Archives de catégorie : Literary

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.

ADAMA de Lavie Tidhar

A sweeping historical epic following four generations of a single family as they struggle to hold on to their land and each other.

ADAMA
by Lavie Tidhar
Head of Zeus, September 2023
(via Zeno Agency)

There is no land without blood, and i water this land with the blood of my men.

Ruth’s family were in Budapest when the Nazis came.

Now Ruth is in Palestine, amid the bare hills inland from Haifa, breaking the rocky soil of an unyielding land before it breaks her.

With her comrades, her fellow kibbutzniks, she will build a better world. There will be green grass, orange trees and pomegranates, a land that is their own and no one else’s.

So they till their fields, dig their wells, build their homes and forge a new way of living, fiercely proud of their shared pursuit of a dream.

But as one generation begets another, the dream unravels, twisted into a dark tapestry of secrets and lies; sacrificed for revenge, forbidden love and murder.

Lavie Tidhar‘s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, ADAMA and Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children’s books such as Candy (2018) and A Child’s Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.