Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok
In Mimi Lok’s debut story collection, the characters are linked in their sense of displacement and isolation, both connected to and separate from their families and their shared histories.
Author: Laura Spence-Ash
The Gone Dead by Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz’s haunting debut novel interrogates memory, race, and the way that stories define our lives.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
In Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, the dead resemble the living, and the living seem to be on the brink of death.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
There is pleasure to be had in reading Julia Phillips’ debut novel, even in the midst of such grief and despair. Phillips is a beautiful, assured writer, one who knows how to create fully-developed characters, a marvelous sense of place, and a constant forward momentum.
Spring by Ali Smith
To read a book by Ali Smith is to know that she will ask you to do some work, though that work will always be a pleasure and a bit of a game.
The Unspeakable
Yiyun Li’s new novel uses conversation as the mode to better explore her narrator’s grief.
Other People’s Love Affairs by D. Wystan Owen
D. Wystan Owen’s beautiful debut collection is a book to treasure. The ten quiet stories are linked by place, but they are also linked by Owen’s great fascination with understanding the weight of the past on the present.
The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon
The book generates considerable momentum through its short chapters and often gorgeous language, and through the always present search for understanding. It is a difficult book to put down, one whose images and ideas remain long after the read.
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
Ryan’s fourth novel clocks in at just under two hundred pages, and for most writers, telling the story of multiple characters in such a small space would be a challenge. But this book contains worlds. The reader is always searching for those connections, the echoes and strands that insist the stories be told as one.