Editorial reviews

the reader is left to dissect a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers.

The emotional power of “All Our Names” seeps through lines that seem placid on the surface.

This novel shows its author blossoming into her talent with her own innovative, at times pulse-quickening style, distilling startling language from loss.

Quesadillas is pure fantastical rapture, a kaleidoscopic story about anger and adolescence.

While her story is certainly one filled with tragedy, Three Souls as a whole is still a wonderfully wrought story filled with hope.

The novel is an intensely dramatic ride, even taken apart from its Snow White conceit, full of a cast of peripheral characters who reappear throughout and convey their significance to the story.

The Weirdness is absolutely, positively one of the most original takes on the nearing middle age, suffering male writer bit.

Mr. Mengestu writes from the points of view of Helen and Isaac with poignancy and psychological precision, deftly evoking their very different takes on the world.

Readers’ hearts will ache as they realize how little Anna understands and how much sadness she has yet to absorb. Equally affecting, however, is the realization of how much Anna does know --- about courage, survival and, most of all, love.

Kinder Than Solitude is a grim novel, but it’s a mesmerizing experience for fans of elegant writing.

Still, the greatest joy of reading Oyeyemi will always be style: jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others, always singular, like the voice-over of a fever dream.

Prayers for the Stolen” is as harrowing as you would expect, but it’s also beguiling, and even crazily enchanting.

“Dust” moves as the human mind moves: forward and backward, incoherent, indulgent, lingering on the light on a tree, sliding into murky reverie.

The comedy in “Quesadillas” has a moral dimension. Conquered people, Saul Bellow told us, tend to be witty.

As she did in You’re Not You, her compulsively readable literary debut, Wildgen couples vivid description with crisp prose, putting the reader right in the scene — and right at the table.

All the elements of a top-notch historical Australian western are there, but they’re buried beneath so much faux literary bluster.

Relentlessly dreary from beginning to end, Kinder than Solitude presents the world as a dusty repository of heartless, futile hostility. This brittle despair might be right up my alley, but the author, Yiyun Li, offers ornate craft in place of meaning.

For neither the faint of heart nor those who prefer strong plots, Wilson’s work will nonetheless gratify fans of more bleak and rugged times.

The promise of wonder found in Cantor’s novel is the promise of fiction itself—that by picking up a book you will be a spirited away into another world, one full of banality and extravagance, of Neetsa Pizza and Neo-Maosim, which is what makes idle browsing at a bookstore or library so pleasurable.