Hello, book friends, and happy Tuesday. How was your weekend? There was pretty great weather here in Maine. We had several (evening) sightings of the neighborhood gray foxes and our first visit this spring from a Baltimore Oriole. (Errrr, the bird, not the baseball player.) They’re so beautiful! I hope you’re also getting a chance to enjoy nature this spring. Now, let’s talk about books. Today I have a multigenerational novel about class, race, and family; a debut set in contemporary China about a funeral cryer; and a near-future satire in translation about banned books!
As for other new releases, at the top of my list of today’s books that I want to get my hands on are Sound the Gong (Kingdom of Three) by Joan He, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby.
You can hear about more of the fabulous books coming out today on this week’s episode of All the Books! Vanessa and I talked about books we are excited about that are out this week, including The Chain, What’s Eating Jackie Oh?, and The Cats of Silver Crescent.
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Real Americans by Rachel Khong
The author of Goodbye, Vitamin returns with a new novel about class, family, race, and responsibility. On the cusp of Y2K, Lily, the child of immigrant scientists, falls for Matthew, the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. It’s love. But we know that something happened to separate the couple because the book moves to 2021, where we meet their son, Nick. Nick is unhappy living alone with his mother, Lily, on a remote island in Washington and sets out to find his father, whom he hasn’t met before and doesn’t know much about. But Nick’s interest in his heritage has the potential to open old wounds and disrupt the lives of everyone involved. This is a heartfelt story of family, genetics, love, and forgiveness.
Backlist bump: Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
This is an imaginative debut novel about a woman in rural China, who works as a—you guessed it—funeral cryer. Funeral criers are hired to evoke emotion in the mourners and help with their grief using their own words and tears. Despite providing a service, the unnamed narrator of the novel is an outcast in her village, because she works so closely with death. She’s also having a hard time with her husband and is unsure if their marriage will survive. So she decides to do something she hasn’t done before—seek out joy for herself and change her life. It’s an interesting story of a midlife crisis in an area not often portrayed in novels, with more humorous moments than you wouldn’t expect for a novel involving funerals.
Backlist bump: Sin Eater by Megan Campisi
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (translators)
And last, but not least, the winner of the 2021 Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category, now in English. This is a sharp and fitting satirical novel for our times. It’s about a book censor who spends his days scouring reading material for mentions of things that have been banned since the Revolution, including anything that mentions the world before the Revolution. But he is also moved and intrigued and curious, and brings the confiscated books home and reads them secretly at night. And what he reads starts to invade his dreams and his days, as he becomes wrapped up in the world of brave people fighting back against censorship.
Backlist bump: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
This week, I am reading Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski and Highway Thirteen: Stories by Fiona McFarlane. I haven’t managed to fit in any television this week (besides the Celtics), but I am looking forward to Jeopardy Masters starting tomorrow. I just love trivia so much! (Speaking of Jeopardy, last week I picked up Baby Got Facts: Totally ’90s Trivia by Jeopardy champion Buzzy Cohen.) The song stuck in my head this week is “Close To Me” by The Cure. And here is your weekly cat picture: Say it with me now: “BOOOOOOP.”
That’s all for this week! I appreciate you more than I can say, friends. Thank you for joining me each Tuesday as I rave about books! I am wishing you all a wonderful rest of your week, whatever situation you find yourself in now. And yay, books! See you next week! – XO, Liberty
“…I persist in believing that poems do more than newspapers to mend the world.”—Kathleen Rooney, From Dust to Stardust