HOW TO BE EATEN by Maria Adelmann

fiction

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

HOW TO BE EATEN by Maria Adelmann........................................... 4 BROWN GIRLS by Daphne Palasi Andreades......................................7 HORSE by Geraldine Brooks................................................................ 9 CULT CLASSIC by Sloane Crosley.......................................................11 HURRICANE GIRL by Marcy Dermansky .........................................12 MORE THAN YOU’LL EVER KNOW by Katie Gutierrez................. 20 A DOWN HOME MEAL FOR THESE DIFFICULT TIMES by Meron Hadero.................................................................................22 OBLIVION by Robin Hemley...............................................................23 THE KINGDOM OF SAND by Andrew Holleran ..............................24 CAN’T LOOK AWAY by Carola Lovering..........................................30 THINGS THEY LOST by Okwiri Oduor .............................................33 LIONESS by Mark Powell...................................................................35 COMPANION PIECE by Ali Smith.....................................................38 GUILTY CREATURES ed. by Martin Edwards..................................42 THE STARDUST THIEF by Chelsea Abdullah.....................................47 A PROPOSAL THEY CAN’T REFUSE by Natalie Caña ...................48 A CARIBBEAN HEIRESS IN PARIS by Adriana Herrera................48

COMPANION PIECE Smith, Ali Pantheon (240 pp.) $26.95 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-31637-5

HOW TO BE EATEN

Adelmann, Maria Little, Brown (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 31, 2022 978-0-316-45084-3

Familiar fairy tales retold through the modern lenses of group-therapy sessions and reality TV. Bernice has just entered the news cycle, the only survivor of a flamboyant tech billionaire/serial murderer who was known for his eccentric obsession with the color blue, which included dyeing his goatee a signature shade of cyan. Gretel’s iconic photo spread—an image of her and her brother, Hans, reunited with their father in the hospital after having been held captive in a house made of candy—is a part of American truecrime legend; as is the hard-to-fathom assault on Ruby and the shabby wolf-skin coat she’s made out of its perpetrator. Raina, the oldest of the group at almost 40, is familiar mostly for her famous husband, though her face is vaguely reminiscent of some decades-old scandal surrounding their romance, while Ashlee, the most recent winner of the reality dating show The One, seems to be living out her happy ending in real time. All five women have received the same spamlike email inviting them to work through the lingering trauma of their “unusual stor[ies]” in group therapy led by the genially handsome Will, who exhorts them to Absolute Honesty, ostensibly in order to heal. As the summer passes, the women transcend their initial rivalries and suspicions and become bonded by their unique suffering. It seems Will’s therapeutic dictates are beginning to work, but as the women move past their public victimization and into the identities they would like to build in the aftermath, it becomes clear that Will has one more surprise up his impeccable sleeve. Adelmann travels the well-worn paths of some of the most famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm with stylistic panache and 21st-century verve. However, it’s her nuanced consideration of our own culpability that makes this book unique. In the end, Adelmann’s true subject is actually her audience, the great anonymous we who consumes the horrors of violent husbands, ravaging wolves, hungry witches, and made-for-TV love stories with such compulsive demand we never pause to think what might come after the happy ending.

Both a meditation on trauma and a sendup of our society’s obsession with scripted reality, this book sings.

BITTER ORANGE TREE

Alharthi, Jokha Trans. by Marilyn Booth Catapult (224 pp.) $26.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64622-003-8

Alharthi, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019), uses a dreamlike, nonlinear structure to show how the complications faced by a young Omani woman studying abroad merge with her remorse-filled memories of her very traditional surrogate grandmother.

While Zuhour spends her days interacting with a coterie of international students at a university in a cold, unnamed English city, her nights are full of dreams concerning Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour calls grandmother although she was actually a distant relation. Brought into the family home by Zuhour’s real grandparents, Bint Aamir helped raise Zuhour’s father, Mansour, who was her great love, and then Zuhour and her siblings. Zuhour is haunted by regret that she never said a formal goodbye before she left Oman; Bint Aamir died soon after. Zuhour remembers Bint Aamir’s hard, lonely life—she was abandoned in childhood, permanently blinded in one eye, her one possibility of marriage thwarted, living in constant service to others without family, land, or possessions of her own—in bits of memory that merge with Zuhour’s own present life. So Zuhour’s description of Bint Aamir’s ruined eyesight slides into Zuhour’s own “still misty and blurred” sight. In talking about her own life, Zuhour is not a fully trustworthy narrator; her feelings toward Bint Aamir and the past she envisions for the dead woman reflect her own confused emotions surrounding her Pakistani friend Kuhl. Kuhl is passionately involved with fellow medical student Imran, although her wealthy, cosmopolitan parents would never approve of the match because Imran comes from a family of peasant farmers. Zuhour likes to think of herself bonded with Kuhl and Imran, but it is not a neat triangle. Attracted to Imran and perhaps to Kuhl as well, Zuhour remains shut outside their love for each other. The parallel of Zuhour’s and Bint Aamir’s

ISBN: 979-8985122404

WHAT DOES A ROMANCE-THRILLER LOOK LIKE IN THE PANDEMIC ERA?

Can a Pandemic-era romance thriller be about redemption? Welcome to a tale of murder and resilience in a possible near-future.

“…Alby and Ginger are the novel’s driving force, and thankfully for thriller fans, they are well worth spending time with.” —BlueInk Review

“A rousing crime tale with an indelible cast and a sharp, edgy environment.” —Kirkus Reviews

FOR ALL INQUIRIES, PLEASE EMAIL AESONEILL@YAHOO.COM

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

fiction that goes beyond the headlines

As much time as I spend reading newspaper and magazine stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention Instagram posts and Twitter threads, I still find myself wanting to read Ukrainian fiction, to learn more about the country on its own terms. There isn’t a huge amount available in English, but if you can wait until April 19, Deep Vellum will be publishing Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees, written in 2018, in a new translation by Boris Dralyuk. Set in the “Grey Zone,” the no-man’s-land between Ukrainian soldiers and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region, it tells the story of beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich, who finds himself one of the last two inhabitants of his forsaken village. Our review says, “Kurkov transforms the abstractions of geopolitics into an intensely human account of compassion and persistence.” Kurkov is one of Ukraine’s most eminent writers, and some of his earlier books are available in English, too. Death and the Penguin, his best-known novel, was originally translated by George Bird in 2001 and reissued by Melville House in 2011. Like the protagonist of Grey Bees, Viktor Alekseyevich is single and a bit of a sad sack, so when he hears that the Kyiv zoo is having budget problems, he volunteers to take home one of the penguins, who becomes his roommate. To make money, he takes on a job writing advance obituaries for the Capital News—but then his subjects start dying at a surprising rate. “Wistful but (thankfully) not whimsical. Funny, alarming, and, in a Slavic way, not unlike early Pinter,” according to our review.

When Oleg Sentsov’s Life Went on Anyway was published by Deep Vellum in July 2019, its author was in a Russian prison on terrorism charges that were denounced as fabricated by PEN International and other organizations. He was freed in a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine two months later. The book, translated by Uilleam Blacker, consists of eight short stories that “read like slices of a memoir in progress,” according to our review, recalling the author’s childhood in a Crimean village. “Though his ostensible subjects don’t rise above the mundane—his dog, his childhood illnesses, and his years as a victim of school bullies— Sentsov consistently manages to see the world through the eyes of a child while writing, in a disarmingly unaffected style, with the wisdom and sardonic wit of a sometimes-disillusioned adult.” Oksana Zabuzhko’s Your Ad Could Go Here (Amazon Crossing, 2020) is a book of short stories with five translators: Halyna Hryn, Askold Melnyczuk, Nina Murray, Marco Carynnyk, and Marta Horban. It came out in April 2020, when most people were not thinking about fiction, so now would be a good time to check out these irreverent tales. “Themes of fear, desire, and national camaraderie flow through” them, according to our review. Zabuzhko focuses mainly on girls and women, “female characters with fascinating internal lives and emotional crescendos that land.…Evocative stories about the way national issues impact even the most personal aspects of life.”

Finally, while Mohsin Hamid isn’t Ukrainian, his brilliant Exit West is one of the best novels ever written about the experience of being a refugee. Nadia and Saeed find a fantastical portal that leads them out of their violence-ridden city into first London and then San Francisco, where they try to make a home for themselves in a place that’s completely foreign. It’s “one of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory,” according to our review, “and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.