March 1, 2025
Four extraordinary Nigerian women embark on a journey of self-discovery; an Iranian family is transformed by their new life in America; a Dickens classic is revisited; a life is reinvented in Vienna; and a Center favorite pays homage to a musical dreamer. These five works address hopes and aspirations, lives refashioned, and futures that offer possibilities for achieving joy amid heartbreak and the never-ending challenges of living an authentic life.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Dream Count
By CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Published by KNOPF
What a treat to have a new book by this beloved Nigerian writer after a gap of ten years. The four women in her latest are all wrestling with their life choices. Chiamaka is a travel writer who revisits her past relationships during the pandemic. While walking through London with the man she met online, she asks him, “Are you living the life you imagined you would?” This question resonates throughout the novel as she, her best friend, her housekeeper, and her cousin contemplate the nature of happiness and what is both lost and found. Another stunning achievement in fiction for Adichie.
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The Café with No Name
By ROBERT SEETHALER
Published by EUROPA EDITIONS
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
In his latest fiction, Seethaler introduces us to a community of everyday denizens who inhabit a post-WWII Vienna struggling to regroup in a quickly changing world. Robert Simon, the new owner of a previously shuttered establishment, has an open heart and a desire to make his anonymous café a haven for misfits, immigrants, mill workers, butchers—regular working-class folks. There is a quiet compassion to the story that is both sweet and melancholy. The author, who was a finalist for the 2017 the International Booker Prize (A Whole Life), makes keen observations about society with a subtle, understated quality that marks all his novels.
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The Persians
By SANAM MAHLOUDJI
Published by SCRIBNER
Every kind of emotion features in Mahloudji’s very entertaining debut novel about an eminent Tehran family dispersed to America. The daughters of matriarch Elizabeth end up in the U.S. after the Iranian Revolution and find themselves in very different circumstances from their previous place in society. One granddaughter stays behind, but Bita comes to New York to study law. Daughter Shirin becomes a Houston party planner, and Seema, the dreamer of the family, becomes an L.A. housewife in the community referred to as “Tehrangeles.” Their journey, including some jail time, is by turns funny and poignant as Mahloudji offers an engaging portrayal of generations of women between two worlds.
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Fagin the Thief
By ALLISON EPSTEIN
Published by DOUBLEDAY
Recently we’ve seen Percival Everett (Twain) and Barbara Kingsolver (Dickens) take on reimagining classic literature. Epstein selects another novel in the Dickens canon: Oliver Twist. Like Everett, she shifts focus from the main character to another point of view. Here Jacob Fagin, that rascal, is the central story, as he runs his passel of orphan pickpockets in Victorian London. This takes place pre-Oliver as Fagin, with dreams of expansion, builds his young crew, including the memorable characters of Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger. Epstein gets it just right—the tone, the humor, and the sordid atmosphere of London’s underbelly. And she does so with great empathy.
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Song So Wild and Blue
By PAUL LISICKY
Published by HARPERONE
Joni Mitchell’s confessional storytelling is comparable to that of the best novels. In Lisicky’s lovely version of a memoir, he recounts what this prodigiously gifted musician has meant to him and why. He turned from music to literature: “I’d come to think of my paragraphs as the sweet ghosts of my songs.” And wisely imparts that what he learned from music (phrasing, meter, etc.) came to enrich his writing. From her early melodies and strumming in the ’60s that shaped so many people’s coming-of-age, to the celebrations of the recent past, this is also a beautiful tribute to Mitchell’s immense contribution to music, art, and life itself.
