New Literary Fiction

 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)