In 1930s colonial Malaya, Ji Lin, a brilliant student without the means or permission to further her education, survives as a dressmaker's apprentice moonlighting as a dance hall girl. Ren is a houseboy burdened with a mission by his former master that keeps him teetering dangerously between the worlds of the dead and living. Unexplained deaths, the British colonialists with stories and people best left in England, whispers of weretigers and unsettled ghosts, and mysterious connections make this beautiful book an absorbing adventure into a foreign time and place.
Willa and Iano are educated, successful, middle class... so why are they struggling to take care of medical bills, find insurance, figure out how to come up with money to renovate Willa’s old New Jersey inheritance that is falling down around them? In desperation, Willa looks to her home's past and discovers people who also faced great uncertainty and change following the Civil War and Charles Darwin’s shocking new theories. Both narratives explore what it means to live in a time of great change, to live unsheltered, untethered, fearful, exposed, free. Brilliant portrait of where we are and the possibilities of where we might go.
Literary fiction at its finest. Poornima and Savitha will have you alternately railing against a world that has for so long and in so many places dashed women’s sense of agency, sense of control over their bodies, and their futures, and then cheering the sheer resolve of these young women who baldly refuse to accept the dousing of their light. Start this when you have time to read it all the way through because you will not be able to stop. This is the summer read for women who know or want to know the power of their sisters.
To understand the border, what it means to those employed to guard it, to those whose families and lives depend on crossing it, and those who live on and near it, read this book. Cantu served as a US Border Patrol agent from 2008-2012 and his account of that time demands that the reader reconsider border policy, but it is the individual story of a friend, a good man caught between the peril of crossing and the destruction of his family that demands response.
A Caine and Abel (ish) story of one family profoundly affected by 1990s Nigeria, their aspirations for their children, and the power of myth, suggestion, faith, and magic. Benjamin, the fourth son, tells the tragic tale of his brothers, the Omi-Ala River which had been like a god but was - under the influence of western culture - now evil, and a madman with a prophecy. Beautifully written and truly a book you will want to discuss, The Fishermen, which was a Man Booker Finalist and received much acclaim, is an exciting introduction to a voice to watch!
