Season of the Swamp (2024) Yuri Herrera "The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: Reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn't want to surface-here I am still, in its great, brilliant light."
Hum (2024) Helen Phillips "What's more intoxicating than a Helen Phillips novel? Her books have blown open the doors of what's possible with the art of storytelling - and her latest, Hum, is her best work yet: one that captures, with fire and grace, our future and what it means to love, to persist, and to be human. This is a hold-your-breath book. Buckle up and get ready to deeply feel the joy - the thrill, the magic - of reading."
The Expat (2024) Hansen Shi "Hansen Shi's debut uses a taut, piercingly of-the-moment spy story as a staging area for a beautifully layered, bitingly funny exploration of identity, the legacies of trauma and alienation, and the way that nations and the clashes between them can consume and co-opt every corner of a life. THE EXPAT is pure espionage pleasure but also an enthralling dispatch from a world scarred by seething, barely submerged conflicts, both ideological and personal. A triumphant first novel."
The Invisible Hotel (2024) Yeji Y Ham "Yeji Y. Ham's The Invisible Hotel is an absolute fever dream-a book that explores, with haunted grace and magical wildness, the inescapable ghosts of a fractured, heartbroken country, and one woman's relentless quest to rush headlong into the labyrinths and mysteries that make up her family. What a thrill to read this: propulsive, electric, full of fury and ecstatic writing, you won't be able to put this one down."
Emergency (2023) Kathleen Alcott "Kathleen Alcott's Emergency left me windswept and altered--this is a book that reveals to us our forgotten joys and secrets, all the unexpected paths of our days. There is an abundance of the world here, a bright, haunted pulse you want to follow endlessly. Alcott is a mesmerizing writer, and this is her best book yet."
The Mythmakers (2023) Keziah Weir "Every once in a while, a novel appears that grips you and confides in you as an old friend would. Keziah Weir's The Mythmakers is not only a love letter to the mysteries that bind us, but it's also a remarkable portrayal of how we move forward, stumble, get up again and rebuild our lives when we need to the most. Suspenseful, elegant, so full of life and the ghosts we carry, this is, quite simply, beautiful storytelling."
Elsewhere (2023) Yan Ge "Do you remember the feeling of not wanting anyone else to discover your favorite band? Of the music speaking to you as though it were some extraordinary secret only you could understand and decode? Yan Ge's Elsewhere, in all its spellbinding, strange, wondrous and captivating glory, is such a book: let me hold on to it a little while longer before you experience it too. A bewitching collection of stories that will leave you awestruck, shaken, and wanting to reach for it again and again."
Lungfish (2022) Meghan Gilliss "Lungfish is a force of nature - a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best."
The Partition (2022) Don Lee "Where would we be without the work of Don Lee? He is for so many of us our guiding light, the writer we look toward, emulate, and wish we were. Over the course of four novels and a story collection, he has not so much pushed the envelope but blasted it open and created anew the landscape of the Asian American experience with rigor, joy, hilarity, and the most generous of hearts. The Partition is storytelling at its finest and further proof of Lee's mastery - a stunning portrait of who we are now and where we're going."
A Passage North (2021) Anuk Arudpragasam "Anuk Arudpragasam is an artist of revelations. In A Passage North, he continues to map, with beauty, grace, and fire, the responsibilities we carry in a world that is forever on the brink. This is a novel as both an elegy and a love song, not only for a place, but for the souls, living and dead, who are bound to that place—what an unforgettable and perfect reading experience, and one that unearths truths, relentlessly, magically."
Olympus, Texas (2021) Stacey Swann "Here is a lightning field of a novel: enthralling, vast, dark, bright, beautiful and dangerous. I was hypnotized by it. Stacey Swann is an unforgettable force, and Olympus, Texas will carry you and embrace you with all its heart, strength, and hope."
Aviary (2021) Deirdre McNamer "Where would we be without the always magnificent Deirdre McNamer? With Aviary, she has given us her best work yet, a novel brimming, room after room, with all our mercies and our hauntings. This is a house you want to explore forever, where the smallest acts can be as potent as revelations, and where we, on every beautiful, hilarious, and heart-heavy page, learn a little bit more about ourselves. I didn't want to leave it-a book I will return to, often, for faith, for light."
Ruthie Fear (2020) Maxim Loskutoff "A ferocious, unsettling, raging storm of a novel that captures not only a place of hauntings and heartbreaks but also a world on the precipice. This is a symphony on fire, a call for us to be better - a beautiful, glimmering song."
The Vanishing Sky (2020) L Annette Binder "L. Annette Binder's The Vanishing Sky is so fiercely imagined, so wondrously conjured, that what you hold not only pulls you into its history but into a world of pure yearning, determination, struggle, and hope. This is a story-in all its rich layers-that dazzles, breaks your heart, clutches you, and gets you back up again. I'm grateful to have experienced it, and grateful to Binder for the gift she has given us."
How to Pronounce Knife (2020) Souvankham Thammavongsa "Reading Souvankham Thammavongsa's How to Pronounce Knife is like finding, at last, a part of you that you had lost and had been searching for all this time. Not since the stories of Edward P. Jones have I encountered such a unified and yet wide-ranging vision-both geographically and emotionally-that captures the spirit of not only a community but of the greater world-then, now, the future. This is a book full of powerful resilience, great journeys, and above all else: fierce, heart-wrenching love."
The Far Field (2019) Madhuri Vijay "What do we spend our lives searching for? What lasts and what pushes us forward? These are some of the questions Madhuri Vijay's THE FAR FIELD explores and navigates with a heart on fire. Stunning in its artistry, in its engagement with the world and the personal, this is a profound and monumental achievement composed with rage, vulnerability, humor, grief, and mystery. How dangerous this novel is, in the very best of ways, and how grateful I am for this writer and for her creation."
If You Leave Me (2018) Crystal Hana Kim "If You Leave Me is exhilarating... Crystal Hana Kim has written a novel that teaches us and guides us, one that captures majestically, perfectly, not only our histories but our present and our future."
