Min’s assured debut, told in reverse chronology, follows a wealthy Shanghai family from 2040 to 2014. Real estate investor Leo Yang stays behind in Shanghai as his wife, Eko, travels with their two oldest daughters, Yumi and Yoko, to the U.S. When Yoko confesses her pregnancy to Eko, the two secretly reroute to Paris for an abortion, which is now illegal in America. One year earlier, their youngest daughter, Kiko, works as an escort, and in 2034, Leo, who has episodes of “manic paranoia” fueled by apocalyptic fears, forces the family to practice survival skills on a farm outside town. Other episodes depict a 2028 princess party for Kiko, and Leo’s tentative start at building his fortune in 2014, the year he and Eko marry. Though the main characters are somewhat underdeveloped, Min casts a sharper eye on the family’s employees, especially their nanny, who must come to terms with the fact that the bond she feels with the children is not mutual. Though the disparate threads don’t quite cohere, they credibly reflect the messiness of family. Min is a writer worth keeping tabs on. Agent: Stephanie Delman, Trellis Literary Management. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Vietnamese woman becomes an amateur sleuth after her mother’s accidental death in the intriguing latest from Thuân (Chinatown). The unnamed 30-year-old narrator, a single mother, teaches Vietnamese language classes in Paris and is occasionally mistaken for her mixed-race son’s nanny. After her mother dies in a mysterious accident at her brother’s house in Saigon, she returns to Vietnam for the funeral. There, she finds an old notebook of her mother’s containing a yellowed photo of a Parisian man named Paul Polotsky. Soon after, she learns from another man that her mother knew Polotsky when she was a political prisoner during the Vietnam War. That information dredges up memories of a fight she remembers her parents having about her mother’s mysteriously quick release from prison. Back in Paris, the narrator searches for Polotsky, hoping to uncover the truth of her mother’s past. Thuân draws ingeniously on the pacing and tropes of detective fiction to craft a layered tale of family secrets. Readers will be rapt. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

A professional video poker player gets caught in a downward spiral in Iacovelli’s caustic debut. The unnamed narrator makes daily trips from his home on the Nevada-Arizona border to Las Vegas, where he’s on a two-week losing streak. His depression is exacerbated by the recent death of his hero, golfer Arnold Palmer, and he worries his previous winnings have given him the “illusion of meaning.” A widower on his second marriage, he struggles to connect with his 15-year-old son, Tim, an elite youth soccer player. After Tim declines to accompany the narrator on a road trip to Palm Springs, where he wants to place flowers at the site of Palmer’s victory in the 1973 U.S. Open, the narrator stays home and polishes his guns. Then his wife takes Tim to Italy for a soccer tryout, and the narrator hires a Vegas escort named Sophia. From there, the plot veers toward a grim climax, as the narrator hatches a sinister plan. Iacovelli imbues the narrator’s rants with an uncompromising precision; to him, Burberry perfume smells like “rotten fruit tossed in a blender with noxious chemicals.” It’s hard to look away from this disturbing character study. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The gripping and revelatory latest from Moore (Long Bright River) revolves around a prominent banking family’s troubled legacy in the Adirondacks. In 1975, 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar goes missing near the end of her first summer at Camp Emerson. It’s the second time a Van Laar child has vanished from the area; 14 years earlier, Barbara’s older brother Bear disappeared from their summer house when he was eight. The nonlinear narrative lays bare the family’s pain and unhappiness, showing how Peter Van Laar pressures his wife, Alice, to have another child shortly after Bear’s disappearance, and how Barbara frustrates the couple by being comparatively more difficult as a young girl, leading them to send her to boarding school. Moore gradually reveals the truth behind Barbara’s disappearance in scenes told from the alternating perspectives of several characters, including her bunkmate Tracy, who helps Barbara sneak out of the camp to meet her boyfriend. Meanwhile, details about Bear’s disappearance emerge as state police detective Judyta Luptack investigates Barbara’s case. The beautiful and dangerous wilderness setting enhances the suspense as the narrative builds to a dramatic final act that sheds a glaring light on Peter’s reluctance to prioritize the family’s well-being over its reputation. This astonishes. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

YA author Krischer (Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf) makes her adult debut with the entertaining story of a former child star and the journalist trying to track her down. Echo Blue, the daughter of movie star Jamie Blue, won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 1994, when she was 14. Fast forward five years: her career has crashed and burned, and she’s just been released from rehab for a Klonopin addiction. She makes a comeback appearance on MTV’s New Year’s Eve Y2K special, but disappears halfway through the event. Goldie Klein, an up-and-coming New York City reporter and Echo superfan, senses her big break and flies to Los Angeles in search of clues, posing as an artist to ingratiate herself with Jamie. A parallel narrative follows Echo’s rise in the early ’90s and subsequent mental health struggles. Eventually, the story lines intersect, revealing Echo’s whereabouts and her caustic perspective on celebrity culture. As Krischer makes clear in her increasingly unnerving depiction of Goldie’s fixation with Echo, the star is right to be wary of the spotlight. Equal parts intelligent and thrilling, this will have readers glued to their seats. Agent: Emily Sylvan Kim, Prospect Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

This uproarious novel from Bhattacharya (1948–2014), originally published in 2003, exemplifies the author’s penchant for freewheeling magical realism and rollicking revolutionary narratives. The action takes place in 1999 Kolkata, where three severed heads are discovered on the shores of a river, prompting the police to write them off as tidal refuse from a cremation site or a garbage dump. The scene turns out to be a prelude for an uprising against the local communist government led by Bhodi, a member of the Choktar black magic sect, who joins forces with three mischievous Fyatarus, flying creatures who ransack people’s homes. Over the course of their campaign against “governmental assbuggery,” they wreak pandemonium to deliriously comic effect. In one of many madcap episodes of Pynchonesque action, the Fyatarus salvage a cannon once used by Portuguese pirates, then fire it against their enemies. The sprawling cast includes the ghost of Josef Stalin, a communist official who dreams about visiting North Korea, a talking raven, and a police commissioner who’s beheaded by a flying saucer controlled by Bhodi and his crew. Bhattacharya smoothly shifts between high and low registers, zagging from erudite references to Kolkata’s political history and its poets to the Fyatarus’ scatological barbs (everyone they encounter is an “asswipe” or a “pube”), and he makes every sentence fizz with the spirit of insurrection. It’s an absolute blast. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this wry debut from Tominaga, a Japanese woman navigates single parenthood after her American husband’s untimely death. Kyoko is visiting her parents in Japan with her 18-month-old son, Alex, when her husband, Levi, is crushed to death in their San Francisco garage by the antique car he was working on. Kyoko had stopped working after Alex was born, and she struggles to see how she’ll afford her life in San Francisco. She cuts down on her costs, finds work at a preschool, and receives emotional support from her blunt and loving mother-in-law, Bubbe. The women’s relationship forms the heart of the episodic narrative, which includes a visit to a psychic who claims Levi wasn’t happy with Kyoko. At one point, Kyoko suppresses the urge to tell Bubbe how little she misses Levi, thinking, “The greatest gift he gave me was the opportunity to raise Alex alone”; at another, Bubbe affectionately calls Kyoko her daughter, not her daughter-in-law. Tominaga depicts the women’s tensions, misunderstandings, and affection with refreshing honesty and piercing insights (“Regret, resentment, and shame would build a wall around you, [Bubbe] believed, and by telling the truth we would break the wall and unite”). Tominga impresses with this distinctive slice of life. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Frazier debuts with the delightfully offbeat yet weighty story of a Chinese American college dropout turned limo driver and a Uyghur Muslim girl fleeing Chinese persecution. After Mĕi Brown’s father dies, she returns from Dartmouth to Oakland, where she struggles with her mother’s refusal to grieve. Her limo-driving job attracts the attention of her eccentric lǎoyé (Mandarin for “grandfather”), who lives in the garage and spends his days smoking weed and playing video games. Lǎoyé connects Mĕi with under-the-table clients, mainly sex workers, and eventually with the mysterious and handsome Henry Lee, who hires her to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse. Along the way, Mĕi discovers Henry is smuggling an 11-year-old girl, Anna, in his suitcase to reunite her with her professor father. Later, Mĕi learns that Anna and her mother were planning to leave China together, until her father’s incendiary articles about Uyghur persecution in Xinjiang led to her mother’s detention by Chinese authorities. The character work is top-notch, as Frazier shows how Mĕi offers Anna the kind of support she wished her own mother had provided, and the narrative structure (each chapter recounts a different leg of the journey) creates plenty of forward momentum. It’s a fresh take on the classic American road novel. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The colorful latest from Joella (A Quiet Life) finds 52-year-old Jack Schmidt at a crossroads in his diligent management of his family’s restaurant in Rehobeth Beach, Del., which he took over from his father decades earlier. When corporate bully DelDine, which has been scooping up dining establishments up and down the Delaware coast, approaches Jack with a lucrative offer, he’s tempted to take it. Though his high school buddy Deacon and others urge him not to sell, Jack remains torn. Meanwhile, he rekindles his romance with former fiancé Kitty, and the narrative flashes back to the 1980s, when the pair fell in love as teens. Eventually, Jack enters into negotiations with DelDine, but revelations about the developer’s true intentions complicate matters. The plot is predictable and sentimental, but Joella adds in meaty themes of gentrification, corporate greed, and the burdens and privileges of family tradition. Those in search of a feel-good summer tale will find what they’re looking for. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this compact and characteristically biting denunciation of French hypocrisy from Céline (1894–1961), WWI soldier Ferdinand is plagued by a “horrific din bashing my head... like a train” after being wounded in battle. Stumbling around in a delirium, Ferdinand hallucinates dead friends, three of whom appear before him “completely armless... you could see daylight through his head... he had guts that were sliding from his ass far into the countryside.” Brought to convalesce in a hospital in the town of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys, Ferdinand is protected from a doctor who wants to operate on him by a necrophiliac nurse, and befriends a fellow convalescent whose attempt to put his girlfriend to work as a prostitute threatens to backfire. For the maimed and embittered Ferdinand, the real enemy is the French establishment, including his bourgeois parents. Céline fled France in 1944 to avoid being charged as a collaborationist and left this unedited manuscript behind; Mandell’s faithful translation preserves some of the peculiarities of the original, including a few character names that change over the course of the narrative. Céline’s furious style is in full force, and is well served by the brevity of the text. Devoted fans will rejoice. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink