by Omar El Akkad The wreckage of a boat filled with Middle Eastern and African migrants washes up on a (presumably) Greek island, and Amir, a Syrian child, is the sole survivor. What Strange Paradise is told in chapters alternating between the events leading up to the incident––explaining what brought Amir and the others there––and…
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by Michael LaPointe Whitney Chase is the culture writer for the New York publication The Bystander. She gets a taste for hard reporting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and by a stroke of luck hits upon a story about a medical breakthrough with the potential to save millions of lives. But everything isn’t as…
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by Kazuo Ishiguro Klara is an Artificial Friend, a robotic humanoid that thinks and feels, intended as a companion to a lucky child. Klara and the Sun follows her journey from the AF store into the home of Josie, the child who chose her. Though Josie has an illness that often tires her out, she…
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by Stéphane Larue In The Dishwasher, we follow a mostly unnamed narrator as he tries to crawl out of the gutter of his life. The story focuses on his gambling addiction, how it controls him––mind, body, and soul––and causes him not only to fall further and further into debt and effectively drop out of college,…
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by Emily St. John Mandel Jonathan Alkaitis made a vast fortune investing other people’s money. On one of his many trips to the hotel he owns––the dazzling Hotel Caiette, located on a remote British Columbia island––he hits it off with the bartender, Vincent, and carries her off into a life of luxury as his trophy…
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by Maria Reva Good Citizens Need Not Fear is, succinctly, a collection of connected short stories, but a fuller description is a bit more complicated. Set in a small, late Soviet-era Ukrainian town, the stories build upon the previous ones and often bleed into the stories that follow, creating an ongoing narrative that showcases the…
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by Lucy Ellmann I wish people would be a bit more careful with literary comparisons. I understand the desire to relate new stories to others that readers are more than likely familiar with in order to quickly pitch the book, but superficial comparisons that set readers up for the wrong impressions seem to be increasingly…
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by Dave Eggers In The Parade, two foreign contractors are sent to an unnamed country to build a road from its poor south to the capital in the north, to be finished in time for a military parade in celebration of the end of years of civil war. The workers are sent in without identification,…
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by Margaret Atwood The Testaments, Atwood’s long awaited sequel to her famous The Handmaid’s Tale, sheds further light on Gilead––the United States in the near future, after its transformation into a Christian theocracy. The story is comprised of multiple viewpoints: a Canadian outsider, the daughter of one of Gilead’s elite, and one privy to its…
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by Sean Michaels In The Wagers, Theo Potiris believes in luck. He works at his family’s supermarket by day and does stand-up comedy at night, but he only performs a set if he wins a bet at the racetrack beforehand. Though he briefly saw some minor success with his comedy––receiving interview requests and performing on…
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