New Books: Fiction

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean's most notorious pirates, she's survived to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she's tracked down by the wealthy mother of a former crewman, she's offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade's kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there's more to this job, and the girl's disappearance, than she was led to believe.

This new edition of Camus's final novel tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like Camus's own. This stunning, fully illustrated edition summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood defined by poverty and a father's death, yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria. In telling the story of his metaphorical search for his father, who died in World War I, Camus returns to the "land of oblivion where each one is the first man" and must find his own answers.

In Holler, Child's eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something. In 'Cutting Horse,' the appearance of a horse in a man's suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In 'Holler, Child,' a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side. And 'Time After' shows us the unshakable bonds of family as a sister journeys to find her estranged brother--the one who saved her many times over.

Herb's charmed life with his dear wife, Susan, in their Key West house is coming undone. Susan, in her seventies, now needs constant care, and Herb is in denial about his own ailing health. The one bright spot is the arrival of an endlessly optimistic manicurist calling herself Renee. But then Herb and Susan's adult children arrive to stage an intervention, and life begins to unravel. Herb isn't ready to let go of all that he has ever had, and it turns out that Renee is really Dee Dee, and she, too, has reasons of her own to hit the road. So, when Herb suggests one last joy ride in his Porsche with Dee Dee, they head north, setting off a Silver Alert.

A novel of modern Nigeria and two people caught in the riptides of wealth, poverty, and corruption. Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of an ascendant politician. When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Eniola's lives become intertwined.

Contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Amor Towles has curated an exhilarating assemblage of stories by an international array of talented writers. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Towles, fascinating observations from the winning writers on what inspired their work, and an extensive and useful directory of magazines and literary websites that publish short fiction.

When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn't just any camper, she's the daughter of the wealthy family who owns the camp--as well as the opulent nearby estate, and most of the land in sight. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara's older brother also went missing 16 years earlier, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again?

James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim's point of view, where Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. It explores what it means to be happy when the world is falling apart.

In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age--everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife.