The Reactive, published in South Africa in 2014 by Umuzi and brought to North American readers by Two Dollar Radio in June 2016, is Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel and one of the most arresting literary debuts to emerge from the continent in years. Ntshanga, born in East London in 1986 and trained as a writer…
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s debut novel, All the Little Bird-Hearts, is set in England’s Lake District in 1988 and narrated by Sunday Forrester, an autistic single mother whose carefully structured world begins to unravel when a glamorous couple moves in next door. Published in 2023 and longlisted for the Booker Prize that same year, the novel is…
Zadie Smith has spent a career writing about modern, multicultural London. So when she announced her first historical novel, set in Victorian England and centered on an obscure 1870s fraud trial, the question was fair: why this, why now? The answer, as it turns out, runs hundreds of years deep. The Fraud, published by Penguin…
Lauren Groff’s Matrix, published by Riverhead Books in September 2021, reimagines the life of Marie de France, the twelfth-century poet whose identity remains one of medieval literature’s most tantalizing mysteries. In Groff’s telling, Marie is a seventeen-year-old half-royal, tall and ungainly and fierce, who has spent her youth at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine….
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, published in January 2020 by Pantheon Books, is a novel written entirely in screenplay format. It follows Willis Wu, a bit-part actor stuck playing “Generic Asian Man” on a perpetually filming cop show called Black and White. Willis lives in a Chinatown SRO above the Golden Palace restaurant, shuffling between roles…
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