WOMEN OF THE WORLD

Oprah invites us to a staycation in the company of 28 spectacular writers and their enthralling new works.

We are in a moment—hunkered

down, face masks on, social distancing even from family and friends—when it’s tempting to settle into our cocoons, to get more insular.

Before the pandemic, it wasn’t unusual for me to visit two or three continents in the span of a month. Wherever I went, I’d take in the history, the culture, the people, the cuisine, opening my eyes wide to sights and customs I hadn’t experienced before, always struck by how closely connected we are. For the foreseeable future I won’t be making those trips that for decades fueled my imagination and enriched my soul. But that won’t stop me from spending this summer venturing to places I’ve never been and revisiting others I’ve yearned to see again. My plan is to embark on these journeys while curled up in my coziest chair at home, beneath my favorite tree, book in hand. My guides will be glorious women writers from around the world—the women we celebrate here.

The first time I can recall reading a book by a writer from another country was in the ninth grade, when I was given The Diary of Anne Frank by a friend’s mother. Until then, I had zero knowledge of Nazis or the Holocaust, let alone what it was like for a young Jewish Dutch girl—about the age I was at the time—to try to maintain some sense of calm and normalcy while knowing that, at any moment, she could be discovered in her hiding place and sent off to a concentration camp. As I read that remarkable work, I wasn’t a distant stranger; I was Anne—heart pounding, bursting with fear, curiosity, and courage.

Countless times over the decades since, I’ve been similarly transported, awakened to new perspectives through an author’s words.

In 1998, I read Edwidge Danticat’s searing, stirring novel of dislocation and identity, Breath, Eyes, Memory. Like her heroine, Sophie, Danticat was born in Haiti and lived there with an aunt until moving to the U.S. at age 12. While the cassava bread, ginger tea, and Caribbean setting evoked a place I’d never been,

Sophie’s complex relationship with her aunt and mother were reminiscent of my own family dynamics. Everywhere you go, there you are.

Some 30 years ago, reading a memoir by a black South African who came of age under apartheid shifted the course of my life. Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy stirred something profound in me. I obsessed over it. I felt an urgent need to do something for those suffering under apartheid’s legacy. So I began to educate myself on the subject. I visited the country many times. I met Nelson Mandela. Eventually, I decided I could have the biggest impact by opening a school for girls focusing on academics and empowerment. It was among the most important decisions I ever made—and I found my way to it through a book.

I realize now, though, that I was largely unexposed to non-Western writers. An exception was Rohinton Mistry, whose sweeping Indian epic, A Fine Balance, I chose for Oprah’s Book Club. I was enthralled by its vividness, its critique of empire and caste society, its portrait of friendship and love. Because of it, the first trip I made after ending the Oprah show was to India.

Though it sold more than half a million copies in the U.S., A Fine Balance was among the least successful of my OBC picks. I asked a publisher friend why he thought it hadn’t gained the traction I was used to seeing. He speculated that American readers are put off by authors whose names are unfamiliar sounding. Am I guilty of that, too? I wondered. Do I stick too close to home when it comes to reading?

Zadie Smith has written about the unique ability of the writer to envision someone entirely other with empathy and understanding. “I was fascinated to presume,” she wrote in an essay about creating fictional characters, “that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. That our griefs were not entirely unrelated.... Could I make the reader believe in the imaginary people I placed in these fictional situations?”

Can we, as readers, follow her lead and open to the experiences of others no matter how out of the way and unaccustomed?

While our movements these days may be restricted, that doesn’t mean we can’t explore the world, including our own country, and break out of our comfort zones. My summer intention is to join Shubhangi Swarup, Masha Gessen, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Brit Bennett, Marisel Vera, and the other extraordinary women of the world whose books—fiction and nonfiction—we feature on these pages in their excursions to Japan, Syria, India, Mexico, Italy, and more. In this international community, a sisterhood of storytelling, we find the companionship we crave, the inspiration we need, and a powerful reminder that while our circumstances and locations may vary, we’re all global citizens together.

A Burning

BY MEGHA MAJUMDAR

Born in Kolkata, India, Majumdar immigrated to the U.S. to attend Harvard and briefly worked as a book editor before writing her stunningly original first novel. The explosive literary page-turner about the allure of social mobility follows three lost souls desperate to improve their status in the wake of a devastating train bombing in Bangladesh: an English tutor from the slums wrongly accused of orchestrating the attack, an actress who aspires to Bollywood stardom, and a bumbling gym teacher caught up in the country’s right-wing politics.

In 2018, the French finedining pioneer was awarded three Michelin stars for her San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn, making her the first female chef to win the designation Stateside. In a delectable memoir marked by the same elegance that earned her international foodie renown, Crenn chronicles her journey from a childhood amid the lush farmland and wild coast of Brittany, to establishing an all-women kitchen in Indonesia, to taking the machismo out of Californian cuisine.

The British author of The Water Cure joins the burgeoning tradition of imagining a society in which women’s bodies are no longer their own property. When girls enter puberty, they’re divided into two categories: destined for married life and procreation, or prohibited from having children. But Calla, who’s in the latter group, becomes pregnant and is forced to flee, her body “a spooked horse.”

Rebel Chef

BY DOMINIQUE CRENN

Blue Ticket

BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG

In a medieval Sicilian village, a woman “semiaccidentally” assumes the identity of her sister, a quantum physicist, to sample life on a different plane. Following Brett Kavanaugh–like hearings, a man silences his politically frustrated wife by drugging her artisanal water. These disquieting, topsy-turvy tales by an ingenious author blur the borders between reality and fantasy to reveal the universal uncanniness of womanhood.

Little Eyes

BY SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

The Argentine literary sensation— whose work is weird, wondrous, and wise—leads a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon. Her Frankensteinian creation: kentukis, cuddly robots costumed like plush toys, but with cameras that peer into their owners’ lives and are operated by remote “dwellers” in countries from Peru to Antigua to Croatia. An absorbing allegory about the dangers of voyeurism and technology in our interconnected world.

My Mother ’s House

BY FRANCESCA MOMPLAISIR

This bewitching first novel begins with a house in South Ozone Park, Queens—a Haitian immigrant hot spot— setting itself on fire. After its owner, evil lothario Lucien, kidnaps multiple girls and imprisons them in a “safe room within its walls,” the residence—a living thing—is hell-bent on revenge. Everything about Haitian native Momplaisir’s vodouimbued thriller burns with righteous fury.

The Taste of Sugar

BY MARISEL VERA

This grand epic traces the lives of Vincente and Valentina, coffee farmers in the mountains of Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th century. After the U.S. invasion of their country and the great San Ciriaco hurricane, the couple, along with thousands of others, are lured to Hawaii to work the plantations there. This illuminating work of historical fiction sheds light on a forgotten chapter of the American story through characters who burrow into your bones and whisper in your ear.

Amora

BY NATALIA BORGES POLESSO (TRANSLATED BY JULIA SANCHES)

Less a collection of stories than a collage of vibrant snapshots, Polesso’s entrancing compilation— awarded Brazil’s most prestigious literary prizes—offers pithy-poetic glimpses into the lives of women of various ages who love and desire other women, seeking solace from “a sense of unbelonging, of having been torn from the world, beaten far from what we understand love to be.”

Good Citizens Need Not Fear

BY MARIA REVA

These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy. An isolated woman who makes contraband albums from X-ray film, a clever girl born with a cleft lip who was placed in an orphanage, a dissident poet: Reva’s characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess—hope.

When 28-year-old Lina returns to post–civil war Colombia, she finds her birthplace of Medellín far less dangerous than when her mother was killed there, though it’s still riddled with poverty. Lina volunteers at the Anthill, a community center for desperately poor local children. What follows is both a ghost story and an exploration of the legacy of violence, a gritty novel about memory and how trauma haunts its survivors.

The Anthill

BY JULIANNE PACHICO

Brown Album

BY POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR

The lauded novelist and author of the 2018 memoir Sick brings her singular perspective to provocative essays that map fault lines from Tehran to California to New York. From the “Ayatollah and his Evil Santa bad looks” to her mother’s first Thanksgiving turkey to the tender rituals of Nowruz (Persian New Year), Khakpour charts an immigrant’s diaspora.

Animal Spirit

BY FRANCESCA MARCIANO

With this collection of radiant short stories set mostly in Rome, Marciano claims a spot beside the best practitioners of the form. From a lawyer enmeshed in a messy affair to a grieving film director to a woman fleeing a rocky marriage, Marciano’s characters tread gingerly across emotional minefields, “kaleidoscopically vulnerable” amid the piazze and palazzi of the Eternal City. Creatures of all kinds—a beguiling stray pup, Hitchcockian seagulls—guide them toward keener understandings of their own desires.

All the Way to the Tigers

BY MARY MORRIS

The author of the classic travelogue Nothing to Declare this time ventures to Pench, India, in part to glimpse the apex predator she’s long dreamed of, in part to prove that a recent injury won’t end the habit of far-flung travel that has nourished her for six decades. The resulting memoir—wry and wistful—reveals a woman finally comfortable with her own imperfections and, when she gets the chance, unafraid to look a tiger in the eye.

Afterland

BY LAUREN BEUKES

From the South African novelist behind the inventive chiller The Shining Girls comes a postapocalyptic thrill-ride/ parable that takes place after an unstoppable virus has wiped out most of the world’s men. Our heroine is a toughas-nails mother who’d been visiting Disneyland with her family pre-pandemic and is now trying to return her son— who, as one of the last living boys, is wanted under the Male Protection Act—to the shelter city of Johannesburg.

The Golden Cage

BY CAMILLA LÄCKBERG

The doyenne of Swedish crime fiction serves up a propulsive tale of a scorned woman who seeks to crush the husband who betrayed her and gets back at him by surreptitiously stealing his multimillion-dollar company out from under him. There’s enough haute couture, Cava, and hot sex to sate a devotee of romance fiction, but the real satisfaction comes in watching our heroine reclaim her fierceness.

Must I Go

BY YIYUN LI

In 1996, Li left China for the U.S. to study immunology in grad school, but she ended up pursuing a career in writing instead. The MacArthur “genius” grant recipient’s sixth work of fiction is the elegiac story of octogenarian Lilia, who’s outlived three husbands and had five children, one who died by suicide. Now residing in an assisted-living facility, Lilia probes her past with a clinician’s objectivity, trying to answer the question she’s never stopped asking herself: Why did her daughter take her own life?

Latitudes of Longing

BY SHUBHANGI SWARUP

This Indian bestseller is a marvel of magical realism—a love story between an Oxford-trained scientist who studies forests and a clairvoyant who sees wraiths and communes with trees. It’s also an ode to the Hindu notion of Oneness; the author writes of Girija’s attraction to his wife: “On her forearm, he can spot a ridge. On her feet, a river. Her throat, a restless waterfall created by her hair.”

Surviving Autocracy

BY MASHA GESSEN

The fearless Russian American journalist probes the black hole between fact and fantasy in this taut, incisive critique. Gessen expertly connects Donald Trump’s surprising ascent with the rise of Vladimir Putin, elucidating how the very idea of political legitimacy is undermined by the paranoia and “disdain for excellence” of both leaders, and seeing each as “a king barricaded in his castle, with thousands of soldiers in the battlement, the sights of their rifles trained on potential intruders.”

Exciting Times

BY NAOISE DOLAN

Edna O’Brien. Tana French. Sally Rooney. Enter fellow Irishwoman Dolan, whose knowing, superbly observed debut novel marks the young author as a major force. This sardonic rom-com chronicles the escapades of 22-year-old Ava, a desultory millennial teaching abroad in Hong Kong, where she meets Julian, an aloof British banker, and Edith, a wealthy Chinese lawyer. What ensues is an enchantingly neurotic love triangle in a time of economic and existential tumult.

Memorial Drive

BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY

In this subtle, sublime memoir, the former poet laureate draws us into the devastating story of her mother’s 1985 murder and through the heart’s terra incognita. Trethewey’s languid pace deftly builds the drama to inevitable tragedy while illuminating the interior life of an imaginative, emotionally abused child.

Crooked Hallelujah

BY KELLI JO FORD

Strife between saints and sinners simmers in this richly drawn, atmospheric debut by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Justine, a mixed-blood teenager, rejects her evangelical upbringing for more earthly pleasures, risking biblical plagues to embark on a decades-long odyssey that will carry her and her daughter to the Texas oil fields. Ford unravels the stirring ties that bind Native American women across cultural and generational chasms.

Mexican Gothic

BY SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA

A remote mansion, ancestral curses, and excellent fashion come together in this pageturner combining the eerie dread of The Haunting of Hill House and a feminist plot twist reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Noemí Taboada, a 1950s Mexico City socialite, is the unlikely heroine of this dark and twisted story—but don’t let her debutante cred fool you; she’s a savvy sleuth with courage to burn.

Alligator & Other Stories

BY DIMA ALZAYAT

A Lebanese intern at a movie studio navigates the sexual politics of Hollywood pre#MeToo. A Syrian woman is tasked with burying her younger brother. A seemingly devoted husband cruises for men when his wife is out of town. The richly detailed short fictions in this debut from a Damascusborn scribe form an intricate, breathtaking mosaic of modern Muslim life.

Miss Iceland

BY AUÐUR AVA ÓLAFSDÓTTIR

In remote 1960s Iceland, Hekla—named for a volcano—is an oddity: a woman who aspires to be a writer. As soon as she’s able, she packs her copy of Ulysses and her Remington typewriter and moves to Reykjavík, where she seeks out other bohemians amid eruptions social and literal. Ólafsdóttir, one of her country’s most acclaimed authors, beautifully conjures its craggy, ashen landscape and sea air, the “tumultuous river of life and death flooding” through Hekla’s pages.

The Pull of the Stars

BY EMMA DONOGHUE

With an urgency that brilliantly captures the high-stakes horror and exhilaration of life on a pandemic’s front lines, the Room author centers her latest spine-tingler on a maternity ward nurse charged with keeping new mothers—and herself—safe as the 1918 Great Flu sweeps Ireland. One of the Emerald Isle’s most glittering literary lights, Donoghue here delivers a historical fiction turned timely reminder of human resilience.

Tokyo Ueno Station

BY YU MIRI

The ghost of a migrant worker haunts a railroad hub, transfixed by the surge of crowds and caught in a limbo of memories: the trauma of the 2011 tsunami, the rageinducing privilege of Japan’s imperial family. In spare, indelible prose, Kazu muses on the powerlessness he feels, especially when it comes to his inability to protect his family from loss.

The Vanishing Half

BY BRIT BENNETT

Themes of the Great Migration are reimagined in this lush, balletic second novel by the beloved author of The Mothers. In 1954, the teenage Vignes twins, Stella and Desiree, stage an elaborate disappearance from their Southern town; 14 years later, one staggers home, a daughter in tow, while the other remains a gone girl. Bennett traverses decades and regions as she evokes taboo tensions between light-skinned and “blueblack” African Americans.

Fairest

BY MEREDITH TALUSAN

In this edifying memoir, a lauded lgbtq activist chronicles her journey from being a boy born with albinism in a rural Philippine village—an “anak araw, a sun child, the strangest creature whose skin was so pale it glowed”—to braving the twin tempests of immigration to America and gender transition. Talusan’s inspiring world is one in which mirrors are “bridges made of light to fantastic destinations...a place where passing had transformed into being.”