July 13, 2024
These novels depict the search for answers—how to build a life, how to behave, and how to learn from the past. A Turkish writer gives us a snapshot of a young couple trying to choose where to live; a fantastical novel set during the Renaissance combines wealth, power, and enchantment; a debut follows a Palestinian woman in New York City determined to conquer the world; a young English scholar strives to decipher Shakespeare’s sonnets; and a queer Colombian boy comes of age in Miami.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Anthropologists
By AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ
Published by BLOOMSBURY
“We were scholarship students living in a foreign country, which is to say that we recognized something in each other.” Savaş’s novel follows a couple on the cusp of adulthood—being a grownup feels both close at hand and out of reach. The Turkish-born author has lived around the world and knows how displacement both informs and complicates the journey out of childhood. In spare, cool prose she has expanded a 2021 New Yorker short story into an exploration of home and family that mirrors some of her own autobiography. As our fictional couple hunts for an apartment in an unnamed city, we experience the banal made profound.
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Navola
By PAOLO BACIGALUPI
Published by KNOPF
Navola is a city not unlike 15th-century Florence, steeped in wealth held by a few powerful families. Davico di Regulai is the son of a Medici-like merchant dynasty who must learn to look past the visages of his enemies and friends to uncover the secrets beneath the surface. Navigating treacherous acts of betrayal and even magic, Davico seeks to inherit his father’s prized possession, a dragon’s eye relic (see the cover) that will determine his fate. This epic fantasy is well worth getting lost in. And perhaps the story is not yet over—keep your eye out for Bacigalupi’s next.
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Practice
By ROSALIND BROWN
Published by FSG
The best laid plans go awry in British writer Brown’s debut when a serious young Oxford student attempts to focus on the task at hand and write essays about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Life and her older boyfriend distract her; erotic fantasies intervene, breaking her concentration. This lovely little novel has much to say about the power of literature and the pleasures of normal life. As the author says, “I wanted to explore—with equal sympathy—both the appeal of her beautiful, solitary life, and her unease with the morality of living this way.” A meditative exploration of one day of life that evokes comparisons to Woolf.
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The Coin
By YASMIN ZAHER
Published by CATAPULT
Palestinian journalist Zaher mines her experience of living in New York City in her first novel—a time characterized by a feeling of “psychosomatic madness.” Her anonymous narrator arrives in NYC with a love of luxury but an inheritance she cannot touch, and an obsession with cleanliness. No amount of washing can help her reach the titular ‘coin,’ a patch on her back representing all the filth she cannot eradicate. Her behavior descends into the morally questionable as she gets a job teaching high school and becomes involved in a scam to sell Hermés’ Birkin bags in Europe. This woman on the verge is quietly coming apart in a superbly written debut.
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Hombrecito
By SANTIAGO JOSE SANCHEZ
Published by RIVERHEAD
As this debut opens, ‘Santiago’ waits in vain for his mother to pick him up from school: “Today she forgot she was a mother.” (The author claims this is his favorite line in the book.) The family includes an older brother and an absent father. Santiago’s attachment to his unreliable mother is particularly fierce. In a month they will leave Colombia for Miami and his mother, a doctor, will become a waitress. This poetic Bildungsroman is a tender family saga of a boy who “lives between the world and his own mind,” wrestling with his sexuality and being a first-generation immigrant—experiences beautifully articulated by this promising new writer.
