special issue: best books of 2021
fiction
THE ARSONISTS’ CITY
LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS
Alyan, Hala Mariner Books (464 pp.) $26.00 | March 9, 2021 978-0-358-12655-3
Aoki, Ryka Tor (384 pp.) $25.99 | Sept. 28, 2021 978-1-250-78906-8
Alyan’s riveting novel, set in America and the Middle East, brims with overlapping memories of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties within a seemingly assimilated Syrian Lebanese American family. In 1978, young Palestinian Zakaria is assassinated in a refugee camp in Beirut, the victim of a factional revenge killing during Lebanon’s civil war. Weeks before, Zakaria had betrayed his best friend, Lebanese Idris, with Idris’ Syrian girlfriend, Mazna. Spelled out in the first pages, these facts will haunt the novel as their impact on members of the Nasr family comes to light. Cut to present-day California, where cardiac surgeon Idris Nasr lives with Mazna, whom he married not long after Zakaria’s death. Their three grown children, born and raised in America, take their parents’ perpetually rocky 40-year marriage for granted. And as they first avoid, then succumb to Mazna’s entreaties to convene in Beirut—supposedly to hold a memorial service for Idris’ recently deceased father but really to protest against Idris’ selling the ancestral home he’s just inherited—all three are hiding problems from their parents. In Brooklyn, almost 40-year-old microbiologist Ava suspects her WASP husband is having an affair; in Austin, Mimi, 32, has cheated on his long-suffering girlfriend and been dumped by the band he started; almost 30-year-old Naj, an internationally famous singer/musician, has yet to tell her parents she’s gay. Meanwhile, Mazna, whose passions for Zakaria and her aborted career as an actress have never died, has spent her marriage betraying and being betrayed by Idris, depending upon yet resenting him. And Idris, a man of privileged self-importance and some charm, is perhaps more self-aware than his family realizes. Palestinian American psychologist and writer Alyan is masterful at clarifying the complicated sociopolitical realities surrounding Lebanon’s and Syria’s intertwined histories in terms of class, caste, colonialism, and tribalism. But even more masterful here—as in Salt Houses (2017), which portrayed the Palestinian diaspora through four generations of a single family—is her laserlike focus on her multifaceted characters in big and small moments that come together to create a singular family. Painful and joyous, sad and funny—impossible to put down.
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15 november 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
A runaway trans girl, a harvester of souls for hell, and a family of refugee alien doughnut makers collide in unexpected and wondrous ways. Katrina Nguyen is on the run. She’s escaped her violent father and come to crash in Los Angeles with a queer friend, except now that she’s actually here, he’s not exactly as welcoming as she’d hoped. But she’s got her laptop, her hormones, and her violin—everything she needs for now. Shizuka Satomi is looking for her next student. The world knows her as a legendary violin teacher, sometimes called the Queen of Hell. What no one knows is that she’s had 49 years to actually deliver seven souls to hell. Now her time is almost up, and she wants her last soul to be someone special. Lan Tran and her family run Starrgate Donut, but they too have a secret: Their doughnuts are replicated, not baked, and they are alien refugees from a galactic war. Used to rejection and hatred, Katrina can’t bring herself to trust the offer of private violin lessons from a striking stranger. But as her life gradually begins to intertwine with the lives of Shizuka, Lan, and other colorful, well-drawn characters, everyone receives unexpected gifts of tenderness. Musicians selling their souls to hell shouldn’t fit in the same story as alien doughnut makers building a stargate, but somehow all these elements combine to create something wild and beautiful. Filled with mouthwatering descriptions of food and heart-swelling meditations on music, this novel is an unexpected gift.
FOREGONE
Banks, Russell Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $28.99 | March 2, 2021 978-0-06-303675-8 A man nearing death tries to tell his wife certain things about himself in this dark, affecting work. Leo Fife, a documentary filmmaker and teacher, sits in a wheelchair at home with a morphine drip and a bladder bag, |
