A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Contemporary Fiction
When a Ficus carica, commonly known as the edible fig, takes up a narrative voice in a novel, readers should know they are in for something unique. In the case of The Island of the Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak, the tree narrator, the multiple storylines and settings (contemporary London and twentieth-century Cypress), and the beautiful prose all work to utterly transport the reader.
I recently picked up Sarah Winman’s recent historical fiction novel: Still Life (2021). In addition to its beautiful cover of flowers and parrot, the reference to the world of painting in its title immediately piqued my interest, as did its setting of Florence, Italy.
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
For readers who appreciate a suspenseful fantasy interwoven with a good dose of romance, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) and the four books that come after it will delight.
The first in this series, A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) establishes the divided world in which we find our heroine, Feyre Archeron.
Sometimes we find our way to delightful novels that transport us to fictional communities full of quirky, loveable characters; Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Library at the Edge of the World (originally published in the UK in 2016) and the four novels that continue the Finfarran Peninsula series (Summer at the Garden Café, UK published 2017; The Mistletoe Matchmaker, 2017; The Transatlantic Book Club, 2019; and The Month of Borrowed Dreams, 2020) offer their reader precisely that.
Caroline Lea’s recent historical fiction, The Metal Heart: A Novel of WWII (2021) fictionalizes events on the northern Scottish islands of Orkney during the 1940s. Twin sisters, Dorothy and Constance, flea to a remote island said to be cursed after the death of their parents. Facing the brutal elements as winter descends, the sisters find their isolation invaded by a population of prisoners of war who are relocated by the British Army to Orkney in order to labor on a protective earthen barrier around the islands.
Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is an unsettling read; one replete with ghosts, curses, nightmarish yellow jackets, and plenty of the uncanny. Yet, in addition to the horror—a genre Danforth clearly plays with on multiple levels in PBH—the reader meets the witty, modern narrator, with her references to social media posts and snide humor. Plain Bad Heroines explores the lives and loves of women, both contemporary and early twentieth-century, as they unapologetically make their own ways. Plain Bad Heroines, like Danforth’s first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is LGBTQ fiction.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s She Never Told Me About the Ocean (2021) scrutinizes the experiences and emotional lives of various mothers and daughters, set on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with a hefty dose island myth. Through a story that incorporates the everyday and the mythical, She Never Told Me About the Ocean highlights the interconnectedness of birth, death, and humanity.
Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.
Catherine A Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War (2020), is a moving and informative historical fiction. Victoria’s War opens as Germany invades Poland, shattering the life of its titular character.
works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) is a gut-punch of YA novel. Starr, the novel’s high school protagonist, exists between two worlds. She lives in the poor, predominately Black, neighborhood of Garden Heights; she attends high school in an upper-middle class, predominately white suburb.
Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us (2018) is a touching a family drama punctuated on modern American issues, particularly those of immigrant families.
Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.
Max Porter does something both unique and disquieting in his novel Lanny (2019). Set in a sleepy English village (within commuting distance of London) in modern time, Lanny is family drama set amidst the cacophony of villager voices as overheard by mystical, other-worldly Dead Papa Toothwort.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s debut novel The Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018) is a powerful articulation of life in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s and is a wonderful example of Own Voices narrative. Told predominately from young Chula’s perspective as she looks back on her comfortable life in a gated community in Bogotá, from the refugee life she comes to inhabit in LA, this story shines light on the traumas many immigrant families veil in silence once they arrive on American soil.
In Alka Joshi’s debut, historical fiction novel, The Henna Artist (2020), Lakshmi Shastri, the henna artist premier in 1950s Jaipur, recounts her story.
