Mobile Creatures is a quiet, fragmented, deeply interior novel about grief, widowhood, sisters, childhood trauma, dogs, writing, migration, memory, and the difference between fact and truth. It is narrated by Faith, an American novelist living in Berlin with her elderly dog Sally after the death of her husband, Ronan Sullivan, who was also a writer. […]
The Witch is a dual-timeline gothic thriller set in Woodhaven, Massachusetts, around an old family estate called Pemberton. One timeline follows Julia, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in the present day who returns to the house she has avoided since childhood. The other follows Caroline Eldridge in 1692, a young woman who lived at Pemberton and was […]
This is a grotesque, satirical, erotic horror novel about fine dining, patronage, wealth, exploitation, Asian American ambition, family dependence, and the way appetite turns people into monsters. Its central figure is Jun Li, a young Chinese American chef in New York whose restaurant, À La Belle Étoile, has one Michelin star and dreams of more. […]
Taipei Story is a sharp, painful, funny novel about language learning, diaspora identity, grief, family history, sexual awkwardness, and the fantasy of “reconnecting” with a culture that may no longer exist in the form one imagined. Its narrator is Lily Chen, a Chinese American Yale student who goes to Taipei for a ten-week intensive Mandarin […]
Of Wind and Dust is a historical family saga about three women bound to the same Chinese patriarchal household: Yook Lan, the first wife; Mary, the Indigenous Suquamish second wife; and Guai Fong, the younger third wife. It moves between Toi Shan in southern China, Puget Sound in Washington Territory, Seattle, Hong Kong, and the […]
This novel is about the first years of long-term dialysis in Seattle and the secret lay committee that chose which kidney-failure patients would receive treatment when there were too many dying people and too few machines. It is also a story about guilt, class, race, marriage, medicine, faith, power, and the unbearable burden of judging […]
Heart of the Wild is a survival novel, family drama, and coming-of-age story set in 1972 in the mountains of western North Carolina. It follows fourteen-year-old Emma McKinney, her mother Jenny, runaway Becky Ralston, and a watching hawk whose presence turns the forest into something both real and mystical. The book is about what it […]
Bright Monday is a reflective, elegant, memory-driven novel about ageing, old desire, marriage, literary reputation, dogs, translation, AIDS, Covid, and the way the past can return at the exact moment when one thinks it has become harmless. Its narrator is Adam, an American writer and professor in late middle age. He is married to Robert, […]
Laurel, in her mid-thirties, arrives at the Mcmurdo Antarctic Research Station not as a mycologist researching mushrooms and fungi, but as a kitchen worker, scrubbing pots and floors. She is sunk in grief, although we do not discover until more than a third of the way into the novel that she is mourning her eight-year-old […]
Mexicali is a long historical novel about the borderlands between California, Arizona, Texas, and northern Mexico; about family inheritance; and about whether a violent, evasive, self-inventing man can ever be understood truthfully by his descendants. Its central figure is Odd Slade, a drifter, gambler, opportunist, gunrunner, border entrepreneur, father, coward, survivor, and sometime rescuer. The […]