A Word About Awards

HEAVEN by Mieko Kawakami   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2022, BookTube Longlist 2022   Date Read: March 29, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “This novel from the author of Breasts and Eggs (2020) takes on another subject seldom tapped in literary fiction and blows it open with raw and eloquent intensity.   Kawakami has a unique knack for burrowing into discomfort, and she does it in a startlingly graceful way. Like her last novel—an unsparing treatise on the pressures of being a woman in male-dominated Japan—this book isn’t for the fainthearted. Told from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy in present-day Japan, Kawakami’s tale follows the volatile lives of two teenagers relentlessly bullied by their peers. At the outset, our protagonist—he's referred to as “Eyes” by his tormentors because of his lazy eye—begins a furtive exchange of notes with Kojima, a quiet girl who’s also suffered at the hands of her classmates. Kojima has “stiff-looking hair” that sticks out in all directions and

AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins   Nominations: Goodreads Finalist 2020, Oprah Book Club 2020   Date Read: March 28, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “This terrifying and tender novel is a blunt answer to the question of why immigrants from Latin America cross the U.S. border—and a testimony to the courage it takes to do it.   Cummins (The Crooked Branch, 2013, etc.) opens this propulsive novel with a massacre. In a pleasant Acapulco neighborhood, gunmen slaughter 16 people at a family barbecue, from a grandmother to the girl whose quinceañera they are celebrating. The only survivors are Lydia, a young mother, and her 8-year-old son, Luca. She knows they must escape, fast and far. Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, is among the dead; he was a fearless journalist whose coverage of the local cartel, Los Jardineros, is the reason los sicarios were sent, as the sign fastened to his dead chest makes clear. Lydia knows there is more to it, that her friendship with a courtly older man who has become her

THE RETURN OF FARAZ ALI by Aamina Ahmad   Award: LA Times Winner 2022   Date Read: March 20, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  young Pakistani police officer’s investigation leads him deep into his own past.   The story begins with a crime: Sonia, an 11-year-old sex worker in Lahore’s red-light district, has been killed. Though Faraz Ali has been dispatched by his father, a local politician, to cover up the murder, he can’t bring himself to follow orders. In late-1960s Pakistan, against the backdrop of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s rise to power, Faraz’s unwillingness to play politics, to simply do as he’s told and reap the rewards, has grave consequences. He's reassigned to East Pakistan, where he's seen as an occupier by those fighting for a free Bangladesh, yet another test of his moral fiber. Throughout, his relationship to his powerful father remains a secret, as does the fact that his own mother is a sex worker and he was born in the red-light district himself. While Sonia’s case r

THE BOOK OF ARON by Jim Shepard   Nominations: Carnegie Finalist 2016, Dublin Longlist 2017, Kirkus Finalist 2015   Date Read: March 12, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An understated and devastating novel of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, as seen through the eyes of a street-wise boy.   Shepard has recently earned more renown for his short stories ( You Think That’s Bad ,   2011, etc.), but here he presents an exhaustively researched, pitch-perfect novel exploring the moral ambiguities of survival through a narrator who's just 9 years old when the tale begins. He's a Jewish boy living in the Polish countryside with his family and an odd sense of his place in the world. “It was terrible to have to be the person I was,” he despairs, matter-of-factly describing himself as basically friendless, a poor student, and an enigma to his loving mother: “She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.” Yet Aron proves to be engagi

HOME by Marilynne Robinson   Awards: LA Times Winner 2008, Women’s Prize Winner 2009   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2010, National Book Finalist 2008, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2008, Oprah’s Book Club 2021   Date Read: March 10, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  companion volume to Robinson’s luminous, Pulitzer-winning novel  Gilead  (2004).   The focus here shifts from John Ames,  Gilead’s  memorable protagonist, to his lifelong best friend Robert Boughton. A widowed, increasingly frail and distracted former Presbyterian minister, Boughton has eight children scattered across the country. The story unfolds after two of them come home to Gilead, Iowa: Glory, the unmarried youngest, who has resigned her teaching job so she can care for Robert; and ne’er-do-well Jack, who for 20 years has repeatedly broken his father’s indulgent heart with his irresponsible, sometimes criminal behavior and—worse—his absence. “Why did he leave? Where had he gone? Those questions had hung in the a

THE BANDIT QUEENS by Parini Shroff   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2024, Women’s Prize Longlist 2023   Date Read: March 6, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “ Bonds of sisterhood are forged through murders.   When Geeta’s husband, Ramesh, disappeared from their Indian village five years ago, he left her saddled with debt and the lingering rumor that she murdered him. Geeta simultaneously resents her dubious reputation, wields it to scare local children into compliance, and uses it to make up for her loneliness: “She wasn’t respected here, but she was feared, and fear had been very kind to Geeta.'' Then Farah—a member of the microloan club Geeta belongs to along with fellow female entrepreneurs—has a proposal. Would Geeta help her remove her proverbial nose ring by murdering her abusive husband? While hesitant at first, Geeta ultimately agrees. But, of course, this murder does not go smoothly. From there follow a series of betrayals, the uncovering of an underground alcohol trade, and

THE BONE CLOCKS by David Mitchell   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2014, Carnegie Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2016   Date Read: March 5, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Mitchell’s latest could have been called  The Rime of the Ancient Marinus —the “youthful ancient Marinus,” that is. Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell ( Cloud Atlas , 2004, etc.).   As this long (but not too long) tale opens, we’re in the familiar territory of Mitchell’s  Black Swan Green  (2006)—Thatcher’s England, that is. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that. At first it’s 1984, and Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old suburban runaway, is just beginning to suss out that it’s a scary, weird place, if with no shortage of goodwilled protectors. She wants nothing but to get away: “The Thames is riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, it’s 11:30 and the town’