by Jamil Jan Kochai

needs. If the novel feels like it could have been shorter, with multiple moments that could have been stopping points, the payoff is the steamy sex, saved for the end.

This fast-moving novel spotlights a smart woman’s journey to find what she wants.

THE HAUNTING OF HAJJI HOTAK And Other Stories

Kochai, Jamil Jan Viking (288 pp.) $25.99 | July 19, 2022 978-0-59-329719-3

A short story collection full of tragedy, humor, and keen insight. In his second book, following the excellent novel 99 Nights in Logar (2019), Kochai offers a dozen short stories focusing on the lives of Afghans and Afghan Americans. The collection kicks off with “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” the story of Mirwais, a young man whose video gaming session turns surreal when he realizes the nonplayer characters he encounters seem to be his father and other relatives in 1980s Afghanistan. The story is told in the second person, lending an urgency to the narrative: “You’ve been shooting at Afghans in Call of Duty for so long that you’ve become oddly immune to the self-loathing you felt when you were first massacring wave after wave of militant fighters who looked just like your father.” In “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” the title character, a California student teacher who has lost his religion, finds himself transformed into a monkey when he steps in front of his devout mother’s prayer mat. Following an imam’s advice, his mother takes him to Afghanistan to fast at a martyr’s shrine in the hopes that it will make him human again. Things don’t work out that way, and the story ends in tragedy, though Kochai uses humor throughout, which somehow both leavens and amplifies the sadness. The collection ends with the stunning title story, about a West Sacramento family trying to hold itself together through financial difficulties. Like the first story, it’s told in second person, but the perspective this time is that of a shadowy figure, perhaps a government employee, spying on the family and developing an unexpected fascination with them even after determining they’re not a threat: “You should update your superiors. You should advise them to abort the operation. But you won’t.” Like every other story in this collection, it’s brilliant and written beautifully, with real precision and compassion. Kochai doesn’t make a false move in this book; like his previous one, it’s a master class in storytelling and a beautiful reflection on a people that have endured decades upon decades of tragedy.

Stunning, compassionate, flawless.

MEET US BY THE ROARING SEA

Kumarasamy, Akil Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 23, 2022 978-0-3741-7770-6

An AI programmer’s mourning process takes her into her own past and the unusual manuscript she’s translating. Kumarasamy’s slippery debut novel concerns an unnamed young woman whose mother has recently died. To stay connected with her Tamil heritage—and her interest in language and communication—she dedicates herself to translating a document written years earlier by a group of female students at a South Indian medical school. In the meantime, she’s assisting a friend with art projects and cohabitating in her family’s Queens house with cousin Rosalyn, who has opened their home to a homeless veteran who’s appeared on a popular reality show called Soldiers’ Diaries. (We’re in a near future where the military occupies “stabilization zones” in unnamed places and citizens are obligated to keep their “carbon score” low.) And at work, she’s shoveling

“A British farm volunteer in France finds herself enmeshed in a toxic relationship.”

paul

data sets into an AI model she’s nicknamed Bogey and discussing the nature of consciousness with co-workers. Where is all this going? Kumarasamy’s language can be delightfully lyrical: “All along you think you have control, moving along a straight line, from one point to another, but really you’re spinning with the earth so deep in that vortex of girlhood.” It can also be frustratingly abstract. (A line the protagonist asks of the Tamil manuscript might apply to this book: “Why is your syntax so elliptical?...Is this a testimony, a final note, written to no one, everyone?”) Kumarasamy’s core interest is with “radical compassion,” a term the medical students use often to discuss their obligation to alleviate others’ suffering. Our own struggles to articulate that compassion—symbolized here in shows like Soldiers’ Diaries or AI or other technologies—reflect either human nature or a human problem that requires solving. Difficult emotions may require difficult writing, but Kumarasamy’s demanding approach creates less a well-woven story and more a mass of interesting but unbraided tendrils.

Intensely mournful but jagged storytelling.

PAUL

Lafarge, Daisy Riverhead (304 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 16, 2022 978-0-59353-8-845

A British farm volunteer in France finds herself enmeshed in a toxic relationship. British poet Lafarge makes her fiction debut with this first-person narrative of an impressionable 21-year-old girl who falls into the clutches of a truly scuzzy man. Frances has signed up with BénéBio, an organization that sends agricultural volunteers around Europe, at the behest of A.B., originally her professor in England, then her lover in Paris, then suddenly fed up and brusquely sending her on her way. The first assignment she chooses takes her to Noa Noa, an eco-farm/ artistic commune run by a man named Paul, a retired anthropologist who loves to discuss his years in Tahiti and is clearly modeled on—indeed, has modeled himself on—that other