On the first Friday of each month, we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. For our March First Novel Friday, we were thrilled to welcome author Melissa Broder (Death Valley) as the evening’s moderator.
March’s Featured Debuts:
The Delicate Beast by Roger Celestin
A story of exile following the escape from a violent fate, The Delicate Beast portrays the pernicious legacy of political violence. Set in the 1950s Tropical Republic, the reign of The Mortician brings an end to a boy’s childhood of opulence and privilege; narrowly escaping the terror inflicted on many of his fellow citizens, the boy and his family flee to the United States in search of a fresh start. As time passes, the boy fails to feel at home, and so he leaves for Europe, away from his family and away from the ghosts of his past.
Ibis by Justin Haynes
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions. A meditation on mother-daughter dynamics amidst the world’s contemporary migrant crisis, Ibis explores the merging of where we come from with who we become.
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
The Persians is a story rooted in dichotomy; in Iran, the Valiats were somebodies, but in America, they’re nobodies. Centered around the family’s five women, The Persians is a profound, and at times satirical, portrait of a family whose status quo is cracked open after a stint in jail during a yearly vacation. Heartbreakingly sad with an acerbically witty edge, The Persians questions history’s grip on our lives, and whether we actually ever want to free ourselves from the past.
Featured Books
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The Delicate Beast
By Roger Celestin
Published by Bellevue Literary Press
In the 1950s Tropical Republic, a boy lives amid opulence and privilege, spending days at the beach or in the cool hills above the sweltering capital, enjoying leisurely Sunday lunches around the family compound’s swimming pool. That is, until the reign of The Mortician begins, unleashing unimaginable horrors that bring his childhood idyll to an end. Narrowly escaping the violent fate visited on so many of his fellow citizens, he and his brother follow their parents into exile in the United States where they must start a new life. But as he grows, he never feels at home, and leaves his family to travel across Europe and outrun the ghosts of the past.
A searing novel of a life lived in the shadow of history, The Delicate Beast portrays the persistent, pernicious legacy of political violence.
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Ibis
By Justin Hayes
Published by The Overlook Press
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.
In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
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The Persians
By Sanam Mahloudji
Published by Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.
First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone. Except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose, and yet somehow manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters left for America in 1979: Shirin, a charismatic yet outrageous event planner in Houston who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist-turned-housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter Bita, the self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.
When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name. But what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?
These are five women who are pulled apart and brought together by revolution. Here is their past, present, and future. By turns satirical and philosophical, traveling from the 1940s Iran into a splintered 2000s, The Persians is a mordantly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and profoundly searching portrait of a family in crisis at the turn of the century, an American family saga reinvented.
Featuring
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Roger Celestin
Roger Celestin
Roger Celestin is an author, translator, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He has published several academic books and numerous articles on subjects ranging from cannibals and detective fiction to feminist theory and movies. The Delicate Beast is his first novel. He lives in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan.
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Justin Haynes
Justin Haynes
Justin Haynes was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and later moved to Brooklyn, New York. Having earned his MFA from Notre Dame, he continued his graduate studies at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded various fiction residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly, SX Salon Small Axe Project, and PREE. Haynes lives in Atlanta and teaches English at Oglethorpe University.
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Sanam Mahloudji
Sanam Mahloudji
Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran, which she left during the Islamic Revolution, and was raised in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Idaho Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She now lives in London with her husband and two children. The Persians is her debut novel.
