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Contemporary Fiction Views: Books to get lost in [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-18
A smattering of this week's new releases in (mostly) literary fiction follows. Links are to the independent online bookstore, The Literate Lizard, owned by Readers and Book Lovers' own debtorsprison, while descriptions are by the publishers.
Yes, reading can be very difficult these days. I am midway through several books with nothing bad to say about any of them. Yet unfinished they are. Whenever you can look at something, and whatever it is, please do what you can for yourself. It also helps keeps the arts, libraries and bookstores going. And we need those in a functioning society.
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
About an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.
Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya
When the star players on a high school football team are accused of violence by another student, their secrets—and the secrets of their parents—threaten to shatter their entire community in a gripping novel of race, class, and privilege from the author of Members Only.
Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates, Diego and MJ, attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.
But when the kid emerges with injuries that prove to be more serious than the all-star boys intended, they are suspended for the rest of the season and the boys’ parents are brought in to manage the situation. As the parents try to protect their boys, they are also managing their own complicated family and professional lives. While the parents work with, and against, each other to figure out the truth about that night, the boys must come to terms with how much of their own secrets they’re willing to reveal to clear their names.
Everybody Says It's Everything by Xhenet Aliu
In this unforgettable novel from the award-winning author of Brass, twins growing up in America in 1999 unravel larger truths about identity and sibling bonds when one gets wrapped up in the war in Kosovo.
Growing up in Connecticut, adopted twins Drita and Petrit (aka Pete) had no connection to their Albanian heritage. Their lives were all about Barbie dolls, the mall, and roller skating at the local rink. Though inseparable in childhood, their paths diverged as teenagers; Drita was a good girl with and good manners who was going to go to a good college, Pete was a bad boy going nowhere fast. Even their twinhood was not enough to keep them together.
Fast forward to their twenties and Drita has abandoned her graduate studies to move home and take care of their mother, giving up her dreams for the future. She hasn’t heard from her brother in three years when Pete’s girlfriend and their son show up unexpectedly without him and in need of help. Realizing that his child may offer the siblings a second chance at being family, Drita becomes determined to find Pete. But what she ends up discovering—about their connection to their Albanian roots, the war in Kosovo, and the story of their adoption—will surprise everyone, and will either be the thing that brings them together, or tears them apart for good.
Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima
Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster.
Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.
O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy
A young journalist, reeling from loss, investigates a mysterious cult in the California redwoods, only to be drawn in by its charismatic leader—an addictive novel that asks why people give up control and what it takes, ultimately, to find your place in the world.
Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “all suffering is distortion,” and “see only beauty.” Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings and compassionate teachings. But as he gets closer to Odo, Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come to terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo's spell.
Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a an infantryman during the Vietnam War alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless’s clash with a Texas fundamentalist church, O Sinners! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel asks: What is it that we seek from the people we admire and, inevitably, from each other?
Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
The violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelgänger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend and eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; and Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her.
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a master storyteller captures young people in Tanzania in a time of dizzying global change.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university in Dar es Salaam with a new swagger and sense of ambition. There he catches the eye of Fauzia, who sees in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. When the two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all, they little imagine how deeply their fates will entwine and diverge. As rapidly accelerating global change reaches even their quiet corner of the world, bringing tourists, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
The Fisherman's Gift by Julia R. Kelly
The Light Between Oceans meets The Snow Child in this novel set in a Scottish village in the weeks after a young boy mysteriously washes up on shore, causing the buried secrets of the insular community to come to light and rekindling an old love story.
It’s 1900 and Skerry, a small Scottish fishing village, is destined for an unyielding winter. During a storm, a young boy washes up on the shore. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy’s son, lost to the sea at the same age many years before, his body never found.
The village is soon snowed in, and Dorothy agrees to look after the child until they can uncover the mystery of his origins. But over time, the lines between reality and desperate hope start to blur as the boy reminds Dorothy more and more of her own lost child.
The boy’s arrival also finally forces Dorothy to face the truth about her brief but passionate love affair with Joseph, the fisherman who found the boy on the shore and who has been the subject of whispers connecting him to the drowning of Dorothy’s son years earlier.
As the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets are unearthed within this tight-knit community, and the child’s arrival becomes a catalyst for something far greater than any of them could imagine.
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To Shaka’s surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka’s sense of herself as a woman in the world.
Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
A scholarship kid with straight A's and big dreams, Evie Gordon always thought she was special, that she’d be someone. But after graduating from an elite university, she finds herself drowning in debt and working as an SAT tutor for the super-rich of Los Angeles.
Everything changes one Sunday, when she arrives for her weekly lesson at the Victors’ Beverly Hills estate and, in lieu of a bored teenager, finds the bloody remains of the parents strewn through their beautiful back garden, and a woman crying for help within a closet. As Evie works to free her, the two are spotted—and within moments, they go from bystanders to suspects to fugitives.
Suddenly at the heart of a manhunt and accompanied by a mysterious woman who refuses to speak, Evie knows the only way to clear her name is to find the real killer. But first she’ll have to break down the barriers of her companion, who is quickly becoming the most important person in Evie’s upside-down life. Their breathless spree takes them across the U.S. as developments in the case shock the nation and the press runs wild with Evie’s story: a gifted kid turned killer. She's now on the cover of every magazine and newspaper—anointed the new Charles Manson, a bloodthirsty ninety-nine percenter looking to start a class war. Evie is finally someone.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.
Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot’s mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It’s not long before Cherry must decide how much she’s willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act—and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.
The Problem You Have: Stories by Robert Garner McBrearty
The Sisyphean characters in The Problem You Have may not be pushing a giant rock up a hill, but they are unlikely to ever get where they are going. Yet despite knowing that, they push on and work with graceful resignation.
In McBrearty’s newest collection a diverse group of characters encounter turning points. A minor criminal seeking warmth on a frigid night climbs through a farmhouse window to discover more than he ever expected. A dying soldier recalls the man he left behind. In one horrible afternoon, a college professor realizes the only sanctuary is love. An over-the-hill pitcher refuses to get off the mound. A young couple meets the couple they never want to become.
The Running Flame by Fang Fang
The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams. Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures—and eventually a shocking act of violence.
Fang Fang’s explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality.
Soft Burial by Fang Fang
Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased. The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.
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