The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

 

With the ocean as their backyard, Ah Boon and his classmate Siok Mei grow up in land that becomes Singapore. Siok Mei gets swept up in anti-government activities but Ah Boon, having seen his own father lost to government atrocities, treads a narrow path. He joins the Gah Men, the repressive government authorities who doggedly destroy the seaside villages to create a new Singapore as part of the Great Reclamation. The two lovers’ paths are not linear and their motivations are not unselfish either. Heng shows a remarkable knack for juggling nuance and human complexity in a spectacular must-read debut.

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

 

“Part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be.” Librarian Bob Comet’s life has been misshapen by a singular tragedy: his wife Connie leaves him for his best friend, Ethan. Tracing the extraordinary story of an ordinary life, deWitt visits Bob in his retirement and back to a segment of his boyhood when he runs away from home. Heartwarming without eye-rolling manipulations is difficult but DeWitt delivers. An unsplashy marvel that celebrates the quotidian and highlights the many joys and scars tucked into the arc of a life.

The Best Possible Experience: Stories by Nishanth Injam

 

Injam captures the heartache of immigration without sappiness and includes ample doses of  dark humor. In the story “Summers of Waiting,” a granddaughter returns to India from Chicago to care for her elderly grandfather, whose life is ravaged by guilt. In “The Protocol,” an Indian immigrant and a down-on-her-luck Black woman agree to marry to get a green card in exchange for money. Humor abounds as well: All hell breaks loose when 12-year-old Vikas invites his classmate over for lunch, completely befuddling his poor parents. Filled with sharp  humor and unafraid of humanity’s dark underbelly, this is a promising debut.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

 

The imprint of colonialism in Jamaica is one of the central themes of Smith’s novel which seeks to explain the meaning of authenticity. Mrs. Eliza Touchet, the abolitionist housekeeper of a Victorian home in eighteenth-century England, sees that integrity varies depending on who’s worth is being measured. The novel’s noble intentions are not enough to see the plot through as it gets tied up in multiple strands that stall momentum. The established authors featured here lack authenticity, foregoing lived experiences for glamorous stories that push copies. To them it doesn’t matter that “the poor don’t need literature, they need bread.”