New York. Bloomsbury. 2021. 368 pages.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022, Elif Shafak’s thirteenth novel, The Island of Missing Trees, revisits Shafak’s much…
FICTION
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dzanc Books. 2022. 197 pages. I DIDN'T “READ” Nina Shope’s debut novel, Asylum; I lived it, pulled into and almost physically held captive by this heart…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2022. 232 pages. “EVERY LANDSCAPE,” American geographer D. W. Meinig writes, “is an accumulation.” Within it, “the past endures.” Writers concerned with…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 228 pages. “EVERYBODY WHO HAS read Wise Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas I would like to create the impression over…
New York. Vintage. 2022. 240 pages. “EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS framed through the prism of war.” This line that occurs toward the end of the novel Bolla is a ke…
New York. New Directions. 2022. 224 pages. EVELIO ROSERO, AUTHOR of more than thirty books and winner of Colombia’s National Literary Prize, often writes about his country’s civil di…
Leeds, UK. Peepal Tree. 2022. 190 pages. ANDRE BAGOO’S The Dreaming explores the lives and dreams of everyday gay Trinidadians through the short-story form. The Dreaming…
Paris. Éditions Emmanuelle Collas. 2022. 364 pages. THE CAMEROONIAN NOVELIST Djaïli Amadou Amal (b. 1975) is best known for Les Impatientes (2020), which illustrates, from t…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 368 pages. WITH EACH NEW work, Yiyun Li reinvents herself. Readers have come to expect her complexity of thought, detailed historical backg…
New York. Atria Books. 2022. 278 pages. WITH THEIR SEVENTH book, Akwaeke Emezi adds another genre to their catalog: romance novel. The novel begins with Feyi Adekola recovering from t…
New York. New York Review Books. 2022. 144 pages. AMIT CHAUDHURI HAS always been a writer in whose works a place comes alive like a fully delineated character. In his first novel,…
Sheffield, UK. Tilted Axis Press. 2022. 127 pages. MONIQUE ILBOUDO IS a poet, novelist, defender of human and women’s rights, including rights to determine one’s own identities and c…
London. Verso. 2022. 330 pages. IT IS A MADWOMAN’S pursuit to keep chasing what you can never have, but acclaimed novelist Vigdis Hjorth understands how desperation can take hold of…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2022. 247 pages. THE PRESENT, DESCRIBED accurately enough, can later read like prophecy. That Offended Sensibilities, first published in Russia…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2022. 368 pages. LAST YEAR, PAINTINGS by the Chagossian artist Clément Siatous, exhibited at the Caudan Arts Centre in Port Louis, Mauritius, showed the main…
Saqqez, Kurdistan. Khani. 2022. 217 pages. SAYYED QADIR HEDAYATI (b. 1976), a dominant contemporary Kurdish novelist in Iran, has written a number of novels, including The Yoke of…
Beijing. Beijing United Publishing. 2022. 249 pages. AS YANG BENFEN’S third novel published in three years, Wo Ben Fen Fang (I am rich in fragrance) garners no less attention…
New York. Other Press. 2022. 368 pages. LUCIA IS AN elderly nun who has co-created—“birthed,” perhaps, is a better word—Carnality, a bizarre talk show on the Dark Web. It is…
New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2022. 320 pages. SCHOLARLY RESEARCH INTO the work of Henry James is the literary linchpin that drives the characterization and plot of Benefit…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2022. 261 pages. THE PAGES is an inventive and gripping novel that is full of love, loss, intrigue, history, and the enigmatic relationship between…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2022. 152 pages. POISED ON THE “chasm’s edge,” Anne Lardeux’s The Second Substance demands that readers query their environment—its possibilities…
New York. New Directions. 2022. 112 pages. LUCKY BREAKS, by Yevgenia Belorusets, is an experimental approach to the novel that neither follows a traditional story arc nor adh…
Paris. P.O.L. 2022. 204 pages. READERS FAMILIAR WITH his work know Gérard Gavarry as a master of French prose style as well as a writer who comes to each project with a fresh perspect…
Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 368 pages. THIS NOVEL IS the second part of a trilogy, Le Pays des autres (see WLT, Autumn 2020, 95), partly based on the author’s family his…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 419 pages. PATRICE NGANANG’S NEWLY translated novel, A Trail of Crab Tracks, follows the relationship between Tanou, a Cameroonian…