Author Leila Slimani offers a portrait of a modern, imperfect woman in her novel
Adele. "Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist
in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and
their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed
by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than
compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs,
arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been,
until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful,
erotic, and electrically charged,
Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive." (from Amazon.com)
Gbontwi Anyetei brings an African perspective to the classic noir novel in his first novel. "
Mensah is a London Noir. A crime novel with a difference set in the
deprived streets of Hackney amongst the African community, a stone throw
away from affluent and gentrified parts of the borough and Islington.
It pays homage to Raymond Chandler and introduces us to the charismatic
Mensah, a black hero for our times. Mensah is the kind of man you
go looking for when you have a problem. He might cause mayhem and
carnage on the way but he will get the job done. So when a would-be
African pop star disappears her rich husband puts Mensah on the case.
Soon things start to go wrong and Mensah finds he is the one being
hunted. The mean streets of Hackney spell danger for him.
Mensah is set in an African city in the heart of London." (from Amazon.com)
Death is Hard Work is a novel by Syrian-born author Khaled Khalifa. "Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a
hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son,
Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of
Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is
estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older
brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to
Anabiya, which is―after all―only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With
the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies
whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision
to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly
balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening
quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the
decisions the family must make along the way―as they find themselves
captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed―will prove
to have enormous consequences for all of them." (from Amazon.com)
"Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s new historical page-turner--
The Last Thing You Surrender--is a great American tale
of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as
they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United
States. An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the
cost of a black messman’s life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to
the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese . . . a young black
woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl, finds unexpected opportunity
and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the
war . . . a black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched,
is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a
new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion. Set against a backdrop of violent racial conflict on both the front lines and the home front,
The Last Thing You Surrender
explores the powerful moral struggles of individuals from a divided
nation. What does it take to change someone’s mind about race? What does it take for a country and a people to move forward, transformed?" (from Amazon.com)
Author Daniel Sanchez Arevalo captures the grief and disbelief of a newly widowed woman in
Alice's Island. "Alice Dupont’s perfect marriage was a perfect lie. When her husband,
Chris, dies in a car accident, far from where he should have been,
Alice’s life falls apart. After the police close the case, she is left
with more questions than answers. While learning to cope with her loss
and her new identity as a single mother of two, Alice becomes obsessed
with unraveling the mystery surrounding her husband’s death and decides
to start her own investigation. Retracing her husband's last known
whereabouts, she soon discovers clues that lead her to a small island
near Nantucket. As she insinuates herself into the lives of the
island’s inhabitants in an effort to discover what they knew about her
husband, Alice finds herself increasingly involved in their private
lives and comes to a disturbing realization: she has been transformed
into a person she no longer recognizes. In seeking an answer to
what her husband was doing before he died, Alice discovers not only a
side of him she never knew, but sides of her own character she has never
explored. Part mystery, part moving family drama, part psychological
page-turner,
Alice’s Island is a novel whose vivid characters hold the reader rapt right up until the final page." (from Amazon.com)
