Archives de catégorie : Literary

MASQUERADE de Mike Fu

Exploring social, cultural, and sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu’s MASQUERADE is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel for readers of Jason Mott’s A Hell Of A Book and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

MASQUERADE
by Mike Fu
Tin House, October 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s own in Chinese, Liu Tian–a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.

Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. He is a co-founder and editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently teaches fiction and translation at Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER de Kate Grenville

The international bestselling author of The Secret River and A Room Made of Leaves returns with an exquisite portrait of her complex, conflicted grandmother—a woman Kate Grenville feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood.

RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER
by Kate Grenville
Text Publishing (Australia), July 2023

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.

In this compelling new novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able-if at a cost-to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after. A subversive, triumphant tale of a pioneering woman determined to make a life to call her own.

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah ThornhillThe LieutenantDark Places and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection. Her recent non-fiction includes One Life: My Mother’s StoryThe Case Against Fragrance and Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Room Made of Leaves. She has also written three books about the writing process. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

A DAZZLING GREETING de Baik Sou-linne

A tender heart will save us countless times.

A DAZZLING GREETING
by Baik Sou-linne
Munhakdogne, May 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

Haeni’s family falls apart after her older sister dies in a gas explosion accident in 1994. Unable to salvage the marriage, Haeni’s mother decides to separate from her father, and immigrates to Germany with Haeni and her younger sister.

In Germany, she meets new people who make her feel at home. Her aunt, Haengja, is a nurse who was dispatched to Germany in the 1960s. She is part of a community of dispatch nurses that include Aunt Maria and Aunt Seonja.

Haeni befriends Aunt Maria’s daughter, Lena, and Aunt Seonja’s son, Hansu. The three grow close and Hansu eventually asks for a favour: he wants his friends to help him find his mother’s first love. They start by reading Seonja’s diary and finds out that her first love’s initials are K.H.

Time flies by, and Haeni finds herself having to return to South Korea due to the IMF Crisis in 1997. Uprooted from a place she’s just started to call home, Haeni is once again seized by the fear of losing those she cares about. As such, she spends her adult life setting distances between her and whoever she meets.

One day, she bumps into Woojae, a friend from university. He starts pursuing her, and touched by his earnestness, Haeni finds herself willing to open her heart to others again. Her newfound love inspires her to try to solve the mystery of Aunt Seonja’s first love again. On her second attempt, she realizes that she’s seeing things from a new perspective, and picks up on clues she’d missed before.

As she embarks on this new mission as a new person, the people around her are just as eager to reach out to help her. This novel is proof that the smallest gestures of kindness can change lives.

Baik Sou-linne is one of South Korea’s most prolific and popular authors. She was named one of five Best Young Writers in 2021. Given her unique background as a French Literature major, Baik writes heartwarming stories about young women that are often set in unfamiliar countries, taking readers romantic adventures across the globe.

She debuted as a writer after her short story ‘Lying Practice’ was awarded the Spring Literary Contest in 2011. Since then, she has released multiple short story collections including Falling in Paul and Summer Villa. A DAZZLING GREETING is her first novel. Upon its release, it immediately claimed its spot on bestsellers lists across online bookstores in South Korea.

CASUALTIES OF TRUTH de Lauren Francis-Sharma

From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, comes a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller that explores the abuses of history and the costs of revenge.

CASUALTIES OF TRUTH
by Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2025

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s two previous novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling toward justice. Her latest is a gripping novel set between Washington, DC and Johannesburg, South Africa that asks if we are ever truly able to escape our past and how to right an unquestionable wrong.

Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and the past glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to stay home and dedicate her days to her autistic son. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her past might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course. Yet when Davis’s new colleague turns out to be an old acquaintance, Matshediso, Prudence recalls the traumatic events of her childhood growing up in Baltimore and the formative time she spent in South Africa in 1996. There, she attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state. These hearings fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice, and when Mat reveals the real reason for his reappearance, Prudence’s values will be put to a more difficult test than she has ever faced before.

Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants has written about the Caribbean in both her novels. “‘Til the Well Runs Dry” loosely recounts the story of her grandmother’s mid-20th century journey to the United States, with feature articles in both the Washington Post in July 2014 and The Baltimore Sun in March 2015. Her latest, “Book of the Little Axe,” takes place in the late 18th century to the early 19th century, from the changing colonial rule on the island of Trinidad to the rugged terrain of Bighorn Mountain in western North America.

IBIS de Justin Haynes

A bold, witty, and magical cross–generational Caribbean story about migration, superstition, and a refugee’s search for her family.

IBIS
by Justin Haynes
Abrams, February 2025

There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11–year–old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions. New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds. Now, skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas. In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.

With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.

Justin Haynes is a novelist and short story writer from Brooklyn by way of Trinidad and Tobago. Having earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame and PhD from Vanderbilt, Justin has been awarded various fiction residencies and fellowships, most recently the Nicholas Jenkins Barnett fiction fellowship from Emory University and the Tin House Workshop. His writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly, the Hawai’i Review, and Pree. Justin lives in in Atlanta and teaches English at Oglethorpe University.