THE STORM WE MADE

by Vanessa Chan

Malaysian born Vanessa Chan's novel is a spellbinding tale of a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during World War Two. During the British occupation before the war, Cecily Alcantara is determined to become more than just a housewife and dreams of an "Asia for Asians". After she's recruited by the charismatic and sexual General Fujiwara, her skills help to usher in the Japanese in 1941 who prove to be brutal occupiers. Told from the perspectives of four characters, the novel is a saga about the horrors of war and the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors. In her preface to the novel Chan writes, "I wrote through a global pandemic in my small apartment, through the premature death of my mother, through the loneliness of being unable to go home to Malaysia. I wrote about inherited pain, womanhood, mothers, daughters, and sisters, and how the choices we make reverberate through the generation of our families and communities in ways we often can't predict. I wrote about carrying the legacy of colonization in your body, about being drawn to a toxic man, about complicated friendship, about living a life in fragments, about the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake." Author Jessamine Chan says of the book, "combining cinematic grandeur with nuanced storytelling, THE STORM WE MADE offers the hidden history that only fiction can reveal: the everyday yearnings of people surviving a brutal occupation, children trying to make sense of the unspeakable, and the search for love. I'll never forget this book." 

IN THE UPPER COUNTRY

by Kai Thomas

To celebrate Black History Month I've chosen an intriguing first novel by Kai Thomas. Kai is a writer, carpenter, and land steward. He is Afro-Canadian born and raised in Ottawa, descended from Trinidad and the British Isles. His novel is set in the late 1850s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by Black people fleeing enslavement in the American south. Young Lensinda Martin, a writer and healer, works for Arabella Brimmer, a crusading Black journalist. One night she is called to a neighboring farm where a slave hunter has been shot and killed by an old woman, recently arrived in Dunmore via the Underground Railroad. Lensinda is asked to gather testimony from her before she can be condemned for the crime. In her jail cell the old woman is only interested in bartering stories for stories with Lensinda. These extraordinary stories make up the bulk of the novel, especially those that show the interwoven history of Black and Indigenous people of North America. Kai Thomas says in his author's note, "We must share the stories that haven't been shared, in order to bring healing to our world. It's an idea that has motivated and inspired me through the years and many drafts that have birthed IN THE UPPER COUNTRY. It is a story I'm honored to write."  

THE AGE OF MIRACLES

by Karen Thompson Walker

Walker's thought-provoking novel is a coming of age story with a dystopian slant. On an ordinary Saturday in a California suburb,11-year-old Julia (the book's narrator) and her family awake to discover that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights begin to grow longer, gravity is affected, and the environment is thrown into a tailspin. As Julia tries to adjust to a world she's unfamiliar with, she's also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life: the cracks that begin to show in her parents' marriage, the loss of friends, the uncertainty of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who believes it's all a government conspiracy. While food shortages, suicide cults and power outages envelope the world, scientists can find no cause or solutions to the slowing. But Julia and others like her must confront this new world with bravery, compassion and resilience. Author Amy Bloom says of Karen Thompson Walker, "This is what imagination is. Walker has managed to combine fiction of the dystopian future with an incisive and powerful portrait of our personal present." Author Aimee Bender says of the novel, "THE AGE OF MIRACLES spins Its glowing magic through incredible lucid and honest prose, giving equal care and dignity to small spheres and the large. It is at once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy."