April 26, 2025
Several versions of awakenings mark our five books this week: an immigrant son finds his voice; a writer discovers a shared trauma with both her mother and a famous writer; a naïve, teenaged boy has a sexual awakening in Northern England; connected stories evince the challenge of living in a tech-fueled world; and a stunning novel from Zimbabwe features a narrator who has been committed to a mental institution. In diverse and singular ways, they all speak to the essence of humanity and the trials of navigating newly discovered worlds.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Creation of Half-Broken People
By SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU
Published by HOUSE OF ANANSI
This remarkable novel is set in the author’s homeland of Zimbabwe. Our narrator spent time in a mental ward following the suicide of her boyfriend and later, while living in his family’s attic, begins having visions. Three women come to her to tell their stories (a bit like Toews’s Women Talking), including a woman who has mistakenly been told she is white; one who is a victim of rape; and a third who is a political activist. The author has noted, “Rhodesian and Zimbabwean authors, like Doris Lessing, have influenced my writing.” She was also inspired by Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic. Ndlovu explores the effects of British colonialism through her narrator’s personal history, producing a haunting Gothic tale.
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Atavists
By LYDIA MILLET
Published by W. W. NORTON
In Millet’s fourteen linked stories with titles like “Tourist,” Terrorist,” and “Fetishist,” she exemplifies the modern zeitgeist in our unstable cultural climate. Her oddball-yet-recognizable Southern California characters include many who’d prefer to stick their heads in the sand, but often need a wake-up call. Her 2009 collection Love in Infant Monkeys (who wouldn’t want to crack the spine of that book?) was a Pulitzer finalist and she affirms, “stories are joyful toys to me.” A subtle glee abounds in her portraits of contemporary, post-pandemic lives as she delves into the search for identity in a world obsessed with social media and misinformation. These stories are a true delight.
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In the Rhododendrons
By HEATHER CHRISTLE
Published by ALGONQUIN BOOKS
This is an extraordinary book and a cerebrally captivating memoir. As the writer Jericho Brown has remarked, Christle “opens the doors of her mind as if it is a library where we are welcome to roam.” And what a rich library it is! While strolling through Kew Gardens, Christle’s mother divulges for the first time a childhood sexual assault not dissimilar to what the author herself experienced. As Christle tries to make sense of the parallels, she goes down a rabbit hole of Virginia Woolf’s life that reveals yet another similar experience. Linking this triad of events with emotional honesty, she illuminates the life of her mother, of Woolf, and discovers a way to reshape her own past.
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Open, Heaven
By SEÁN HEWITT
Published by KNOPF
Sixteen-year-old James lives in an English village where his uncle has a farm. A dreamer who strives for perfection, he is newly out—both at school and to his parents. When Luke comes to work on the farm, James is immeasurably drawn to him. Luke is older and far from ideal, but James can’t resist imagining his first real romance. Over four seasons, his hopeful/hopeless desire grows, even as he understands what he puts at risk by pursuing this relationship. The author of two books of poetry and 300,000 Kisses, a collection of ancient queer stories—illustrated by Luke Edward Hall—Hewitt has distilled his previous autobiographical work into a moving debut.
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To Save and to Destroy
By VIET THANH NGUYEN
Published by HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
In his intellectually rigorous collection, Ngyuen (The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and First Novel Prize) illuminates his journey as a Vietnamese immigrant whose parents survived the war and opened a grocery store in San Jose. In these trenchant essays, he speaks of winning a writing award as a third grader (“giving me my first taste of literary fame and setting me on the path to over thirty years of misery in trying to become a writer”); the trials of being an outsider; the worry of betraying his family by writing about them; and calls for global solidarity. “For Asian Americans, even claiming an individual voice is fraught, for our place in the United States is to be the silent, acquiescent, apologetic model minority.”
