eventually pass.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sadness Is a White Bird by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
(2/21/2018)
Much of Sadness is a White Bird is an exploration into cultural identity and how even newer generations of optimistic, progressive, humanistic youths are unable to shake off the historical shackles that pull them back into a never-ending cycle of conflict. Rothman-Zecher has an exquisite ability to vocalize the historical contexts that shape personal identity. Through shimmering prose and a pointedly intimate narrative, Rothman-Zecher has written a powerful, passionate but even-handed cri
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee
(2/7/2018)
Across the book's five disparate sections, there is no obvious grand narrative arc, no plot to speak of, no holistic character development or neat resolutions. Instead the reader is left with a glorious, chaotic babel of voices and lives and hopes and suffering of migrants pursuing freedom and economic betterment within the confines of their native country of India. For those willing to play its game, A State of Freedom will prove to be a dazzling and challenging contemplation on beauty a
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Immortalists: A Novel
by Chloe Benjamin
(1/3/2018)
It is perhaps Benjamin's deftness in writing about familial matters that is most exquisite. From section to section, the reader is made to empathize with the brothers and sisters as they navigate a shared inner conflict between family duty and personal desires with their looming death days in mind. With uncluttered incisive prose, the author constantly brings to light the quiet tensions and bonds operating just under the surface of the relationships between the Gold family.
As such