Junot Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience.
Anyone's Ghost (2024) August Thompson "You know those books that you take with you everywhere? That you won't stop talking about to your friends? That bring it all back? That change you? Anyone's Ghost is that book."
Victim (2024) Andrew Boryga "You get debuts this blazing once in a generation if you're lucky. Boryga is brilliant, a brilliant writer, a brilliant satirist and his voice could light up a city. Victim is a stake of truth aimed at our vampire culture's charlatanic heart."
The Suicide Museum (2023) Ariel Dorfman "The wildly brilliant Ariel Dorfman has outdone himself with this rivetingly original and mesmerizingly profound supernova of a novel...The Suicide Museum is so many perfect things: a globetrotting mystery, a courageous journey into Chile's nightmare past, a tender paean to the bonds that keep us human, but above all it's just about the best book I've read in a decade."
The Circumference of the World (2023) Lavie Tidhar "Tidhar wins it all with this magnificently original mind-bender of a novel about a missing husband and a mysterious book that disappears as soon as you read it. The Circumference of the World is two parts Philip K. Dick, two parts Brothers Strugatsky, and six parts blow your f**king mind."
8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster (2023) Mirinae Lee "Fantastically original doesn't begin to describe this exhilarating, globe-spanning, decade-hopping masterpiece. Lee has achieved the impossible - from a fractured century of agonies and betrayals, she has woven a novel of immense beauty and regeneration."
The All-American (2023) Joe Milan Jr "Only a novelist as gifted as Milan Jr could have transformed this nightmare tale of a world lost into profoundly moving meditation on nationhood, belonging and the possibility of rebirth ... with this incredible debut Milan has rocketed himself into the literary stratosphere."
Hospital (2023) (Hospital , book 1) Han Song "Demented, delirious, and one of a kind... Kafkaesque doesn't begin to describe this cunning labyrinth of a novel. Nothing I have read has captured so incisively (and searingly) the unrelenting institutional brutality of our contemporary world."
Cocoon (2022) Zhang Yueran "An irresistible siren-song of a novel by one of our most original voices - a grandfather lies in a coma, his brain destroyed by a nail and two friends reach across time and the gaps between them to unravel the mystery of that nail, a mystery that has haunted and tormented both their families. A transcendent novel that suggests that family secrets and family crimes are the nation from which none of us can ever fully escape."
Lebanon Red (2022) Luke McCaffrey "McCaffrey writes with the taut no-nonsense energy of early Lee Child but with a noir sensibility all his own. A dynamite debut."
Edgware Road (2022) Yasmin Cordery Khan "Part family mystery, part immigrant hustle, Edgware Road is a complete tour de force... Khan calls up all the ghosts that prowl between children and their parents, between immigrants and their homelands, between our dreams of wealth and our hunger for love, and exorcises them with prose so lapidary and understanding so vast Khan's novel is like unto a blessing."
Call Me Cassandra (2022) Marcial Gala "A spellbinding novel by one of the best writers of the Americas. Call Me Cassandra is Marcial Gala's masterpiece, blending Greek myth with the Cuban intervention in Angola. At the heart of this incandescent tales burns sensitive Rauli, caught between the Gods and the Revolution, between a body that he longs to escape and a world that lets no one like him escape. Call Me Cassandra is Chronicle of a Death Foretold but blacker and brilliantly better."
Dante's Indiana (2021) Randy Boyagoda "The astonishing Boyagoda at his astounding best … Dante’s Indiana is a satirical stunner, a mad Midwestern tour de force and one of the most moving, most incisive maps of our grim contrapasso present you’ll ever read, a novel that is both humblingly humane and soaringly divine. Dante’s Indiana is what would happen if Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Moby Dick had a prophetic prodigal child. This book is a miracle."
Em's Awful Good Fortune (2021) Marcie Maxfield "Em's Awful Good Fortune takes its reader across the world and deep into the heart of its trapped, privileged, suffering, and, ultimately, invincible narrator. Equally funny and brutal, this novel breathes vivid life into a much maligned and little understood "type"--the expat wife. Maxfield poured her heart into the writing, and it shows: the pages crackle."
Red Milk (2021) Sjón "The trickster that makes the world, and he is achingly brilliant."
The Fortune Men (2021) Nadifa Mohamed "The Fortune Men is that rare novel that breaks your heart and, in so doing, gives you life. Nadifa Mohamed is a revelation - she writes with the fierce compassionate lightning of a truth-teller, lays bare the ghastly colonial condition that afflicts so many of us, where truth cannot overcome injustice. If a novel can be an avenger then The Fortune Men is the one we've all been waiting for."
Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac "A rapturous tour de force by Pola Oloixarac-one of the few writers I cannot live without-Mona is that novel that, once finished, leaves its reader perfectly, beautifully undone. Part mystery, part send-up of a literary world, part journey into night, Mona reminds us that no matter how far you fly, the past is always near. If Mona were any smarter, any funnier, any truer, I'm not sure my tender heart could have taken it."
No Heaven for Good Boys (2021) Keisha Bush "An extraordinary literary debut, as mesmerizing as it is heartbreaking . . . Bush is an amazing storyteller, by turns harrowing and tender, and no matter how difficult the journey, she never lets us lose sight of the two young cousins who are the beating hopeful loving heart of this triumphant must-read novel."
The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana (2020) Maryse Condé "What an astounding novel. Never have I read anything so wild and loving, so tender and ruthless. Condé is one of our greatest writers, a literary sorcerer but here she has outdone even herself, summoned a storm from out of the world’s troubled heart. Ivan and Ivana, in their love, in their Attic fates, mirror our species’ terrible brokenness and it’s improbable grace."
The Dog Stars (2012) Peter Heller "[The Dog Stars] gripped me-it's the real deal. One of those books that makes you happy for literature."
Vida (2010) Patricia Engel "Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for."
The Third Bear (2010) Jeff VanderMeer "Cunningly crafted stories full of wonder and intelligence... VanderMeer proves again why he is so essential and why everybody should be reading him."
The Black Minutes (2010) Martín Solares "A breathless, marvelous first novel... This is Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest... a literary masterpiece masquerading as a police procedural and nothing else I've read this year comes close."
Your Presence Is Requested At Suvanto (2010) Maile Chapman "Maile Chapman is one of my favorite writers and in Your Presence Is Requested At Suvanto has given us an errie gift of a novel. It is a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch from that Gothic frontier of the Female Body."
