All my favorite books have something in common: a vital energy to the prose, an immersion in another world, and characters shown in all their complex humanity.
When Faraz Ali takes up his new role at the police station in Lahore, Pakistan’s red-light district – the Mohalla - two things are clear early on: he’s supposed to cover up the death of a young girl, and he has a disturbing family history in the Mohalla. Even though you know all that, the suspense never lets up.
Any action Faraz Ali takes may be a dangerous choice. He and the children and women of the Mohalla are portrayed with such vivid intimacy, you have to care about each one and fear for them page after page.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND NPR
“Stunning not only on account of the author’s talent, of which there is clearly plenty, but also in its humanity.” —New York Times Book Review (cover)
Sent back to his birthplace—Lahore’s notorious red-light district—to hush up the murder of a girl, a man finds himself in an unexpected reckoning with his past.
Not since childhood has Faraz returned to the Mohalla, in Lahore’s walled inner city, where women continue to pass down the art of courtesan from mother to daughter. But he still remembers the day…
Pasha’s quest is to bring his nephew home from an orphanage. But this is eastern Ukraine and he must navigate the Gray Zone, a landscape of threat, death, and shifting languages, lines, and loyalties.
With the people he meets along the way, he shares hardship and suffering and, at times, personal animosity while there’s no predicting who will meet with sudden death. Zhadan’s powerful novel isn’t just topical. He plunged me into the reality of civilians in wartime in an astounding work I won’t soon forget. I am grateful to the translators.
A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine
Chosen as one of "Six Books to Read for Context on Ukraine" by the New York Times
Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the "20 Best Books of 2021"
"Powerful . . . For those who want a glimpse of what life will be like in Ukraine for years to come, The Orphanage offers a frightening glimpse."-Bill Marx, Arts Fuse
If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe's most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The…
As you can tell from my first two choices, I usually go for dark, disturbing fiction.
I love fiction that confronts me with the challenge of making sense of troubling circumstances and putting myself in another’s place, work that’s as complex and difficult as the world we live in. So maybe this novel qualifies in those terms because narrator Cara Romero surely has a lot of problems.
Faced now with unemployment and a job counselor, she has no idea how bureaucracy works and all she can do is answer standardized questions in her own digressive way. Cara’s 100% authentic voice made me fall in love with a novel that’s lighter in tone and more upbeat than what I usually choose.
When you listen to that voice – hoping her counselor does too – all Cara’s skills and best qualities shine through.
Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification…
A research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11. In a novel spanning cultures and continents, Out of Place explores the human cost of the security state: a Turkish hydrogeologist is “in the wind”; her husband goes missing in Pakistan; the American office manager is detained as a material witness; a Mexican herpetologist needs to find a place of safety; a US college dropout bicycles across Iran, trying to decide if violence is the answer; Outlaw Scientists conduct unconventional DIY experiments; and an FBI specialist, born in a refugee camp in Africa, proves his loyalty to his adopted country. This cautionary tale offers as well a vivid celebration of diversity in the human and natural world.
