Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it
Nancy Johnson’s The Kindest Lie (2021) reminds me of Terry McMillan for its focus on Black working women’s lives and Brit Bennett’s The Mothers for its slant towards mothering. The novel looks back, specifically to the election of Barack Obama in 2008: “Their feet felt light and their chests,
If you’re the kind of reader who particularly enjoys the idea of stories intersecting and connecting, this one’s for you. If you would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge just as much if the stories had appeared all jumbled. And, if you loved the film Sliding Doors and the
There are many amazing stories about moving from somewhere to elsewhere, about the process of elsewhere becoming somewhere. Take Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy - literally, amazing. It's right there on the cover. It's a real favourite of mine, in which seventeen-year-old Samuel reads comic books in Trinidad to
