Luster

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Luster

A Novel

by Raven Leilani

Description
One of the Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020
Vogue, Elle, Time, The New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture, Parade, USA Today, Literary Hub, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Refinery29, The Rumpus, Book Riot, Thrilllist, Domino, PopSugar, New York Amsterdam News, Bookshop.org

“Exacting, hilarious, and deadly . . . A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring.” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Bazaar

“Impossible to put down.” —Ling Ma, author of Severance

No one wants what no one wants.
And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it?

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules.

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home—though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

My thoughts:

“Between his abrupt cancellations, I realize that I need him, too. In a way, that makes my dreams delirious expressions of thirst—long stretches of yellow desert, cathedrals hemmed in dripping moss. By the time we set our first real date, I would’ve done anything.
He wanted to go to Six Flags.”

Sharp, funny and sad. This book is a journey!

GO

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Go

A Coming of Age Novel

by Kazuki Kaneshiro

Description
For two teens, falling in love is going to make a world of difference in this beautifully translated, bold, and endearing novel about love, loss, and the pain of racial discrimination.

As a Korean student in a Japanese high school, Sugihara has had to defend himself against all kinds of bullies. But nothing could have prepared him for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai. Immersed in their shared love for classical music and foreign movies, the two gradually grow closer and closer.

One night, after being hit by personal tragedy, Sugihara reveals to Sakurai that he is not Japanese—as his name might indicate.

Torn between a chance at self-discovery that he’s ready to seize and the prejudices of others that he can’t control, Sugihara must decide who he wants to be and where he wants to go next. Will Sakurai be able to confront her own bias and accompany him on his journey?

My thoughts: “But to me, all the stories about the legendary Kim Il Sung were lacking. There was nothing appealing about them. Or exciting. And that’s how I came to this realization that day in third grade:
Our stories are better.”

Excellent coming of age story. A great inside into the Zainichi thematic.

A Man

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A Man

by Keiichiro Hirano

Description

A man follows another man’s trail of lies in a compelling psychological story about the search for identity, by Japan’s award-winning literary sensation Keiichiro Hirano in his first novel to be translated into English.

Akira Kido is a divorce attorney whose own marriage is in danger of being destroyed by emotional disconnect. With a midlife crisis looming, Kido’s life is upended by the reemergence of a former client, Rié Takemoto. She wants Kido to investigate a dead man—her recently deceased husband, Daisuké. Upon his death she discovered that he’d been living a lie. His name, his past, his entire identity belonged to someone else, a total stranger. The investigation draws Kido into two intriguing mysteries: finding out who Rié’s husband really was and discovering more about the man he pretended to be. Soon, with each new revelation, Kido will come to share the obsession with—and the lure of—erasing one life to create a new one.

In A Man, Keiichiro Hirano, winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, explores the search for identity, the ambiguity of memory, the legacies with which we live and die, and the reconciliation of who you hoped to be with who you’ve actually become.

My thoughts:

“The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them. Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they sink ever deeper into solitude.”

I loved Keiichiro Hirano’s novel A Man, I was engrossed in its story of identity and transformation, past and present from the start. The additional insight into the life of Zainichi was of great interest to me. I will definitely add Keiichiro Hirano to my list of Japanese authors I want to read more translated works from.

The Ghost Variations

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The Ghost Variations

One Hundred Stories

by Kevin Brockmeier

Description
The author of the acclaimed novel The Brief History of the Dead now gives us one hundred funny, poignant, scary, and thought-provoking ghost stories that explore all aspects of the afterlife.

A spirit who appears in a law firm reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, a man haunted by the trees cut down to build his house, nefarious specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows in which they live, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead–these are just a few of the characters Kevin Brockmeier presents in this extraordinary compendium of spectral emanations and their wildly various purposes in (after) life.
     These tales are by turns playful, chilling, and philosophical, paying homage to the genre while audaciously subverting expectations. The ghosts in these pages are certain to haunt you well after you’ve closed the book.

My thoughts: I read The Brief History of the Dead 12 years ago and still fondly remember it which made me want to read The Ghost Variations. I enjoyed finding out that the afterlife seems to still be a big theme in Kevin Brockmeier’s writing. These Ghost stories are fun, sad, scary, puzzling and beautiful, I liked how they were grouped in different categories like Ghosts and Nature, Ghosts and Friendship etc. But you can just pick up this lovely collection and just read a story whenever the mood strikes you.

A Lover’s Discourse

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A Lover’s Discourse

by Xiaolu Guo

Description
A story of desire, love and language – and the meaning of home – told through conversations between two lovers

A Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life, away from her old world. She knew she would be lonely, adrift in the city, but will her new relationship bring her closer to this land she has chosen, will their love give her a home?

A Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a post-Brexit Britain, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a stifling flatshare in east London, or journeying through other continents together…

Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate and tender novel asks universal questions: what is the meaning of home when we’ve been uprooted? How can a man and woman be together? And how best to find solid ground in a world of uncertainty?

My Thoughts: Very much feels like an updated version of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Very interesting East-West dynamic at play and thoughts about identity, culture and language. I always enjoy reading Xiaolu Guo’s book and this one was no exception.

A Lover’s Discourse

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A Lover’s Discourse

by Xiaolu Guo

Description
“I don’t believe in love at first sight.”

I was taken aback. I thought we were definitely in love at first sight.

“What do you mean? Wasn’t it clear the moment you picked the elderflowers by the park and we looked at each other? Or was it in that book club?”

You gave me a damp smile, as if my confusion proved that you were right.

A Chinese woman moves from Beijing to London for a doctoral program—and to begin a new life—just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build a life together.

A Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in post-Brexit vote Britain, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humor, this intimate and tender novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

My Thoughts: Very much feels like an updated version of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Very interesting East-West dynamic at play and thoughts about identity, culture and language. I always enjoy reading Xiaolu Guo’s book and this one was no exception.

Must I Go

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M

Must I Go

by Yiyun Li

Description
Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have

‘This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it’s happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.’ Meg Wolitzer

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland’s charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27.

Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

My thoughts:

“Most Men are undertakers of their women’s dreams.” Full of sharp observations.
Yiyun Li is a great writer, the Lilia passages were fascinating insights into people, men, women, loss, grief and surviving.
I was less drawn to the diary entries written by Roland however, self-obsessed men without a sense of humor can be tedious to read. Still they are necessary to get Lilia’s insight on these passages.

The Inugami Curse

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The Inugami Curse

by Seishi Yokomizo

Description
A fiendish classic murder mystery, from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers, featuring the country’s best-loved detective

In 1940s Japan, the wealthy head of the Inugami clan dies, and his family eagerly await the reading of the will. But no sooner are its strange details revealed than a series of bizarre, gruesome murders begins. Detective Kindaichi must unravel the clan’s terrible secrets of forbidden liaisons, monstrous cruelty, and hidden identities to find the murderer, and lift the curse wreaking its bloody revenge on the Inugamis.

The Inugami Curse is a fiendish, intricately plotted classic mystery from a giant of Japanese crime writing, starring the legendary detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

My thoughts:

Like The Honjin Murders, this book is a entertaining Agatha Christie style manor murder mystery but set in postwar Japan.
Really enjoyed reading this and already looking forward to the next installment of the Detective Kosuke Kindaichi series.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

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The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

by Zen Cho

Description
“Fantastic, defiant, utterly brilliant.” —Ken Liu

Zen Cho returns with The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, a found family wuxia fantasy that combines the vibrancy of old school martial arts movies with characters drawn from the margins of history.

A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, a young votary of the Order of the Pure Moon, joins up with an eclectic group of thieves (whether they like it or not) in order to protect a sacred object, and finds herself in a far more complicated situation than she could have ever imagined.

My thoughts: Highly entertaining fantasy-adventure novella. The writing flows beautifully and the dialogue is on point.

Would love if Zen Cho would expand this into a series because I would really enjoy to follow these characters on another adventure.

The Law of Lines

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The Law of Lines

A Novel

by Hye-young Pyun

From the Prize-Winning Author of The Hole, a Slow-Burning Thriller about Unseen Forces That Shape Us and Debts We Accumulate, in Life, in Death

The Law of Lines follows the parallel stories of two young women whose lives are upended by sudden loss. When Se-oh, a recluse still living with her father, returns from an errand to find their house in flames, wrecked by a gas explosion, she is forced back into the world she had tried to escape. The detective investigating the incident tells her that her father caused the explosion to kill himself because of overwhelming debt she knew nothing about, but Se-oh suspects foul play by an aggressive debt collector and sets out on her own investigation, seeking vengeance.

Ki-jeong, a beleaguered high school teacher, receives a phone call that the body of her younger half-sister has just been found. Her sister was a college student she had grown distant from. Though her death, by drowning, is considered a suicide by the police, that doesn’t satisfy Ki-jeong, and she goes to her sister’s university to find out what happened. Her sister’s cell phone reveals a thicket of lies and links to a company that lures students into a virtual pyramid scheme, preying on them and their relationships. One of the contacts in the call log is Se-oh.

Like Hye-young Pyun’s Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel The Hole, an immersive thriller that explores the edges of criminality, the unseen forces in our most intimate lives, and grief and debt.

My thoughts: 3.5 stars. I liked the writing but I wished the two main plot lines would have come together more. It felt like reading two well written stories about grief. Still good but I felt it could have been more.