RAMADAN RAMSEY by Louis Edwards

“A young Southern boy travels to the Middle East to find his father in this delightful and intimate modern epic.”

ramadan ramsey

a coastal Bulgarian city trafficked into sex work in Amsterdam; Aksinia Levina, a former ballerina aging alone as the neighborhood cat lady, and more. While these interspersed narratives sometimes veer into the territory of trope, the novel as a whole succeeds in making visible both the dignity and the intimate familiarity of lives lived on the fringes of a society that would much rather pretend they do not exist.

A strong debut that uses gauzy impression to explore the harsh realities of post-communist Eastern Europe.

RAMADAN RAMSEY

Edwards, Louis Amistad/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 10, 2021 978-0-06-301203-5

A young Southern boy travels to the Middle East to find his father in this delightful and intimate modern epic. Guggenheim fellow and Whiting Award winner Edwards harnesses the best of his storytelling powers to tell the tale of Ramadan Ramsey, a young boy who is at once blessed with the fierce love and protection of his maternal grandmother, Mama Joon, and whose privileged place in her heart sparks the enmity of the rest of his family. The novel begins in 1999, when Mustafa Totah, a Syrian immigrant in New Orleans, takes a job at his uncle Adad’s convenience store. There, he meets Alicia Ramsey, a Black native of the city who beguiles him into breaking his Ramadan fast before sunset one day. Their love affair provokes the ire of uncle Adad, who informs Mustafa’s family in Syria and sends him back. Unbeknownst to Mustafa, however, Alicia is pregnant with his child, whom she names Ramadan in an attempt to atone for having coaxed his father into breaking religious laws. Tragedy strikes again when Alicia dies of meningitis, leaving Ramadan under the guardianship of her mother, Mama Joon, who lavishes him with affection and, much to the chagrin of her eldest daughter, Clarissa, plans to bequeath him everything she owns, including her house. When Mama Joon dies, 12-year-old Ramadan decides to flee the wrath of the envious Clarissa and her vicious sons, traveling to the Middle East to find his father. Borrowing from the episodic structure of epic tales, the novel sustains a swift pace that only picks up momentum as it advances. The narrative voice is highly engaging, often combining humor and pathos in a single sentence so that even tragic events are imbued with lightness.

A novel that is as exhilarating as it is moving; a fine achievement.

AFTER THE SUN

Eika, Jonas Trans. by Hellberg, Sherilyn Nicolette Riverhead (208 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 24, 2021 978-0-593-32910-8

A collection of surreal stories from a Danish wunderkind. This debut book brings together five strange, challenging works of fiction and has already won its 30-year-old author several Nordic literary awards. Difficult and mesmerizing, the stories range from formally formidable to downright mind-melting in their creative disregard for convention. “Alvin,” relayed in one paragraph that spans 32 pages, follows a narrator

who lands in Copenhagen for business only to learn that the building where he was heading has collapsed into rubble. Without a place to stay, the narrator crashes with the titular character, a wildly successful derivatives trader whose friendly economic advice quickly escalates into the two acquaintances absconding to Bucharest to make money and, maybe, love. The equally inventive “Bad Mexican Dog” centers around beach boys who wait hand and foot on guests at a resort in Cancún. The story is broken into two parts: Its first half features the unsettling death and resurrection of one of the beach hands, and it’s an understatement to say that the second half then gets weird. Likewise, “Rachel, Nevada” follows a man’s visceral, violent encounter with an extraterrestrial device known only as “The Sender”; beneath the shock value of the man’s self-inflicted tracheotomy, sincere questions about reality and authenticity bubble. It’s Eika’s ability to plunge readers headfirst into discomfort or even disgust and then prod for uncomfortable truths that elevates his brazenly weird fiction from crass pyrotechnics to legitimately rewarding puzzles.

Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader’s nervous system.

ROCK PAPER SCISSORS

Feeney, Alice Flatiron Books (304 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-250-26610-1

An unhappy British couple attempt to rekindle the magic with a weekend trip to a remote spot in Scotland. How is she tricking me? Feeney, the author of Sometimes I Lie (2017) and His and Hers (2020), has trained her readers to start asking this question immediately with her puzzlebox narratives. Well, you won’t find out here. Only the basics: Amelia’s won a weekend getaway in an office raffle, and as the novel opens, she and her screenwriter husband, Adam, who suffers from face blindness, along with their dog, Bob, are miserably making their way through a snowstorm to a destination in the Scottish Highlands which is no Airbnb Superhost, that’s for sure. A freezing cold, barely converted church with many locked rooms and malfunctioning electricity, the property also features a mysterious caretaker who has left firewood and a nice note but seems to be spying through the window. Both Adam and Amelia seem to be considering this weekend the occasion for ending the marriage by any means necessary—then Bob disappears. The narrative goes back and forth with first-person chapters by Amelia and Adam interleaved with a series of letters written to Adam on their anniversary through the years and keyed to the traditional gifts: paper, cotton, wood, leather, etc. There’s also a rock and a scissors, referring to the children’s game of the book title, which the couple use to make everyday decisions like “Should we stay together?” Offstage is the famous writer Henry Winter, whose novels Adam has made his fortune adapting; through several author-characters, Feeney weaves in sometimes-grim observations about the literary life. On meeting a sourpuss cashier at the rural grocery store: “The woman wore her bitterness like a badge; the kind of person who writes one-star book reviews.”

This complicated gothic thriller of dueling spouses and homicidal writers is cleverly plotted and neatly tied up.

CONSTANCE

FitzSimmons, Matthew Thomas & Mercer (352 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 1, 2021 978-1-5420-1426-7

A human clone’s struggle to solve the mystery of her own existence brings her up against a brace of ruthless adversaries. When she died in 2040, Constance D’Arcy was your typical mixed-race