Book Reviews

Laura Sibson's Edie in Between follows our heroine as she learns her own magic and unravels a family mystery. If only we didn't have to keep yelling at her to stay out of the metaphorical basement.

Poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers spent more than a decade working on her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, which follows Ailey Pearl Garfield as she unearths the truths of her family.

Pat Barker returns to the scene of the Trojan War in The Women of Troy, but this time after the city has fallen and its women are grieving their old lives while trying to figure out their new ones.

A wave of new comics creators are drawing on their heritage, culture and folklore to create fantastical worlds and superpowered characters — something that wasn't possible until very recently.

"If I could put it into words, I wouldn't be drawing it," says one of the characters in Zuo Ma's surreal graphic novel Night Bus, a collection of stories that drives through every literary boundary.

"It is too cruel to ask if it hurts more the first or second time a homeland is lost," says Afghan American author Nadia Hashimi, whose parents are from Kabul. "I know one never becomes numb to it."

The eight short stories in Yoon Choi's extraordinary collection splinter out in unexpected ways, shifting focus from a single life to decades of complex family history.

While this book would not exist without Kat Chow's grief — while Chow would not be the person she is now without that grief — her project here aims for more than just mapping her primal anguish.

Linden A. Lewis's stylish queer space opera series levels up with The Second Rebel, which picks up with our initial protagonists Hiro, Lito and the First Sister, and adds a few new voices too.

The third installment of British writer Deborah Levy's excellent Living Autobiography is largely a book about the collisions of fantasies and real life — or perhaps a synthesis of the two.