February 7. 2025
On the first Friday of each month, we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. For our inaugural First Novel Friday, we were thrilled to welcome the host of the podcast Debutiful, Adam Vitcavage, as the evening’s moderator.
February’s Featured Debuts:
The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai
Set in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, this modern-day Romeo and Juliet story between a Palestinian and a Jew explores the complexities of taboo love, the struggle to keep family intact in the face of threatened identity, and the ways that exile forces us to confront our preconceived notions in unimaginable ways. Zeeva is a 2014 alum of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship.
Loca by Alejandro Heredia
Following the lives of two best friends, Sal and Charo, over the course of a year, Loca is a testament to friendship and its power to provide a sense of home—especially when family, nations, and identity groups fail to do so. Striving to retain their dreams in 1999 New York, Sal and Charo are both held back by the tragedies of their pasts. When Sal unexpectedly finds love at a gay club one night, his and Charo’s worlds expand, pushing them to reevaluate what they owe to themselves, their pasts, their futures, and to each other.
The English Problem by Beena Kamlani
A profound narrative of displacement and desire, The English Problem tells the story of one man’s journey to liberation—both for his nation and himself. Chosen by Mahatma Gandhi, 18-year-old Shiv Adani arrives in London eager to learn English law, with plans to return home and help drive the British out of India. However, the “English Problem”—a form of racist colonialism—begins to infiltrate every aspect of his life. Soon, Shiv finds himself torn, wanting to join the very people from whom he once sought liberation.
Featured Books
-
.
The Anatomy of Exile
By Zeeva Bukai
Published by Delphinium Books
In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the U.S. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar’s determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect. This powerful debut novel explores Tamar’s struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.
-
.
Loca
By Alejandro Heredia
Published by Simon & Schuster
It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.
.
-
.
The English Problem
By Beena Kamlani
Published by Crown
Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage, and he is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.
He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem” is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets” seeps into everything—not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.
Set against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement, with appearances by historical figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi, The English Problem is so self-assured and ambitious, it is hard to believe it is a debut.
Featuring
-
Zeeva Bukai
Zeeva Bukai
Zeeva Bukai is a fiction writer, born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her stories have appeared in Of The Book Press, Carve magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Master’s Review, the Jewish Fiction Journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, December Magazine, the Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her honors include an Emerging Writer Fellowship at The Center for Fiction, residencies at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony, and Byrdcliff AIR program in Woodstock, New York. She received The Master’s Review fiction prize, the Curt Johnson Prose Award, and the Lilith Fiction Award. Her work has been anthologized in Frankly Feminist: Short Stories by Jewish Women from Lilith magazine, and Out of Many: Multiplicity and Divisions in America Today. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University. Her debut novel, The Anatomy of Exile, will be published by Delphinium Books in January 2025. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Photo Credit: Ghila Krajzman
-
Alejandro Heredia
Alejandro Heredia
Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.
-
Beena Kamlani
Beena Kamlani
Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review; Ploughshares; Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, eds. Gillan (1999); Growing Up Ethnic in America, eds. Gillan (2000); The Lifted Brow (2008); World Literature Today; and other publications. She has been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Hawthornden Castle, Jentel Arts, and Hedgebrook. A former senior editor for the Penguin Group, she taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades and was presented an award for teaching excellence. The English Problem is her first novel.
Photo Credit: Dan Demetriad
