anuary is a month of new beginnings, which makes it the perfect time to start a great book. We’ve chosen ones that will have you at hello, dangling an intriguing detail, a glimpse of character, or slice of a setting in the first sentence that pulls you irresistibly into the world the author has created:
- “It was not that September 11th felt like just another day in New York.”—Too Soon, by Betty Shamieh
- “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen years old, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me.” —Playworld, by Adam Ross
- “Two days after she disappeared, most of my mother’s body washed up in Flushing Creek.” —Confessions, by Catherine Airey
- “I know there are exceptions—pregnant male seahorses with their brood pouches and so on—but mostly, it’s females who carry the future.” —The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight
See what we mean? Now you just have to decide which one to pick up first!
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This profound family drama is a masterpiece of its kind, chronicling a year (1980-81) in the life of prep school freshman Griffin Hurt. The son of an actor and a dancer, he has a role on a popular TV series, struggles with academics and a problematic wrestling coach, is still recovering from the trauma of a fire he caused when he was six… and to top it off, one of his parent’s friends, a woman of 36, has fallen in love with him. The evocation of the New York of that period — the architecture, the catchphrases, the public life, and popular culture — is so textured and compelling as to be a kind of literary virtual reality.
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When elderly Chinese immigrants “Sue” and “Howard” run into each other in the produce aisle of a Los Angeles grocery store in 2008, it’s clear that what a Shanghai psychic told teenage friends Suchi and Haiwen in 1945 was true: Their destinies are entwined for life. Chen’s ambitious debut moves between their perspectives to track their stories over nearly sixty years of war, dislocation, love, and loss unfolding in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and New York. This is a novel historical fiction mavens will adore, as its storytelling magic and emotional depth flow over a foundation of enlightening, critically important facts.
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This British campus novel has it all: a page-turning plot revolving around family secrets, a love affair so fresh and engrossing you feel like you are the one with the crush, a brilliantly developed ensemble cast, vivid settings at the University of Edinburgh, and the estate of the extraordinary Lenox family, plus a frisson of #metoo revenge. It begins with a letter from Canadian freshman Penelope Winters to the famous mystery writer Lord Lenox, whom she believes has the answer to some questions about her dad. Meanwhile, Pen’s lifelong best friend, the lovely Alice, is getting entangled with her philosophy tutor. An amazingly accomplished debut.
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Palestinian-American playwright Shamieh makes her wonderfully brash and sparkling fiction debut with this novel of three generations. It centers on a New York theater director named Arabella who has found her niche finding comedy in Shakespeare’s tragedies. When she’s invited to put on a gender-flipped Hamlet in the West Bank city of Ramallah, she fears she’s being marginalized, but the “Borders Without Doctors” guy her buttinsky grandma Zoya wants her to meet is there, so she packs her bags. Zoya’s own story begins in Palestine just before the upheaval of 1948, then sweeps on to Detroit and California. Funny, sexy, and often furious, this book fills in gaps in our understanding.
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This beautifully written novel about the power of stories to redeem the past and reclaim the future is itself a tapestry of such narratives. At the center is Peter Fisher, a gay immigration lawyer in New York who finds himself completely thrown off balance by Vasel Marku, a gay Armenian teenager driven out of his country by homophobic persecution. To right himself, Peter has to mend his estrangement from his mother Ann, who left his now-deceased father for a woman and runs a retreat center in Vermont. Together, they unearth a secret they buried long ago.
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First, we meet sixteen-year-old Cora, whose mother Máire died by suicide years ago and whose father Michael is now missing after the World Trade Center attack. Then a letter arrives from her aunt Róisín, now her legal guardian, inviting her to rural Ireland. The next section places us in County Donegal in the 1970s, the teen years of Róisín and Cora’s parents. Airey’s dazzling debut is a puzzle box of a novel with a solution you discover along with the characters in the satisfying final chapters. A video game, secret correspondence, 23andMe, reproductive rights activism, and french fries dipped in a vanilla milkshake all play a role.
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Sixty-five years after her death, we are getting a never-before-published novel from the arguable literary doyenne of the Harlem Renaissance—and inarguable queen of the first line (see the unforgettable start of Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board”). As the anthropologist daughter of a Baptist minister, Hurston was obsessed with the Bible and driven to re-invent it through historical fiction. Following her Afrocentric Moses, Man of the Mountain, she nearly completed this detailed, revolutionary rethinking of Herod, presenting a man usually seen as one of the bloodiest villains in the Bible as a charismatic ruler who led his people toward peace and prosperity. To complete the unfinished manuscript—nearly destroyed and partly burned in a fire—editor Deborah Plant includes excerpts from the author’s letters and an insightful commentary.
cREDIT: Oprahdaily
