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This book caught my eye because it is on the Booker Prize long list. The story of a family, told by Lucy, begins when she and her androgynous sibling Sam are 11 and 10, after their father dies and the two search for the appropriate place to bury him. This is the Wild West at the time of gold strikes when Ma had come looking for the Golden Mountain she heard about in China. She found Ba, mistaking...

This 1993 novella by a Bengali writer is bound for the list of my favorite books of the year. It came out in English in July; after hearing Maureen Corrigan’s short review, I bought the audio version. It is a fairy tale featuring an angry ghost. Pishima was married at seven, widowed at 12, and kept in perpetual widowhood by the family so that they would eventually get her dowry of gold. The...

The coming of age story of Nadia Turner is a dramatic one. She lives in a Black community in southern California with her beautiful mother and father who has a steady job and a beloved truck. The local church called Upper Room is an important part of their lives. That name is poignant for me because my mother always had a copy of the devotional publication of that name on the table by her chair...