PPCA Book Selection Survey for 2027
Survey CLOSED
Survey #1
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Purple Hibiscus (2003)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: By turns luminous and horrific, this debut ensnares the reader from the first page and lingers in the memory long after its tragic end. First-person narrator Kambili Achike is a 15-year-old Nigerian girl growing up in sheltered privilege in a country ravaged by political strife and personal struggle. She and her brother, Jaja, and their quiet mother, who speaks “the way a bird eats, in small amounts,” live this life of luxury because Kambili’s father is a wealthy man who owns factories, publishes a politically outspoken newspaper and outwardly leads the moral, humble life of a faithful Catholic. The many grateful citizens who have received his blessings and material assistance call him omelora, “The One Who Does for the Community.” Yet Kambili, Jaja and their mother see a side to their provider no one else does: he is also a religious fanatic who regularly and viciously beats his family for the mildest infractions of his interpretation of an exemplary Christian life. The children know better than to discuss their home life with anyone else; “there was so much that we never told.” But when they are unexpectedly allowed to visit their liberated and loving Aunty Ifeoma, a widowed university professor raising three children, family secrets and tensions bubble dangerously to the surface, setting in motion a chain of events that allow Kambili to slowly blossom as she begins to question the authority of the precepts and adults she once held sacred. In a soft, searing voice, Adichie examines the complexities of family, faith and country through the haunted but hopeful eyes of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. Lush, cadenced and often disconcerting, this is an accomplished first effort.
Survey #2
Akbar, Kevin: Martyr! (2024)
Review: ©Booklist: Orphaned, anxious, and outspoken Iranian American poet Cyrus Shams is in AA and barely scraping by. Not quite 30, he’s trying to write a book about martyrs, his obsession with meaningful deaths stemming from his mother’s perishing on the Iranian passenger airliner shot down by the U.S. navy in 1988. His bereft father left Tehran with his infant son to work at an industrial chicken farm in Indiana. The only remaining connection to Iran is Cyrus’ uncle, who suffers from PTSD after his surreal service in the Iran-Iraq War as a battlefield angel. Living with Zee in an ambiguous friends/lovers relationship, Cyrus is tipping toward suicidal. When they learn about a martyr-in-the-making, the terminally ill Iranian American artist Orkideh and her end-of-life performance piece à la Marina Abramovic at the Brooklyn Museum, the two men go to New York, leading to a staggering revelation. Poet Akbar (Pilgrim Bell, 2021) is an almost deliriously adept first-time novelist, writing from different points of view and darting back and forth in time and into Cyrus’ satirical dreams and the lives of Iranian poets from Rumi to Farrokhzad. Akbar creates scenes of psychedelic opulence and mystery, emotional precision, edgy hilarity, and heart-ringing poignancy as his characters endure war, grief, addiction, and sacrifice, and find refuge in art and love. Bedazzling and profound.
Survey #3
Alharthi, Jokha, and Marilyn Booth: Bitter Orange Tree (2022)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) returns with a gorgeous and insightful story of longing. Zuhour, now at university in the U.K., spent her girlhood in a small Omani village, brought up mainly by a grandmotherly woman named Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour’s grandfather Salman had charitably taken in years earlier. Bint Aamir raised Salman’s son and, eventually, Zuhour, as Salman’s wife was too mired in depression and obsessed with piety to take responsibility. Bint Aamir gradually lets go of her dreams for a plot of land to tend and a husband and children of her own, takes comfort drinking coffee in the shade of her beloved bitter orange tree, and dies just before Zuhour leaves for college. Away, Zuhour is troubled by unsettling dreams of Bint Aamir and tries to cope through therapy and friends such as the wealthy, sophisticated Pakistani sisters Suroor and Kuhl. The latter is married without the knowledge of her parents to Imran, a handsome fellow medical student of lowly, rural origins, and Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran form an exclusive triangle. Zuhour loves both, mainly the charming, taciturn Imran, whose humility, self-sacrifice, and agricultural roots inevitably remind her of Bint Aamir and the sense of belonging she misses so much. The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images symbolizing freedom struck down, such as a battered kite and a bird ripped to shreds. This solidifies Alharthi’s well-earned literary reputation.
Survey #4
Barragán, Carlos: The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers (2026)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: This outstanding debut from New York Times reporter Barragán explores the lives of Nigerian scammers who use seduction as part of their grift. Having initially traveled to Lagos to find a Nigerian man who romanced and scammed his mother, Barragán ends up closely following four such “Yahoo Boys” (so named after the email service). They include Chibuike, who strings along an Irish mother for years by posing as professional wrestler Cody Rhodes, and Richie, who fears that a woman in Kentucky may have died because of his scam. Along the way Barragán delves into how romance scams work–using fake social media accounts, the scammers seduce Western men and women into buying them gift cards–as well as the Yahoo Boys’ lavish lifestyles and the lengthy pre-internet history of “impersonation scams” in Nigeria. There are plenty of eye-popping details, including alarmingly manipulative chats between the scammers and their victims, and even more nefarious alleged strains of Yahoo, including Yahoo Plus, in which scammers use “supernatural forces” to attract victims, and Yahoo Plus Plus, which “was rumored to entail ritual killings.” Yet the book is most noteworthy for its affecting humanization of both the Yahoo Boys–Barragán shatters the image of romance scammers as part of “well-organized Mafia-like syndicates,” instead revealing them as impoverished young men scrambling to survive–and of their victims, made vulnerable by the West’s loneliness epidemic. It’s a remarkably empathetic view of both sides of the con.
Survey #5
Gopal, Anand: Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution (2026)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: Fighting dictatorship and terrorism. This authoritative work of journalism focuses on working- and middle-class people who helped rewrite their nation’s history. Not unlike No Good Men Among the Living (2014), his look at the human toll of America’s war in Afghanistan, Gopal’s latest foregrounds the ideas, threats, and challenges driving Syrians caught up in a civil war that killed more 600,000. The backdrop is Manbij, a city where “bricklayers and gym teachers and electricians and doctors and neighbors and friends” defied both Bashar al-Assad’s despotic government and Islamic State fanatics. Gopal’s street-level reporting takes us into homes, businesses, and boltholes, where freedom-seeking Syrians debate protest tactics, form what amount to “mini-parliaments of the people,” edit independent newspapers, and hide when regime planes begin bombing the city in the early 2010s. Later, many locals continue to resist when ISIS fighters arrive from abroad and establish a Repentance Office, organize lectures and a “religious trivia” contest, and execute the allegedly impious, throwing their bodies into a well. Gopal crafts indelible portraits of Manbij’s citizens, among them an erstwhile political prisoner who thinks “like a military general,” friends pulled apart by one’s embrace of ISIS, and a couple whose bond is endangered by differing views of the revolution. This is the product of a remarkable 2,000 interviews, some conducted by local researchers Gopal employed: “People did not always trust me, but they trusted their fellow Syrians.” This approach, which Gopal calls “collective journalism,” grants us access to memorable moments, as when Syrians living under tyranny elect a committee to organize anti-Assad protests. “It was the first vote of their lives,” Gopal writes. The above seamlessly meshes with enlightening passages on Syria’s history, politics, and economy, giving this powerful book a firm foundation. Brave, inventive reporting yields an important account of an uprising that shook the Middle East.
Survey #6
Han, Kang*: Human Acts (2014/2016)
* 2024 Nobel Literature Prize
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: After winning the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, Han has written a harrowing second novel that traces the long-term reverberations from South Korea’s 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which government troops killed anywhere between 200 and 2,000 civilians in the chaos following the assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979. The story opens in that fateful year with Dong-ho, a 15-year-old boy searching for his friend Jeong-Dae while tending to the bodies of protestors in the municipal gymnasium, helping family members identify and claim them. But Dong-ho is soon another casualty in the violence, and the novel, structured in linked stories, traverses the subsequent years to document the aftermath of Dong-ho’s death. The story is told in a combination of first-, second-, and third-person narration by those who knew Dong-ho, and it includes Jeong-Dae’s life after death, a book editor’s fight against censorship, a prisoner’s recollection of his captivity and torture, a former factory worker whose memories of the violence are brought up when an author needs her as a “witness,” and Dong-ho’s mother, remembering her son 30 years after his death. In the final chapter, Han herself reveals her connection to Dong-ho. Han’s novel is an attempt to verbalize something unspeakable, and her characters often find themselves adrift decades after the event. But she humanizes the terrible violence by focusing on the more mundane aspects: tending and transporting bodies, or attempting to work an ordinary job years later. And by placing the reader in the wake of Dong-ho’s memory, preserved by his family and friends, Han has given a voice to those who were lost in the Gwangju Uprising.
Survey #7
Harris, Jessica B: High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2012)
Review: ©Booklist: Acclaimed cookbook author Harris (The Africa Cookbook, 1998) tells the story of the African diaspora through food, from the foodstuff brought along with African slaves to barely maintain them on the Middle Passage to the undeniable imprint of African American cuisine on southern American and Caribbean food. She traces African foods (yams, okra, black-eyed peas, corn), flavoring, cooking methods, and food rituals from the abduction of Africans and enslavement in the Americas to travel throughout the American and European continents, recounting tribulations and joy. Along the way, she profiles famous and obscure but gifted cooks; cooks in the big houses of slave plantations; Pig Foot Mary, who grew wealthy from sales of food she cooked on a stove mounted on a baby carriage; chefs who served meals to presidents; and members of a cooperative of black hoteliers in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. Along with historical context, Harris offers recollections from her own travels and ends with selected recipes. Photographs enhance this passionate perspective on the culinary history of the African diaspora.
Survey #8
Hassan, Aisha: When the Fireflies Dance (2025)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A young man plots his family’s escape from slavery in modern Pakistan. Hassan’s debut novel centers on Lalloo, a young man living in the outskirts of Lahore. When he was 7, his older brother, Jugnu, was killed under mysterious circumstances on the grounds of the bhatti, or labor camp, where his family made bricks to work off an insurmountable debt. To earn money for the family and escape the bhatti’s degradations, he was soon sent to work at a garage; now in his 20s, he works as a driver for a wealthy family. Lalloo’s lifelong determination to get his family out of the bhatti accelerates when his father falls ill and his sister is engaged, prompting a need for more money. The plot of the novel turns on Lalloo’s ill-fated attempts to secure funds, ranging from begging to blackmail to outright theft. In the process, he exposes the corruption of the system he’s been trapped into. Hassan, a playwright, poet, and Lahore native, has a gift for lyricism and metaphor, particularly around the fireflies of the title, symbols of a freedom that seems remote to the point of otherworldliness. But she’s also careful not to sugarcoat a narrative that uses various euphemisms–“peshgi,” “indenture”–to rationalize slavery. (One early scene has Lalloo literally mired in muck and sewage.) This is all embedded in a dense but speedy plot as Lalloo schemes for cash, explores the circumstances of Jugnu’s murder, and negotiates a budding romance with a childhood friend. Some plot twists defy believability, and some characters deliver cardboard dialogue, but throughout, Hassan cannily reveals the ways that a broken financial and caste system in “an upside-down world” thrusts its poorest people into making rash decisions. A socially savvy study of caste and its abuses.
Survey #9
Johnson, Adam: The Wayfinder (2025)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: The Polynesian islands in the South Pacific are transformed by this historical epic into a region at once otherworldly and recognizable. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son, 2012) has established a reputation for spinning complex, colorful, and plausibly rococo yarns from civilizations remote from and mysterious to outsiders. Here, his audacious, unruly imagination roams with confidence through the island kingdom of Tonga as it undergoes societal uncertainty and the potential of war with other islands. At or near the center of this whirlwind is Kōrero, bold and insatiably curious daughter of a fisherman and a tattoo artist, whose discovery of a fishhook-shaped pendant in an ancestral graveyard signals the beginning of a grand, perilous, and transfiguring adventure that puts her, her family, and her friends on a sea voyage whose outcome could mean either salvation or oblivion for their people. The perilous odyssey is led by a figure known only as the Wayfinder, whose near-intuitive grasp of navigation by both the shifting waters and the celestial patterns of the night sky arouses in Kōrero her own aspirations of being a “way finder.” Telling stories, however, is her own means of navigating through the twists and turns of her life’s journey, and Johnson’s multilayered narrative has the baggy, wildly divergent feel of oral storytelling, in which the intrigues of royal power politics, often facilitated through violence, are woven with tales of familial conflict, verse by royal poets, and even the occasional monologue from Kōkī, the most articulate and, it seems, resilient of the islands’ many parrots. Such enchanted touches are deftly threaded into the rangy storyline by Johnson’s richly lyrical prose, which is also capable of handling the social dynamics of the Tongans along with the background stories of royalty and their rivals. At times, the saga can get so discursive that it risks leaving the reader on some reef or capsized by an unexpected surge from another time. Yet somehow, you yield to the novelist’s evocation of a world that, like the pendant recovered at the novel’s start, feels “both ancient and startlingly new.” A book stuffed with revelations while keeping many secrets.
Survey #10
Krasznahorkai, László*, and George Szirtes: Satantango (2012)
* 2025 Nobel Literature Prize
Review: ©Booklist: In his third novel to appear in English (after The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War), Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai introduces us to a dismal mud puddle of a village and its denizens, desperate folk who connive, cheat, and betray each other as they struggle to escape their wretched, rain-soaked circumstances. Readers, too, must struggle. Krasznahorkai’s prose is murky and confounding, with shifting points of view, opaque bits of dialogue, and long paragraphs that refuse to let you up for air. Those who put in the effort to trudge through all this and who can also stomach a handful of particularly disturbing depictions of violence may come to appreciate the compelling voice that emerges from the muck, and the careful artistry that undergirds this novel’s existential bleakness. This novel may also be of particular interest to cinéasts who enjoyed the lauded (and similarly challenging) 1994 film version directed by Bela Tarr.
Survey #11
Lemus, Jared: Guatemalan Rhapsody: Stories (2025)
Review: ©Booklist: The men in Lemus’ debut mélange of short stories exist in desperate circumstances. Some are in rural Guatemala: a monkish member of a cultlike group and a niño have a mystical encounter in a remote jungle village; at a hotel in the jungle, the different management strategies of two brothers have dire consequences. Other characters are in American cities: a dishwasher who hopes to win a tattoo contest, a janitor at an elite college befriended by the new security guard whose hiring has put his job in jeopardy. Lemus’ characters have been negatively impacted by contact with the U.S. through immigration and deportation (themselves or family members) and even by entitled American tourists. The narrative voice dances between third and first person from story to story and pirouettes through the first-person plural in a tale about a soccer team of privileged youths being coached by a washed-up former star hired by their parents. Each story is beautifully bleak as it depicts unique situations; a few, like the inventive story in which the protagonist ponders two potential endings for himself—he takes the path of a sad-sack junkie or he cleans up and becomes a bus driver to help others like the bus driver who helped him—offer welcome glimmers of hope.
Survey #12
Mahajan, Karan: The Complex (2026)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: In Mahajan’s immersive third novel (after The Association of Small Bombs), a family tragedy unfolds against the backdrop of political upheaval in India. As the story opens in 1980, Sachin Chopra, grandson of a late revered Indian politician, is trying to forge a new life in Michigan with his wife, Gita, even as she longs to return to Delhi. During a visit there, Sachin’s lecherous uncle, Laxman, sexually assaults Gita, and the other family members, including Sachin, brush her off when she tries to tell them about it. Meanwhile, Laxman, a failed businessman, attempts to launch a new company with Karishma, the wife of Sachin’s brother Brij, and embarks on an affair with her. Brij, a broken man following his service in the Indian Air Force, physically abuses Karishma and their two sons. After Sachin and Gita move back to Delhi, Brij comes to deeply resent his brother’s presence, and eventually, Gita pushes Sachin to grasp the depth of Laxman’s depravity. In the mid-1980s, members of the far-right Bhartiya Janata Party court Laxman, hoping to win over establishment voters by exploiting his family name, and the family tensions build to a tragic denouement. Even those unfamiliar with Indian political history will be swept up by the well-drawn characters and gripping drama. The author proves himself a consummate storyteller.
Survey #13
Mueenuddin, Daniyal: This is Where the Serpent Lives (2026)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A multigenerational saga of high and low classes in Pakistan. In his debut, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–finalist story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Mueenuddin deployed elegant prose to harshly critique a callow and often corrupt Pakistani aristocracy. In this book, his passion for the theme has only deepened. The constant thread and symbolic figure in this story is Bayazid (aka Yazid), who’s discovered on the streets of Rawalpindi as a child in the mid-1950s and put to work at a tea stall, eventually serving as a driver for a wealthy landowning family, the Atars. As a child, he demonstrates the skills necessary to serve the aristocracy: unquestioning loyalty, personability, and a capacity to deliver violence when necessary. As the story moves into the late 20th and early 21st century, Mueenuddin explores how the wealthy classes, gangsters, and corrupt police intertwine, and how a sense of entitlement powers all of them. That’s most visible in the relationship between Hisham, a scion of the Atar family, and his wife, Shahnaz; though a well-educated member of an elite family (one observer notes that she’s “the real brains of that operation”), she’s relegated to managing servants and abiding Hisham’s infidelities. In the book’s closing acts, Mueenuddin reveals the consequences of defying this broken but intractable caste system, largely through Chaudrey Mohammad Saqib, a manager of the Atars’ nearby farm, whose missteps expose his bosses’ cruelty. Mueenuddin delivers all this in a graceful style that dignifies the lower-caste characters and intensifies the unjustness of their treatment. In his old age, Yazid has bulked up with the years, well-fed but unwell–another symbol for a class system that rewards loyalty with oppression and disloyalty with worse. A potent and nuanced tale about the abuse of an underclass in ways both subtle and overt.
Survey #14
Reid, Stuart A: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (2023)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A powerful account of “extensive U.S. meddling” in a foreign government, “a habit it perfected in the Congo.” The plot hatched by the CIA under the Eisenhower administration to rid the newly independent Congo of its elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was considered a “model” intervention at the time. As Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, shows, the Congo proved to be the first “theater” in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union transformed the Cold War “into a truly global struggle.” In this carefully nuanced study, the author underscores how ill-advised American officials were at the time about Lumumba and his supposed communist intentions. Fears of a communist takeover were perpetuated by the CIA’s station chief in the Congo at the time, Larry Devlin, and others who failed to fully grasp the significance of many African nations’ long struggles to decolonize. On June 30, 1960, the Congo tentatively declared itself free from Belgian rule, and UN peacekeeping forces were stationed there to aid the transition. However, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, wary of the newly elected Lumumba, who he thought “was being used by leftist Africans and the Soviet Union,” refused his plea for more aid to help quell a military mutiny and secessionist worries. When Lumumba turned to the Soviets for help (Nikita Khrushchev was largely noncommittal), the Americans sprang into action. Reid grippingly narrates the horrific tale of Lumumba’s imprisonment, torture, and execution by the henchmen of then-army chief Joseph Mobutu, a former Lumumba protégé and eager recipient of American cash. Sifting through significant new documentation, the author casts tremendous clarity on this important period and how essentially the world looked away. “The rest of the world seemed to decide [that] in the Congo, occasional barbarity was the price of stability.” An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.
Survey #15
Slimani, Leila, and Sam Taylor: I’ll Take the Fire* (2026)
*Third book in “Pays des autres” series
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A decades-spanning family saga comes full circle in the final book of a trilogy that began with In the Country of Others (2021) and Watch Us Dance (2023). Slimani picks up the saga, inspired by her Franco-Moroccan family, in 1980s Casablanca. Mehdi Daoud, the former Marxist activist who’s the new president of the Crédit Commercial du Maroc, aims to foster the emergence of a Moroccan middle class by financing social housing programs and tourism-boosting resorts. However, the more hours Mehdi puts in at the office, the less time he has for daughters Mia and Inès–a source of contention between him and his selfless wife, gynecologist Aïcha. Aïcha believes that her eldest child, Mia, wears her hair short and dresses like a boy so she can “escape the curse of girls and mothers, who always end up acting like martyrs.” In truth, Mia is secretly queer, disdains stereotypically female preoccupations, and nurtures the “unspeakable hope that she might eventually become her father’s son.” Inès, for her part, desperately wants to be like her mother–or better yet, her sensual, independent great-aunt Selma, who calls to mind “Lauren Bacall, with a cane and a cigarette holder.” Both sisters would be imprisoned for “loose morals” by their homeland’s government, so each begins plotting her personal exodus. Advance to 2021 Paris, where the tale’s modern-day frame finds novelist Mia suffering from post-Covid writer’s block. After consulting with a neurologist, Mia hops a plane to her grandparents’ farm in Fes, determined to find a way forward by reconnecting with her past. Moving back and forth in time while employing myriad narrative styles and points of view, Slimani explores issues of identity, alienation, disillusionment, and generational trauma. All Slimani’s characters shine, but her women are especially radiant, evincing a complexity and depth that elevate both this book and the series as a whole. At once an elegy and a joyful celebration of family and home.
Survey #16
Szpila, Agnieszka, and Scotia Gilroy: Hexes of the Deadwood Forest (2026)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: An ecofeminist saga. Anna Frenza is the unhappily married chief executive of a Polish oil company. The problem: Her husband has a secret porn addiction that keeps him too distracted to have sex with her. Medicated to deal with her malaise, she sleepwalks. Her destination is usually a gas station where she steals sweets, until one fateful night when she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a felled tree, which she straddles and makes love to. Caught in the act by a journalist who was tipped off by her neighbor, she’s swiftly abandoned by the government establishment that liked her when she was making money for Poland but embraced by the EcoDivas who applaud her for “the best environmental protest-performance” they’ve ever seen. That’s just the beginning of this sprawling, bawdy comic novel that goes all the way back to 1569 to create a genealogy of women trying to escape the tyranny of men’s rodkins (you can guess which anatomical part this refers to) and discover gentler ways to pleasure themselves and live in harmony with the earth. Over successive centuries, the narrative features lascivious men of the cloth, the discovery of elixirs to make a man’s rodkin wither, witch hunts sponsored by the Catholic church, ointments to protect women from penetration and rape, scenes of intense violence against women, and moments in which women come together to “cleft-spark,” fulfilling themselves and replenishing the earth. Though there’s never a dull moment, the novel does become a bit repetitive in the middle–perhaps for good reason, since the domination of rebellious women has been a constant across centuries. Still, Szpila spins a rich, imaginative alternative to the usual phallocentric history, urging women in the final chapter, a manifesto, to “suspend [their] powers of reason,” trust their “wild, atavistic Cleft,” and celebrate their connection to the natural world. In this feisty novel, women’s strength comes from reasserting their role as earth mothers.
Survey #17
Tan, Twan Eng: The House of Doors (2023)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Tan (The Garden of Evening Mists) explores the power of storytelling in this intoxicating outing. At Cassowary House in Penang, Malaya, in 1921, Lesley Hamlyn prepares to receive “Willie” Somerset Maugham, the famed English writer and friend of her husband, Robert. Increasingly drawn to Willie–who is desperate for new material for a novel to stave off bankruptcy–Lesley gradually unburdens herself to the author, unearthing a trove of long-buried secrets ranging from the personal to the political. Tan seamlessly merges fact and fiction as he explores the underlying tensions in both Lesley and Willie’s marriages, as well as Lesley’s intriguing involvement with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen during his 1910 sojourn in Penang. A side plot involves Lesley’s friend Ethel Proudlock, another real-life figure, who stood trial for the murder of her fellow Englishman in Kuala Lumpur. As in Tan’s other works, the narrative dwells on memory and loss, its lush, dreamy prose evoking the bygone days of colonial pre-WWII British Malaya amid musings on life’s ephemeral nature, while never losing its eye for injustice: “For a woman to be remembered,” Lesley laments, “she has to either be a queen or a whore. But for those of us who lead normal, mundane lives, who will remember us?” This is a stunner.
Survey #18
Tokarczuk, Olga*, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones: House of Day, House of Night (1998/2025)
* 2018 Nobel Literature Prize
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. There, the unnamed narrator posts an ad in the local paper about her interest in collecting people’s dreams. Krysia, a senior employee at a nearby bank, dreams of hearing a voice in one ear, which feels like it’s “making the whole world vibrate.” Aging wigmaker Marta is mum about her own dreams but claims she can know other people’s dreams just by looking at them. The narrator also takes an interest in Saint Kummernis, a 14th-century folk saint who saved a group of children sickened by poisonous mushrooms. Meanwhile, the narrator is unsettled by the monstrous, undying wolves who stalk the landscape at night, while her husband begins detecting a strange smell only he can perceive following a car accident. Mushrooms figure prominently in the episodic narrative, as the narrator eats so many that she dreams of becoming one. What emerges from this cornucopia of curiosities is a rich and pulsating view into life itself, which the narrator views as “beautiful despite the terrible things other people say about it.” It’s a marvel.
Survey #19
Xhoga, Ledia: Misinterpretation (2024)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: An interpreter living in Brooklyn throws herself into the lives of acquaintances to avoid confronting her own life. The unnamed narrator, a woman from Albania, is married to Billy, an American professor of film. Billy asks his wife to focus on translation work while taking a break from interpreting, as interpreting seems to interfere with her ability to remain present. But she takes a job serving as an interpreter for Alfred, another Albanian immigrant, first for a dental visit and then for therapy to confront his demons from the war in Kosovo. The therapist fires her after the first session, for both identifying too closely with the client and getting lost in her own thoughts. From there, the narrator acts impulsively without considering the repercussions. She tries to help a struggling Kurdish woman desperate to evade a stalker and a former client who needs a new immigration attorney. All the while, she’s prone to reveries and what appear to be dissociative episodes that leave Billy stupefied. When they reach an impasse, he accepts a six-month artist’s residency in Hungary. The night before he departs, his wife follows strangers to a party where she gets high on mushrooms and falls asleep. As a wife and a protagonist, she proves wonderfully and frustratingly off-kilter. Eventually she flees New York to visit family in Albania. The novel heats up in the second half, when she returns to Brooklyn, where some of the consequences of her previous heroics materialize to thrilling effect. These suspenseful moments punctuate otherwise meandering tangents. While intriguing at times, the narration relies heavily on rhetorical questions and digressions loosely tied to the story by way of the protagonist’s saying that so and so or such and such “come to mind.” Some of the associations are more interesting than others. The author is at her best when she reveals her thematic concerns and her characters’ interiority, through their idiosyncrasies, interactions with one another, choices, gestures, and dialogue. This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.
Survey #20
Yang, Yuan: Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order (2024)
Review: ©Booklist: The nation of China has experienced unprecedented economic reform over the past five decades, offering seemingly limitless possibilities—but also unimaginable competition. Hundreds of thousands of students vie for admission into top universities each year, and there can be tens of thousands of applicants for a single professional job posting. This engaging offering follows four women from childhood to the current day as they navigate city life and establish careers, documenting their struggles with school admissions and quotas, educational scams, unsafe working conditions, forays into social activism, and family and corporate intrigues. Alternating chapters allow each subject’s story to emerge, and while personal details vary (one spent her early years in a remote village with her great-grandparents, another discovered her true vocation while teaching soldiers basic English greetings in preparation for the 2008 Olympics), similarities emerge: intense pressure exerted by the one-child policy, needed support from other women, and shared dedication to hard work (evidenced by an inability to function during time off from factory shifts). There are no happy endings; these women’s experiences continue to morph along with new, twenty-first century realities. This very readable account offers rare and unblinking insights into modern China.