Hungry Ghosts

September 1, 2022

The Emmy Award--winning Calvi (Dear George, Dear Mary) returns with the story of a young Teddy Roosevelt wooing Boston belle Alice Lee in If a Poem Could Live and Breathe (60,000-copy first printing). Three Souls author Chang goes hardcover with The Porcelain Moon, about a young Chinese woman who flees her uncle's Paris home in 1918 to avoid an arranged marriage, seeking a cousin in the French countryside working with the Chinese Labour Corps and befriending a Frenchwoman who wants quit of her abusive husband (50,000-copy first printing). Set in 1940s Trinidad, when British colonialism and U.S. occupation were folding, Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Hosein's Hungry Ghosts contrasts the lives of wealthy farm owners Dalton and Marlee Changoor and their impoverished workers, with the plot driven by Dalton's disappearance (100,000-copy first printing). In Code Name Sapphire, from World War II fiction titan Jenoff, Hannah Martel flees Nazi Germany for Brussels and joins the Sapphire Line, which spirits downed Allied airmen to safety; when her cousin Lily's family is slated for deportation, she must decide whether she should risk trying to rescue them (350,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Best-selling thriller writer Labuskes turns to historical fiction with The Librarian of Burned Books, which moves from U.S. author Althea James's discovery of Nazi resisters in 1933 Berlin to German refugee Hannah Brecht's work at the German Library of Burned Books in 1936 Paris to Vivian Childs's efforts in 1944 New York to block the censorship of the Armed Service Editions, paperbacks shipped to soldiers overseas (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). Writing under his father's Lithuanian surname, Maetis, British thriller writer John Matthews takes readers to 1938 Vienna, where members of The Vienna Writers Circle fear that the Anschluss means they won't be able to write and then fear for their very survival (50,000-copy first printing). In Canadian author Marshall's best-selling debut, Angela Creighton's discovery in 2017 of a long-misplaced letter with great import to her family sends her Looking for Jane, with Jane the codename for a network providing illegal abortions in 1970s-80s Toronto. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award and National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honors for Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, Moustakis tries out full-length fiction in Homestead, about a couple named Marie and Lawrence who marry impulsively and then learn about each other while homesteading in Alaska as it nears statehood (75,000-copy first printing). In Pulitzer Prize-winning Verble's Stealing, a Cherokee girl named Kit Crockett is taken from her home in 1950s bayou country and sent to a Christian boarding school intent on expunging her heritage (50,000-copy first printing).

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December 5, 2022
Hosein (The Beast of Kukuyo) sets this thorny literary thriller in the divided Trinidad of the mid-1940s. Eccentric landowner Dalton Changoor’s fortune is tied to an unspecified criminal enterprise. His wife, Marlee, doesn’t have the details but can pick up the vibe, as “the kind of money that Dalton brought in seemed flecked with blood.” When Dalton goes missing, Marlee worries he’s been killed, and wonders who did it. Then, after receiving a ransom note, she wonders “what would happen if she didn’t care to pay.” As the kidnappers try to intimidate Marlee by prowling around the property at night, Marlee asks one of the farmhands, Hans, to guard the house. Hans has spent his life in abject poverty in the barrack alongside his wife, Shweta; their two sons; and five other families. Shweta is desperate to leave the barrack, and Marlee’s offer comes with enough money to help them buy their own plot of land. Though a deluge of detail bogs down the pacing, Hosein imbues the proceedings with the swelter of subtropical noir, and entwines his class and colonial commentary with Hans and Marlee’s fraught arrangement, as Marlee becomes financially desperate and Hans gets a taste for a better life. Patient readers will find plenty of rewards in this complex tale. Agent: Chris Wellbelove, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

December 1, 2022

DEBUT Set in 1940s Trinidad, as British and U.S. imperial power start their downslide, this novel from Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Hosein (his first to be published in the U.S., after several published in the Caribbean, including International Dublin Literary Award long-listed The Repenters) is both a family drama and an acute study of social structure. Wealthy landowner Dalton Changoor has disappeared, and his wife Marlee flirtatiously asks one of the workers, Hans Saroop, to stay at their house at night as protection. That will take Hans away from wife Shweta, son Krishna, and his just-hanging-on Hindu community living in a tumbledown barrack that once served a colonial sugar plantation. Hans is a good man who neither drinks nor gambles, but his marriage has been strained by the death of a daughter, which has left Shweta inconsolable. Meanwhile, teenage Krishna is bullied at the upscale missionary school he attends, turning for respite to cousin Tarak and roustabout twin friends with a shady father; Hans is pulling away from the family just when Krishna needs him the most. As the narrative builds to a corrosively painful ending, Krishna muses that "the man he's known his whole life had changed. Or worse--had always been that way"; the question of whether we can change our lives hovers ominously throughout. VERDICT A highly recommended story of family and class divides that will break readers' hearts.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2022
Being Hindu in 1940s Trinidad is a curse for the Swaroops, who eke out a meager existence on the sugarcane plantation on the outskirts of town. The patriarch, Hansraj (Hans), toils at the lavish Changoor estate, envying people who can buy a plot of land to call their own. Such an opportunity presents itself when Dalton Changoor, the head of the estate, mysteriously vanishes, and his wife, Marlee, offers Hans a handsome sum to become a night watchman and ensure her safety. Dazzled by the lure of money, Hans goes against his wife's wishes and takes the job. On a parallel track runs the story of Hans' son, Krishna, and his friends, as they too discover the perils of playing with fire. Hosein (The Beast of Kukuyo, 2018) sensitively teases apart the tangled web of class and religion and emphasizes the hard choices the powerless routinely live with. "Lemme tell you, life is what you make it. Small room, big house. Life could be good and bad in both," says an older woman in the plantation barracks. As the Swaroops discover, the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps theory does not always work for those flailing at the edges of society.

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Starred review from December 1, 2022
A vibrant portrait of Trinidad in the 1940s traces various members of a multiracial community grappling with poverty, emotional connection, and "hereditary pain." Starting with the disappearance of secretive landowner Dalton Changoor, the blood-brother swearing of four local lads, and a drowned dog, Hosein--a celebrated author from Trinidad and Tobago--plunges readers into the turbulent stream of Bell Village life on a not-always-paradisiacal-seeming Caribbean island. His cast of characters is wide, forefronted by Hansraj "Hans" Saroop, one of Changoor's laborers, and his family--wife Shweta, son Krishna. Their home, on an old sugar cane estate, is the barrack, a rat-infested, leaking, multifamily dwelling with a shared latrine, in contrast with the large Changoor home, a manor now occupied solely by the landowner's wife, Marlee, left in the dark about her husband's whereabouts or return plans. Faced with ransom notes and a second dog's death, Marlee pays Hans to be her night watchman, arousing suspicions in both Shweta and Krishna. Meanwhile, secondary characters--other barrack dwellers, bullying teenagers, unreliable policemen, and more--impact events and shade in the "anecdotal tapestry." Destructive histories, not just the colonial past, but also the American occupation during World War II, impinge on the present, as do racism and complex, often violent connections. There are gods--Hans and his family are Hindu; his colleague Robinson is Christian; Rookmin, the wise woman of the barrack, adheres to the old beliefs--and devils who beat their wives and worse. Sex, betrayal, feuds, nightmare pregnancies, and more dead dogs swirl through the narrative, underpinned by philosophies of survival among all classes. Hosein evokes all this in rich, visceral language dotted with obscure terms: flabellate, noctilucae, rufescent. His story, often brutal, ultimately tragic, is nevertheless lit by a wide embrace reaching beyond place and people to the bedrock. Immersive, persuasive: an elemental "portal to the Caribbean" delivered in a distinctive voice.

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