INTERNATIONAL FICTION
The Water Dancer | Ta-Nehisi Coates | $32.99 | Penguin Random House Lyrical, haunting, beautiful; Ta-Nehisi Coates tackles one of America’s darkest periods with elegance and inventiveness. Coates is one of the US’s most incisive intellectual thinkers about race, and in this, his first work of fiction, he unpacks the lasting, damaging effects of slavery. Laced with elegant, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary, The Water Dancer is a powerful lament against the enduring trauma of families torn apart in the name of slavery. With this book, Coates has taken on the mantle of such writers as Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and Octavia Butler. — Sarah I have very high expectations for The Water Dancer and can’t wait to get my hands on it. One of the most exciting writers of today, Ta-Nehisi Coates combines his astute racial and social analysis with the kind of vivid storytelling and imaginative prose I have no reason to expect from him—as a debut fiction writer—but do. If the rumours are true, this is the best book of 2019! — Emma Co.
The Divers’ Game | Jesse Ball | $24.99 | Text This is a novel that increases in power and resonance like a reversed echo. It seems more fitting to call Ball’s work an assemblage rather than a novel because of the way it seems to function in my mind’s eye. The form is four separate, though connected parts written in a style that is so open, spacious and poetic, that it contrasts wholly to the vicious allegory presented. Characters are vicious, power systems are unquestioned, and morality is entirely disconnected from itself and shamelessly selfserving. This novel is tremendous, grasping towards what it is to be alive right now. — Virginia
Before the Coffee Gets Cold | Toshikazu Kawaguchi | $18.99 | Picador
The World That We Knew | Alice Hoffman | $32.99 | Simon & Schuster
Olive, Again | Elizabeth Strout | $29.99 | Penguin Random House
My absolute favourite genre to read, this serves everything that I adore about magical realism; a meditative approach to writing, a gentle slip from the very real and a detailed quirk of character that warms your heart. In the back table of a basement café sits a lady reading, she is a ghost. Once a day she rises from her seat and if you take this seat you can travel to the past but only while the coffee you are served stays warm. At first this story appears quite simple but upon later pondering the many layers reveal a much deeper spellbinding tale. — Dean
Hoffman employs her unique brand of magical realism and signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust in this moving story of love, loss and resilience in the face of immense tragedy. At the heart of the novel is Ava, a mythical golem of Jewish folklore, who has been created by a mother desperate to grant protection to her teenage daughter during the darkest days of the Nazi regime. This is a book about the power of love, and the challenges redeeming or retaining humanity under the most horrific circumstances. — Sarah
Strout’s prose is exquisite, gentle and calm, inviting us once more into the mind of Olive Kitteredge and into the lives of the people in Crosby, Maine, even as those lives are consumed with grief and loneliness and dread and guilt. Her composure makes the occasional emotional gut punch all the more impactful. Here Olive is in her 70s and 80s, and as she grows older she is relentlessly confronted with her own mortality. Strout’s observations are sharp and refreshingly brazen. I am thrilled that I was able to spend more time in Olive’s company. — Kate
The Topeka School | Ben Lerner | $29.99 | Granta Shifting perspectives, fragmented time periods The Topeka School offers a fresh take on the family saga. Adam’s parents Jonathan and Jane are psychiatrists each with their own hidden secret. This gives the reader additional knowledge about their social responses surrounding a devastating situation that arises at a seniors party. Adam is popular, one of the cool kids (who also suffers from anxiety). When loner Darren Eberheart (one of his father’s patient’s) is brought into the cool gang it has disastrous effects. Riveting, intelligent, and compelling commentary on toxic masculinity, this is a must-read for the summer. — Dean
“RIVETING, INTELLIGENT...COMPELLING COMMENTARY ON TOXIC MASCULINITY.”
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