Tasneem P

Emily Henry regards love as a worthy element and intrinsic part of a meaningful life, passed down in various permutations and impacting generations. Shining an unwavering spotlight on love through all her previous romance novels, Henry doubles down in Great Big Beautiful Life, rendering the power of love with a bigger paintbrush and a larger canvas. The book's premise is that two journalists, Alice and Hayden, are competing for the chance to write the biography of the elusive and enigmati

Anointed with the peculiar quirks and idiosyncrasies befitting a detective set to appear in a series of mystery novels, Præst is characterized quite well. He's a part-time blues musician who quotes Kierkegaard and doggedly pursues the truth while dressing impeccably in fine suits, hats and shoes. He's a devoted father and a man nursing a broken heart. What's not to love? The plot maintains a good tango between the good guys and the bad guys, enough to keep you on your toes. Whenever Præ

Maintaining a razor-sharp focus on the materiality of the book — more precisely, the "undersung inseparability of book form and book content," which she terms "bookhood" — Smith explores familiar as well as new topics and themes. She brings scholarly vigor to issues around the reading, publication and usage of books and sets them in geographical, temporal and historical contexts. All this is done with a conversational levity that is both beguiling and surprising: I did not expect to

In places the novel comes across as too contrived — certain things fall into place a little too easily. The pace, too, sags around the middle. All the same, it works as a gentle read, not dousing you in heavy ideas or complicated storylines. Besides, it's an astonishing feat to fit into such a tight narrative themes as wide-ranging as love, loss, identity, diasporic longing, grief and art, while also exploring all kinds of relationships: parent-child, mentor-protégé and even huma

The Wonders comes together more as a series of stark, arresting vignettes than as one story. But what is audacious and brilliant about Medel's debut is the unique style she employs. The voice of the omniscient narrator interjects during Alicia and Maria's internal monologues, and the effect is that of seamless stream-of-consciousness-like narration. Reminiscent in parts of Elena Ferrante and Virginia Woolf, Medel's The Wonders is a stunning debut about the intersection between pove

Freeman doesn't meditate over grief and bereavement by delivering heavy, prosaic or descriptive reflections. Instead, there is action. Mara arrives at a wealthy seaside town with a few dollars in her pocket, very few clothes, a dead phone and no real plan. We are taken on her journey as she figures out what to do with herself. The novel unravels as Mara's psyche also unravels before us, bit by bit, evenly at first, and then with gentle momentum, much like a surprise wave tiding over the beach, h

The stories present a sweeping view of Yoon's characters, so though we're with them for only a few pages, the depth of the flashbacks and backstories are so illuminating, it feels as if she's giving us unlimited access to them. Choi's stories are built up on small moments, constructed upon a frame of tiny potent instances that she tends to with careful, laborious detail. In "A Map of the Simplified World," a young child's crucial moment of change occurs when she slightly betrays her friend. That

What plays out is a thrilling but horrifying reveal of a conspiracy borne of experiences of racism and disenchantment, rooted in reality but taken to their logical, fictional end. The setting works very well on two counts: For one, since Harris has been employed in publishing herself, she is able to create a picture full of uncommon insight into what it is like to be a Black woman in the industry. And two, as publishing is a modern ivory tower where culture is shaped, its presence allows for com