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All Speculative Fiction Coverage

FictionSpeculative FictionFamily SagaDebut FictionComing of Age

Six of the brightest new names in fiction

Feature by the editors of BookPage

We’ve got our eyes on you: These emerging writers have stopped us dead in our tracks with their unforgettable first novels, from epic historical adventures to imaginative family sagas.

GOODBYE VITAMIN
By Rachel Khong

For fans of: Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Stephanie Danler, Nell Zink.

First line: “Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights.”

About the book: A 30-year-old woman returns home to help care for her father, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

About the author: The former executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine, Rachel Khong lives in the Bay Area.

Read it for: Hilarious, insightful observations that balance well with bittersweet memories.

REBELLION
By Molly Patterson

For fans of: Jane Smiley, Jane Hamilton, Min Jin Lee.

First line: “Hazel is driving and damn her children and damn her eyesight and who cares where she’s going.”

About the book: During the Boxer Rebellion in China, American missionary Addie Bell disappears, an event that will echo through the years and the lives of three other women.

About the author: Molly Patterson, who won the Pushcart Prize for her 2012 short story “Don’t Let Them Catch You,” is a native of St. Louis and lived in China for several years.

Read it for: The author’s dazzling ability to capture disparate settings, from a turn-of-the-century American farm to present-day China, and to weave together the stories of four strong women.

GATHER THE DAUGHTERS
By Jennie Melamed

For fans of: Tales of chilling societies like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

First line: “Vanessa dreams she is a grown woman, heavy with flesh and care.”

About the book: An isolated cult society ruled by men begins to crumble when young girls rebel against their preordained and doomed futures.

About the author: A psychiatric nurse practitioner specializing in working with traumatized children, Jennie Melamed lives in Seattle with her husband and two dogs.

Read it for: The gripping, haunting portrayal of girls coming of age and questioning everything they’ve ever been taught.

SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE
By Sarah Schmidt

For fans of: Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, literary horror like Stephen King.

First line: “He was still bleeding.”

About the book: This fictional retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders is a domestic nightmare, unfolding through multiple perspectives to reveal a claustrophobic household laden with dread.

About the author: Sarah Schmidt lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her partner and daughter, and works at a regional public library.

Read it for: Staggeringly gorgeous, feverish prose and the thrill of deep, dark, gruesome detail.

THE TALENTED RIBKINS
By Ladee Hubbard

For fans of: Toni Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Colson Whitehead.

First line: “He only came back because Melvin said he would kill him if he didn’t pay off his debt by the end of the week.”

About the book: Antiques dealer Johnny Ribkin journeys through Florida where he meets with other members of the Ribkin family, whose special abilities were used to further the civil rights movement.

About the author: Ladee Hubbard lives in New Orleans with her husband and three children. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Read it for: An intimate portrait of a black family battling against segregation and inequality whose strength literally turns them into comic book-worthy superheroes.

THE HALF-DROWNED KING
By Linnea Hartsuyker

For fans of: Ken Follett, Diana Gabaldon, George R.R. Martin.

First line: “Ragnvald danced on the oars, leaping from one to the next as the crew rowed.”

About the book: A brother and sister fight to seize power and control of their own fate in the harsh, beautiful and unpredictable world of medieval Norway.

About the author: A descendant of the first king of Norway, Linnea Hartsuyker grew up in the woods of upstate New York and turned to writing after a decade working at internet startups.

Read it for: A spellbinding evocation of a long-lost world of magic and blood feuds, populated by characters riddled with doubt and human failing beneath their epic exteriors.

 

Khong photo credit Andria Lo.
Patterson photo credit Elaine Sheng.
Melamed photo credit Jennifer Boyle.
Schmidt photo credit Nicholas Purcell Studio.
Hubbard credit Vilma Samulionyte.
Hartsuyker credit Nina Subin.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

We’ve got our eyes on you: These emerging writers have stopped us dead in our tracks with their unforgettable first novels, from epic historical adventures to imaginative family sagas.

NonfictionFictionSpeculative Fiction

Trick or treat: fact or fiction?

Feature by Eleanor Macbreale

When it comes to things that go bump in the night, are you a straight-shooting skeptic who wants the evidence behind the enigmas, or do you revel in tales of the supernatural? Whatever you fancy, we’ve got a grab bag of five new Halloween-appropriate reads. Leave the lamp on!

Our favorite mortician is back to tell us all about corpses! In From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, the bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, explores the variety of ways cultures around the world deal with their dead. As she travels across the globe, stopping everywhere from Bolivia to Japan, Colorado to Spain, Doughty is a respectful observer of all that unfolds, even when confronted with death rites that appear strange to eyes accustomed to the Western practices of burial and cremation. In a remote region of Indonesia, families make sure their loved ones are never forgotten by regularly visiting their graves, retrieving the body to be washed and redressed, and filling them in on the latest goings-on. In the U.S., a movement to normalize more natural ways of handling the dead—sans chemicals, sans coffin—has gained traction. Yet each tradition from every culture Doughty observes is an expression of respect—what may seem ghoulish to one is the ultimate form of love for another.

THE SPIRIT REALM
In the mid-1800s, the Spiritualism movement and the belief in communication beyond the grave gripped American minds. In a time when technology—like telegrams and photography—was rapidly creating miracles, the ability to communicate with the dead didn’t seem too far-fetched. The Civil War further fanned the flames of Spiritualism, as grief-stricken families sought to speak to their loved ones one last time. But as the excitement of Spiritualism swept the nation, William Mumler was dubious. So when a self-portrait he took while alone in a photography studio showed a girl sitting beside him, he assumed it was a technical error. But then he realized that he recognized the girl in the photo. It was his cousin, who had died 12 years prior. Thus begins the bizarre story of photography, ghosts, grief and lies that plays out in Peter Manseau’s fascinating The Apparitionists. Mumler, aided by his wife, who called herself a healing medium, went on to create a business based on these “spirit photographs,” even taking a photo of the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln that showed her dead husband’s hands lovingly resting on her shoulders. In the battle between science and Spiritualism, science eventually won. But the desire to peek beyond the veil of the living may never die.

MONSTER MASH
Aaron Mahnke’s “Lore” is one of the most popular podcasts out there. Of course, entertainment with a supernatural or mythological bent has always drawn listeners, but Mahnke’s talent and appeal come from his desire to put stories about creatures such as the wendigo and haunted dolls in context. He caters to both the Mulder and the Scully inside us all by presenting these fantastical tales alongside impeccable historical research. The first of a planned trilogy, The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures follows a very similar format to the podcast—for fans, these stories may be a bit too familiar, but the uninitiated will find much to explore. Pick almost any mythical monster, and you’ll find it via organized chapters: For records of vampires, try “The Dead Returned”; you’ll find skin-crawling historical tales of doppelgängers in “Our Other Halves”; and if you’re into specters, try “Beyond the Veil.” Mahnke’s tongue-in-cheek asides make these tales great fun, and the book is wonderfully designed with Edward Gorey-inspired pencil illustrations. And for fans who just can’t get enough Lore, a television series is on its way to Amazon.

A CHILL IN THE AIR
Literary horror fans know that there are few authors as deft at marrying pulse-pounding action and a sense of inescapable dread than Joe Hill. Fans of his masterful thrillers NOS4A2 and The Fireman will find plenty to love in his new collection of four short novels, Strange Weather. The unifying theme here is the sheer terror that the unapologetic forces of nature can instill in us, but Hill cleverly sets the detached whims of the weather against the calculated, deliberate actions of sinister individuals. In “Loaded,” a shooter attacks a shopping mall while a wildfire propelled by wind decimates thousands of acres outside. “Rain” follows a group of survivors in Boulder, Colorado, after an apocalyptic rainfall of “needle-sharp amber glass . . . hard as quartz.” With each story spanning around 100 pages, this is the perfect collection to split up into a few satisfying chunks as we creep closer to Allhallows Eve.

THE WOMAN IN WHITE
“Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean she isn’t there.” But who is she, and what is she? When she was alive, she was Emma Rose, an Irish immigrant who found her way to a small logging town in Northern California. But even now, after her death, she still feels like Emma, though she’s more of a spectator now—taking in the church bells each morning, the seals on the shore and the scent of wildflowers on Evergreen Hill. Emma has been lingering in her mortal home known as the Lambry House for 100 years, and she’s determined to remain there (much to the horror of the home’s new residents), even when a supernatural hunter comes to forcibly scrape her out. M Dressler paints a moving, chilly portrait of a woman’s afterlife in The Last to See Me, perfect for fans of Lauren Oliver’s quietly haunting ghost story Rooms.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When it comes to things that go bump in the night, are you a straight-shooting skeptic who wants the evidence behind the enigmas, or do you revel in tales of the supernatural? Whatever you fancy, we’ve got a grab bag of five new Halloween-appropriate reads. Leave the lamp on!

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Book clubs: New in paperback

Feature by Julie Hale

Acclaimed author Amy Bloom dramatizes the love that blossomed between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena “Hick” Hickok in her well-crafted novel White Houses. In 1945, following a separation of eight years, Hick pays Eleanor a visit. Franklin Roosevelt is dead, and World War II is nearing an end. The reunion sparks memories for Hick, who looks back on her life. After a rough upbringing in South Dakota, she becomes a successful journalist, covering politics for The Associated Press. She meets Eleanor in 1932, and their connection intensifies over time. Hick moves into the White House and eventually works for the Roosevelt administration. As chaotic political events unfold, the love between the two women proves to be a lasting force. Skillfully mixing fact and fiction, Bloom creates a poignant portrait of the pair—two kindred spirits who were ahead of their time. Fans of historical novels will find much to savor in Bloom’s moving book.

UNHAPPY HOLIDAYS
Ali Smith follows up her acclaimed 2017 title, Autumn, with Winter, the second entry in her series of season-inspired novels. It’s Christmas 2016, and Art is headed to Cornwall, where his mother, Sophia, awaits him and his girlfriend—with whom he just broke up. So when Art meets Lux, a lesbian Croatian woman, he pays her to pretend to be his ex, and they arrive at Sophia’s for what turns out to be an unforgettable holiday. The presence of Sophia’s radical, estranged sister, Iris, creates friction as the foursome debate Brexit and the state of politics in America. Past events come into play through scenes of Iris’ involvement in protests and the first meeting between Sophia and Art’s father. Smith employs a daring narrative style in this book that is at once a powerful family novel and a shrewd exploration of the Trumpian era. Readers will be eager for the next installment in Smith’s compelling series.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich, known for her realistic portrayals of American Indian life, moves into the realm of speculative fiction with Future Home of the Living God. Twenty-six and pregnant, Cedar Hawk Songmaker is living in a dying world. Instead of progressing, evolution appears to be moving in reverse: Plants have a prehistoric quality, and pregnant women are bearing primitive infants. Cedar was adopted by a kind, forward-thinking couple in Minneapolis, but she hopes to connect with her Ojibwe birth mother. Presented as a letter written by Cedar to the child she carries, this haunting tale portrays America as a police state in which pregnant women are imprisoned. When Cedar is captured and held in a hospital, she must fight to survive. Convincingly rendered and filled with suspense, this futuristic tale is a remarkable departure for Erdrich. Her storytelling skills are on full display in this all-too-resonant narrative.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

We know it's a cliché, but it's true—this month's book club picks couldn't be more timely.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionSpeculative Fiction

Short, deadly and sharp

Feature by Alice Gunther

Reinvention and apprehension abound in two surreal new short story collections.

In the introduction to her new collection A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, Kat Howard declares her ambition to “hang a skin of myth on the skeleton of the strange.” If you’re inclined to overlook this phrase as a bit of airy lyricism, don’t. The bone first pokes through the mythical skin in “Translatio Corporis,” in which a young girl’s slow physical decline gives life and dimension to a city of her own creation. By “The Speaking Bone,” a meditation on an imagined island manned by bone-divining oracles, the physical structure and its mythic overlay are indistinguishable. Like the protagonist of another strange short story, Ray Bradbury’s “Skeleton,” Howard is obsessed with the human frame and returns to it again and again.

It’s a fitting motif for a writer as preoccupied by the construction of myth as by its content. “When I wrote my versions of these stories,” Howard writes, “I wanted to . . . break them out of the frames they had been displayed in.” The opening story, “A Life in Fictions,” gives the reader a taste of her intention, depicting a woman whose reality is profoundly altered when she becomes a recurring protagonist in her boyfriend’s writings. The fascinating novella “Once, Future,” published here for the first time, sees an English project turn sinister when college students find themselves helplessly reenacting the fall of King Arthur. (Fans of the short form may wonder if the knowing “Professor Link” heading the experiment is really veteran slipstream writer Kelly Link.) And “Returned,” which is more contemporary thriller than ancient epic, throws a wrench into the Eurydice myth by asking whether our heroine really wanted to be resurrected.

Howard’s myths are independent sallies, some mutually exclusive, not all effective. Her evocation of Catholic imagery sometimes seems as surface-level as a Sacred Heart on the wall of a tattoo parlor. (It’s at its best in “The Calendar of Saints,” which explores doubt by alluding to real hagiography.) Further, her attempts to shatter the frame of myth fail to contend with the fact that such subversion is a common frame in itself. The last story, fittingly titled “Breaking the Frame,” self-consciously describes a gallery of feminist reinterpretation (think Beauty holding the head of the Beast) that would be at home in any college art building. But if Howard’s ringing challenges aren’t always surprising, her more wholehearted investigations may drag you in their wake. The most moving tale in the collection, “All of Our Past Places,” keeps its myth at the edges, using fantastic cartography to explore the history of a longstanding friendship.

If Cathedral speaks for the adolescent rebelling against the prescriptions of its elders, Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds is decidedly grown-up, its wildest surrealism rife with parental anxiety. (The fetching abstraction of its translated title doesn’t quite capture the violent punch of the Spanish Pájaros en la boca, “Birds in the mouth”—a fitting header for a story detailing a father’s struggle to accept a teenaged daughter’s bizarre appetite.) In “Preserves,” a young couple discovers an unusual way to put an unplanned pregnancy on hold. No harm is done to the child, but the success of their trick can’t deliver them from the reeking guilt they feel at having played it. “On the Steppe” hits the opposite end of the adult terror spectrum, dealing with the pain of infertility by taking baby fever to feral extremes. Between these points lie a breathtaking range of misgivings and inadequacies, from a lethal mistake comprehended a heartbeat too late in the nightmarish “Butterflies” to a child’s misunderstanding of a broken marriage in “Santa Claus Sleeps at Our House” to a haunting reverberation of the Pied Piper in “Underground.”

Readers may relate to the hearer of the latter tale, who, abandoned without an ending, squints at the landscape, “searching for some revelatory detail.” Schweblin doesn’t offer that easy solution, preferring to dispense discomfort. Her art lies in setting up a problem and letting the reader sit with it. “The Size of Things” gets to the bitter heart of onlooker helplessness, and the title story is a particular highlight, asking (but not quite settling) the question of how far parental love can go.

Reinvention and apprehension abound in two surreal new short story collections.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Spotlight: Visions of the future

Feature by Annie Peters

Speculative fiction allows the constants of our reality to change, giving readers a glimpse of how those shifts might affect their own lives. This trio of novels use time travel and prophesy to craft compelling, all-too-human stories.

In Kate Mascarenhas’ superb debut novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, four female scientists in 1967 discover the secret of time travel. At the news conference announcing their discovery, however, one of the women, Barbara, has a mental breakdown that threatens to undermine the value of their discovery. To protect their work, the other three scientists exile Barbara from the project. 

Jumping to 2017, Barbara, now a grandmother, receives a newspaper clipping of a murder that will occur in the future. Her granddaughter, Ruby, is convinced that one of the scientists is trying to warn Barbara of her impending murder. Ruby must follow this clue from the future to unravel the mystery and save her grandmother.

Mascarenhas conjures a world in which time travel not only exists but also has its own legal system, currency and lingo. She meticulously weaves the stories of multiple female characters as they—both older and younger versions of themselves—jump back and forth in time to create a delightfully complex, multilayered plot. To all of this, Mascarenhas adds a thoroughly satisfying murder mystery. The Psychology of Time Travel heralds the arrival of a master storyteller. 

Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then provides another enjoyable venture into time travel. In this novel, Kin Stewart is caught between two worlds separated by almost 150 years. Originally a time-traveling agent with the Temporal Corruption Bureau in 2142, Kin becomes stranded in 1996 when a mission goes awry. Breaking bureau rules, Kin takes a job in IT and starts a family as his memories of 2142 degrade. When an accident alerts a retriever agent to return Kin to 2142, where only two weeks have passed, Kin must confront his divided loyalties between his adolescent daughter, who may be eliminated as a timeline corruption, and the family he cannot remember in 2142. 

Although Chen’s novel is set in a futuristic world, it is ultimately about the bond between a father and his daughter. While Kin’s dilemma is one that readers will never face, they will be drawn in by the human questions at its heart.

In Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra, young Mildred Groves has the gift of prophesy—and the curse that no one wants to heed her warnings. Mildred escapes an abusive home and takes a job as a secretary at Washington’s Hanford research facility in 1945, where workers are sworn to secrecy as scientists create “the product”—plutonium for the first atomic bombs. At first, Mildred is happy to be a part of something so big and important. However, as the product comes closer to completion, she begins to have nightmarish visions of the destruction that will be wrought on the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Hanford facility. She feels compelled to warn those in power, even as her own well-being disintegrates. But to what end? 

Shields has written a brilliant modern retelling of the classic myth of Cassandra. While this is not an easy novel to read, as the imagery becomes increasingly gruesome, it is a pleasure to be immersed in a myth so deftly woven into an apt historical context. The Cassandra should not be missed by those interested in Greek mythology, the Hanford project or beautifully crafted stories. 

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Speculative fiction allows the constants of our reality to change, giving readers a glimpse of how those shifts might affect their own lives. This trio of novels use time travel and prophesy to craft compelling, all-too-human stories. In Kate Mascarenhas’ superb debut novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, four female scientists in 1967 discover the […]
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Book Clubs: May 2019

Feature by Julie Hale

TOP PICK
Sheila Heti’s brave, unflinching novel Motherhood tells the story of one woman’s indecision about having children. The book’s unnamed narrator, a writer approaching the age of 40, is surrounded by friends who are starting families. She lives in Toronto with Miles, her boyfriend, who has a daughter from another relationship. In the midst of this domesticity, she’s plagued by uncertainty about reproducing. She’s honest about her ambivalence but fearful that she’ll one day regret not having kids of her own. Heti combines poignant first-person storytelling with a compassionate consideration of the traditions and implications of motherhood. The novel is a rich meditation on society’s expectations, personal agency and the evolving roles of women. Selected as a best book of 2018 by the New York Times and NPR, this provocative novel is sure to resonate with female readers, regardless of parental status.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Enlisted by England’s MI5 at the age of 18, Juliet Armstrong becomes enmeshed in a web of espionage and betrayal that will haunt her for a lifetime in Atkinson’s thrilling World War II novel.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
When Romy Hall kills her stalker, she gets slapped with two life sentences. The story of her transition to life in a California correctional facility makes for a riveting read in Kushner’s latest novel.

Severance by Ling Ma
In Ma’s haunting, satirical take on the apocalypse, a young Chinese-American woman continues to live and work in Manhattan despite a fever that spreads across the globe and turns victims into zombies.

There There by Tommy Orange
Orange’s impressive debut chronicles the struggles and triumphs of 12 Native American characters in California, offering a complex, compelling look at contemporary Native life.

Sheila Heti’s brave, unflinching novel Motherhood tells the story of one woman’s indecision about having children.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionSpeculative FictionComing of Age

8 new voices to discover

Feature by bookpagedev

It’s tough out there for a debut author, but these eight newcomers get nothing but love from us.

Amanda Lee Koe, author of Delayed Rays of a Star

The book: This century-spanning work charts the rise and fall of three of the most famous women of 20th-­century cinema: Marlene Dietrich, Anna Mae Wong and Leni Riefenstahl.

The author: At 25, Amanda Lee Koe became the youngest-ever winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for her story collection Ministry of Moral Panic. She is the fiction editor of Esquire Singapore and the editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s film journal, Cinémathèque Quarterly.

For fans of: Novels that place art within the context of history, like The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith. 

Read it for: Prose to get lost in, plus a heartfelt tribute to cinema history and the complicated lives of notable women.

Kira Jane Buxton, author of Hollow Kingdom

The book: A foul-mouthed, Cheetos-loving crow named S.T. goes on an adventure to save humanity from doom.

The author: Kira Jane Buxton has been previous published in the New York Times, McSweeney’s and more. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with a menagerie: three cats, a dog, two crows and plenty of hummingbirds.

For fans of: All creatures great and small, as well as funny fantasy authors like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and David Wong.

Read it for: A totally fresh take on the apocalypse, peppered with hilarious philosophical discourse and a fascinating, imaginative animal world.

Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

The book: An intricate web unfolds in 1851 London, where an aspiring artist is stalked by a creepy taxidermist.

The author: Scotland-born Elizabeth Macneal is a potter based in East London. She won the Caledonia Novel Award for this debut.

For fans of: Victorian gothic fiction, Jessie Burton, Sarah Waters and Imogen Hermes Gowar.

Read it for: A darkly beautiful exploration of the razor’s edge between creation and destruction.

Tope Folarin, author of A Particular Kind of Black Man

The book: The son of Nigerian parents—including a mother who shows signs of mental illness—grows up in a very white Utah in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

The author: A Nigerian-American author based in Washington, D.C., Tope Folarin won the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing and was recently named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40.

For fans of: Coming-of-age immigrant stories, Imbolo Mbue, Nicole Dennis-Benn and Zinzi Clemmons.

Read it for: Acrobatics in structure and pacing, meditations on memory, layers upon layers to unravel and a sharp perspective of the social structures in white and black communities.

Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou Is Everywhere

The book: In northern Appalachia, a 14-year-old girl tries to escape a bleak life by slipping into the place left behind by an affluent teen who has gone missing.

The author: Sarah Elaine Smith holds two MFAs: fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers.

For fans of: Novels that delicately balance the brutal and the beautiful, like Julie Buntin’s Marlena.

Read it for: A mesmerizing blend of dream and reality, wrapped in a palpable love of language and plenty of suspense.

Natalie Daniels, author of Too Close

The book: Connie has found a new friend in fellow mom Ness. But jump forward in time, and Connie has been institutionalized for a crime, and her disturbing story sounds strangely familiar to her psychiatrist. Is Ness at the heart of this tale of madness and toxicity?

The author: Natalie Daniels is a pseudonym for London-based actor and screenwriter Clara Salaman.

For fans of: Provocative, well-written thrillers by Laura Lippman and Alison Gaylin.

Read it for: Entertaining thrills and a perceptive exploration of the way women’s relationships are portrayed in fiction.

Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone Dead

The book: A multiracial woman returns to her childhood home in Greendale, Mississippi, to reckon with weary prejudices and the truth of her father’s death.

The author: Chanelle Benz’s 2017 story collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, was long-listed for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Benz lives in Memphis and teaches at Rhodes College.

For fans of: Complicated family stories, wonderful casts of characters, Stephanie Powell Watts, Jesmyn Ward and Celeste Ng.

Read it for: An actor’s ear for dialogue, flawless directorial vision and the many sprawling, tension-building perspectives of the American South.

Zach Powers, author of First Cosmic Velocity 

The book: It’s 1964, and the space race is in full swing. The Soviet launch program seems to be a success, but it’s a ruse. Instead, the program relies on twins: The cosmonaut twin perishes, while the living twin survives on Earth, assuming the life of their deceased sibling.

The author: Zach Powers is the author of Gravity Changes, an award-winning short story collection. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, and works with the Writer’s Center in Maryland.

For fans of: Original alternate histories and juicy tales of Soviet secrets.

Read it for: The psychological burden placed on the twins who are selected to survive.

It’s tough out there for a debut author, but these eight newcomers get nothing but love from us.
NonfictionFictionSpeculative FictionMystery

Book Clubs: December 2019

Feature by Julie Hale

★ The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
Reading groups will enjoy untangling the threads of Lyndsay Faye’s historical whodunit The Paragon Hotel. In 1921, Alice James, who’s been mixed up with New York mobsters, comes to Portland, Oregon, bearing a bullet wound. Alice, who is white, takes shelter at the Paragon Hotel—a sort of safe house for the city’s African American population, which has been harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. When Davy Lee, a multiracial boy who’s a favorite at the hotel, disappears, Alice pretends to be a journalist researching his case. Along the way, she crosses paths with a wide cast of characters, including Blossom Fontaine, a nightclub singer with a questionable past; wealthy Evelina Vaughan, a white woman with stakes in the boy’s disappearance; and an assortment of belligerent cops and racist thugs. Faye’s smart, stylish and suspenseful tale tackles timeless topics of race and gender.

Black Is the Body by Emily Bernard
In her powerful collection of personal essays, Bernard reflects upon her experiences as a black woman in America, sharing poignant reminiscences of her Southern childhood and insights into her life in the place she now calls home—the predominately white state of Vermont.

North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah
This piercing novel finds Somalian immigrant Mugdi living a quiet life in Oslo until his troubled son, Dhaqaneh, commits suicide. When Dhaqaneh’s strict Islamist widow and children come to live with Mugdi and his wife, the process of assimilation changes them forever.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
In this dystopian tale, Lia, Grace and Sky live apart from society on an island with their parents. They receive no outsiders except for women in need of a ritual that protects them against the world’s poisons. 

Last Stories by William Trevor
Last Stories is a stunning final collection from the beloved Irish author (1928–2016). Trevor’s unembellished prose stands in striking contrast to the weight and complexity of the ideas he explores, including mortality and the nature of love.

★ The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye Reading groups will enjoy untangling the threads of Lyndsay Faye’s historical whodunit The Paragon Hotel. In 1921, Alice James, who’s been mixed up with New York mobsters, comes to Portland, Oregon, bearing a bullet wound. Alice, who is white, takes shelter at the Paragon Hotel—a sort of safe house […]
FictionSpeculative FictionGothic Fiction

Casting spells upon your shelves

Feature by Carole V. Bell

Wild and wicked women—long may we praise them. Long may we be them.

Three magical tales mine the rebellion and persecution of willful women in America’s past and present to chilling effect. If you have any feminist leanings, these books will inflame them. If you don’t, these books may incite them.

There’s a fascinating interplay of past and present, and fiction and reality, in Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth’s debut novel for adults. Two stories unfold in parallel. One begins shortly after the turn of the 20th century, when the scandalous and not-so-subtly titled bestselling book I Await the Devil’s Coming—an incredible, quotable and, best of all, real piece of queer history—ignites a dangerous fervor at a tony Rhode Island school for girls. The book’s author, Mary MacLane, writes about ambition, sensuality and lust, including her attraction to other women. Two girls in particular, Clara and Flo, become gloriously, passionately entangled with the book and with each other. They see themselves in the text in ways they never have before, and they form a club to honor MacLane. When MacLane writes, “Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?” and “I wish someone would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her,” it is easy to see the appeal.

But the book becomes both talisman and curse. Soon Flo, Clara and another classmate end up dead, all three found with the same copy of the infamous red book, leaving the school’s principal and her partner to sort through what happened and manage both the guilt and the ongoing threat.

Alas, the curse doesn’t end there. A century later, another rebellious teenager becomes obsessed with MacLane, as well as with Flo and Clara’s story, and writes a history that gets optioned for film. This second storyline focuses on the conflicts and passions surrounding the film’s production, which is plagued by some of the same omens that bedeviled Clara and Flo.

Plain Bad Heroines is smart, feminist and funny (as well as beautifully illustrated by Sara Lautman), and invites more psychological reflection than fright despite its significant body count. A sense of dread builds, then dissipates and builds again, without ever truly finding release. Danforth propels her story not with scary moments but with beautiful writing, indelible characters and complex relationships.

In contrast to Danforth’s metafictional take, Alix E. Harrow’s second novel, The Once and Future Witches, is a more traditional witches’ tale. Magic and history abound in this suspenseful saga, which boasts an impressively rich and notably inclusive cast of secondary characters.

In 1893, put off by the elitism and stodginess of the local suffragists, three long-estranged sisters reunite to form a more inclusive movement for women’s rights, one that encourages the embrace of their magical powers. In doing so, the Eastwood sisters make an enemy of a dangerously overzealous politician who is both more and less than he seems. Witchcraft is far from the only activity Gideon Hill wants to suppress. He criminalizes suffragists, unionists and all manner of “unnatural women” and threatens anyone who would give them aid. The only thing the women he targets have in common is their refusal to cooperate with the powers that be. Still, they unite against the common threat, sparking a magical battle royal in the town of New Salem. Fairy-tale elements and the sisters’ tentative, tender steps toward forgiving past wounds add depth to the struggle.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Alix E. Harrow discusses being caught between fairy-tale magic and real-world rage.

Magic Lessons, Alice Hoffman’s new prequel to her beloved 1995 bestseller, Practical Magic, organizes its strong feminist themes organically. Heartbreaking and heart-healing, this intense and gorgeous novel answers a unique question: How does a bastard and orphan, criminal and daughter of a witch, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean, grow up to become a heroine and mother in Massachusetts? Lush and enchanting, Magic Lessons reveals the nearly tragic but ultimately triumphant origin story of Maria, matriarch of the illustrious Owens clan introduced in Practical Magic.

As an infant, Maria was found abandoned in a field. By the age of 19, she had witnessed ample evidence of love’s destructive power in the lives of countless women who were beaten, betrayed, bought and sold by men who should have protected them. Maria’s birth mother had to give up her child to protect her from her father, who supposedly loved her too much. Maria’s adoptive mother, Hannah, was accused of being an abomination by a man she thought loved her. So when Maria meets the right man, a good man who only wants to love her, she doesn’t trust him. Plus, she’s already met the wrong one, who cemented her distaste for romantic love.

This is an impressive tale—equal parts love story, history and horror. One of the novel’s most terrifying aspects is that, much like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, this fictional tale is grounded in the well-documented persecution of women in 17th-century New England. Eventually love wins out, but that is only one part of a broader story in which an abused, neglected and discounted woman rises, finding a way to save herself, safeguard her family for generations and make systemic change for others along the way. The whole thing is absolutely riveting and rewarding from start to finish.

Three magical tales mine the rebellion and persecution of willful women in America’s past and present to chilling effect. If you have any feminist leanings, these books will inflame them. If you don’t, these books may incite them.
FictionThrillerSpeculative Fiction

The Guide

Review by Alice Cary

Peter Heller takes readers on another thrilling wilderness adventure in The Guide, set at a luxurious fly-fishing compound near Crested Butte, Colorado. Protagonist Jack, first introduced in Heller’s Deliverance-like novel, The River, is still recovering from the tragedy that unfolded before his eyes during a canoe trip three years ago. He has also never recovered from witnessing his mother’s violent death when he was a boy, another tragedy for which he feels responsible. 

A virus known as Covid Redux threatens the world, but Jack hopes to lose himself in the rhythms of a pristine Rocky Mountain river as a fishing guide. “It’d be nice to have one summer of peace,” he muses. Fishing, in fact, is Jack’s therapy for his trauma and PTSD: “He had learned that it was much less a distraction than a form of connection: of connecting to the best part of himself, and to a discipline that demanded he stay open to every sense, to the nuances of the season and to the instrument of his own body, his own agility or fatigue.”

Jack is assigned to guide the perfect client, a fishing expert named Alison K who also happens to be kind, beautiful and a world-famous singer. Romance ensues, and things could hardly be better for Jack—except for strange events that build from a slow drip into a heavy cascade. There are security cameras on bridges and a nearby closely guarded fortress. Jack’s boss barks gruff, odd orders at him. Jack hears shots fired and strange screams, and finds a mysterious boot buried in the dirt that later disappears.

Heller is an expert at building suspense, and he’s a first-rate nature writer, lending authenticity to the wealth of wilderness details he provides. (He has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker.) He also uses a notable layout technique—adding space between each paragraph—that makes readers turn his thrilling pages even faster. One warning, however: Heller’s novels, especially The River, are not for the faint of heart. Still, The Guide is a glorious getaway in every sense, a wild wilderness trip as well as a suspenseful journey to solve a chilling mystery. 

The Guide is a glorious getaway in every sense—a wild wilderness trip as well as a suspenseful journey to solve a chilling mystery.
RomanceNonfictionFictionYA FictionYASpeculative FictionBiography

The Hold List: Genre refreshers

Feature by the editors of BookPage

No matter how hot it is outside, that first jump into the pool is always a shock. These five books are like that early summer plunge, each having transformed a well-loved genre into something totally surprising, gasp-worthy and deeply refreshing.

Severance

I have no idea why zombie movies and novels were such a thing in the 2010s, but it felt like everyone had an opinion about fast versus slow zombies, and nearly any stranger could tell you when and why they stopped watching “The Walking Dead.” Ling Ma’s spectacular 2018 debut novel, Severance, took the familiar zombie thriller and fused it with the fledgling millennial office novel to create something wholly original, using an apocalyptic framework to explore our daily routines and nostalgic obsessions. The story of a young woman who survives the plague and now finds herself homesick in civilization’s afterlife, Severance is a mashup, a sendup, a takedown. And the book continues to feel fresh in new ways nearly three years later: It’s about a global virus, but it’s also about continuing to work at your semifulfilling job while the unfathomable draws ever closer.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Anna K

I remember gasping aloud and then laughing with delight at the opening paragraph of Jenny Lee’s relentlessly effervescent re-imagining of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (which, confession, I have never read). It begins with a magnificent revision of Tolstoy’s famous epigraph, contains an unrepeatable expletive, name-drops Hermès, Apple, Madison Avenue and SoulCycle, and then ends with a parenthetical explanation that its subject’s “new gluten-free diet” prevents her from attending a “double sesh” workout. The whole thing serves to signal: Reader, you’re not in 19th-century St. Petersburg anymore. You’re in contemporary Manhattan amid a group of uber-wealthy Korean American teens whose social and romantic entanglements Lee chronicles with wit and style aplenty, not to mention a blunt frankness that would make even Gossip Girl blush. I can’t imagine anything more delicious than setting up poolside or stretching out on a park blanket under a tree and letting Lee’s sparkling prose and Anna and Vronsky’s life-changing love take me away. XOXO, indeed.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Mona in the Promised Land

Coming-of-age novels are far from rare, but acclaimed writer Gish Jen crafted one that rises above its genre in her beloved 1997 novel, Mona in the Promised Land. In the late 1960s, Chinese American teenager Mona Chang is growing up in the suburbs of Scarshill, New York, and struggling to find peace in her identity and to settle into her place in the world. Throughout Mona’s engaging exploration of Chinese, American and Jewish traditions, she finds love in a tepee, employment in a pancake restaurant and adherence to a new religion. It’s astoundingly refreshing to see a book effortlessly balance complex topics like race and identity with lighthearted moments and adolescent rites of passage. Through it all, Mona’s sharp wit and penchant for drama are her constant companions, making this lively book as entertaining as it is pensive. Jen takes a dynamic look at how important identity is for all of us while keeping the laughs coming. I loved every page of it.

—Caroline, Editorial Intern 

Red, White & Royal Blue

Even if you’re not a romance reader, you’ve probably heard of Casey McQuiston’s debut novel. (If you’ve been living under a rock, our interview with the author will catch you up.) But this love story between Alex Claremont-Diaz, first son of the United States, and Prince Henry of the U.K. deserves recognition for more than its stunning crossover success. When the novel achieved bestseller status, McQuiston proved that leaving LGBTQ representation in romance to the online-only and/or independent publishing realm meant leaving dollars on the table. She also gave the oft-gloomy, oft-toxic subcategory of New Adult (which features college-age protagonists), a much needed zap of positive, giddy energy. There are plenty of serious issues at stake—only a trusted few know that Henry is gay, and Alex must explore his bisexuality under a media microscope made even more intense by his Latinx heritage—but there are also karaoke extravaganzas, one of the rowdiest New Year’s Eve parties in fiction and a fan-favorite scene involving Thanksgiving turkeys.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

I love family memoirs—the messier, the better. If the author has been disowned, neglected or mistreated, I’m there with bells on and bookmarks in hand. However, even someone whose literary appetite for drama is as bottomless as mine can appreciate the refreshing sweetness of Bess Kalb’s memoir about her late grandmother, Bobby. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me digs into generations of difficult family history—fleeing the pogroms in Belarus, immigrating to New York City, building a business and a home one scheme at a time—but the twist is that Kalb writes from a place of deep love and appreciation for her grandmother, in defiance of those trauma-informed books that tease apart years of hurt. As an added bonus, comedy and TV writer Kalb narrates this story in Bobby’s frank, anxious, singularly funny voice, like an adoring impression. This bold, fresh approach is a welcome deviation from the first-person introspection common to the genre. Kalb’s buoyant memoir floats splendidly alone on a sea of fraught familial tales.

—Christy, Associate Editor

These five books are like an early summer plunge, each having transformed a well-loved genre into something totally surprising, gasp-worthy and deeply refreshing.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Kingdoms

Review by Lauren Bufferd

When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in 1898 Londres, he can remember his name but very little else, and he barely recognizes his surroundings. He learns that the former British capital has been a colony of the French Republic ever since France won the Napoleonic Wars 90 years ago. So begins Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms, a deliciously transgressive work of steampunk speculative fiction.

Joe is diagnosed with “silent epilepsy,” the official name given to the visions and amnesia that sometimes afflict people in this world. Otherwise in good health, Joe is returned to the French family to whom he is enslaved and to his wife, Alice, none of whom he recalls. After several years and the birth of his daughter, Joe receives a postcard of a lighthouse in the Scottish islands with a message signed by “M.” Most mysteriously, the note arrives almost a century after it was written.

Joe is determined to get answers about his identity as well as that of the card’s sender. He returns to Glasgow, now the site of a simmering British rebellion, and then travels farther north where he discovers a portal that acts as a pass-through from one era to another. Finally, at the lighthouse, he meets Missouri Kite, a Royal Navy officer from 1807, and is drawn into a complicated plan to use technology such as telegraphs and steam engines to aid in the British fight against the French.

Along with a cast of characters that includes the real-life Admiral Lord Nelson, Joe and Kite race from Scotland to Spain, trying to sway the forces that led to France’s victory. The butterfly theory, which posits that complex changes often originate from minuscule actions, plays out as Joe ricochets from century to century, trying to help his friends and ensure his own future existence and that of his family.

Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in tidbits of naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.

Natasha Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Peaces

Review by Michael Magras

Readers of Helen Oyeyemi’s latest mind-teaser will know they’re in for an unusual experience when the novel’s narrator, a 38-year-old hypnotist, begins the story by describing a set of Czech days-of-the-week underwear, a gift from a former boyfriend. And that’s before the narrator boards a train for a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” with his current love and their pet mongoose. Such is the uncommonly inventive setup of Peaces.

Otto Shin is one half of “a starry-eyed young couple” and has happily adopted the surname of his partner, Xavier. As the novel begins, they and their mongoose have boarded a sleeper train called The Lucky Day at their local station “in deepest Kent.” The ride was a gift from Xavier’s aunt. But, in one of the novel’s many engagingly bizarre flourishes, Otto and Xavier don’t quite know where they’re going. Even more curious: When Xavier calls his aunt from the train to check in on her, she says she’s in the company of someone named Yuri. Yuri claims to be a friend of Xavier’s, but Xavier doesn’t know who he is.

That’s just the start of the book’s many complications. Soon Otto and Xavier meet the train’s owner, Ava Kapoor, a theremin player who lives full time on The Lucky Day and has her own pet mongoose. Ava is days away from collecting an inheritance, but a series of events threatens her bounty. Among the characters that deepen the plot are a composer named Karel, who wrote a piece Ava used to play; Karel’s mysterious son, Přem; and a doctor assigned to assess Ava’s state of mind.

The story’s second half is convoluted, and Oyeyemi tends to overwrite, as when she describes a photo of a “fainting couch upholstered in brocade the color of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing.” But fans of the British writer’s previous work, such as the PEN award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will enjoy this novel’s surreal twists and imaginative scenarios. Peaces is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

Helen Oyeyemi’s latest is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

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