New Books Coming Your Way February 12, 2019

Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal
250 p.; Fiction/Native American

For the loosely connected Seneca community members living in Upstate New York, intergenerational memory slips into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother's silences, a family seeks to reconnect with a lost sibling, and a young woman searches for a cave that's called to her family for generations. With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Native.

Elsewhere Home by Leila Aboulela
224 p.; Short stories/Global

A young woman’s encounter with a former classmate elicits painful reminders of her former life in Khartoum. A wealthy Sudanese student studying in Aberdeen begins an unlikely friendship with a Scottish man. A woman experiences an evolving relationship to her favorite writer, whose portrait of their shared culture both reflects and conflicts with her own sense of identity.

Shuttling between the dusty, sunbaked streets of Khartoum and the university halls and cramped apartments of Aberdeen and London, Elsewhere, Home explores, with subtlety and restraint, the profound feelings of yearning, loss, and alienation that come with leaving one’s homeland in pursuit of a different life.


The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
384 p.; Historical fiction/Malaysia

Smart, vivacious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother’s Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been hoping for.

Across town, 11-year-old houseboy Ren is on a mission of his own, racing to fulfill his former master’s dying wish: that Ren find the man’s severed finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master’s soul will wander the earth forever.

As the days tick by, a series of unexplained deaths wreak havoc on the town, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren are pulled together in ways they couldn’t have imagined, as their increasingly dangerous paths lead them from lush plantations, to hospital storage rooms, to a ghostly dreamscape.

The Night Tiger draws us into a world of servants and masters, ancient superstition and modern ambition, sibling rivalry and forbidden love. But anchoring this dazzlingly ambitious, propulsive novel is the intimate coming of age of a boy and a girl, each searching for their place in a society that would rather they stay invisible.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima
192 p.; Fiction/Japan

It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.

At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time.

Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mysteries by A.L. Herbert

The Hallmark Channel and Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote) might have you convinced that cozy mysteries are strictly for and about white women. Dear readers, I'm here to tell you they are not! During my extended hiatus from blogging, I took the time to read a diverse array of books and discovered not only do I love cozy mysteries, there are a numbers of series featuring black protagonists, written by black authors.

Welcome to Mahalia's Sweet Tea--the finest soul food restaurant in Prince George's County, Maryland. In between preparing her famous cornbread and mashed potatoes so creamy "they'll make you want to slap your Momma," owner Halia Watkins is about to dip her spoon into a grisly mystery. . .

The titles are a bit kooky, but I love A.L. Herbert's Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mysteries. While most cozies are set in small towns, Herbert sets hers in Washington DC and Prince George's County in Maryland. Halia, full-time restaurateur and part-time detective, and her quirky cousin Wavonne find themselves in a number of predicaments. And, as is usually the case, there's a police detective who hates their interference, but has to admit the cousins are pretty good at figuring things out.

I love the realness of the characters: Halia is serious and focused on making her restaurant a success; younger cousin Wavonne is focused on designer clothes and snagging a rich man (providing well-timed comic relief; and Halia's mother, Celia, is focused on getting Halia married off so she can give her grandkids. One more thing to love about the series is the  recipes the author sprinkles throughout the book. They're not at the end of every chapter, so you don't feel like you're reading a cookbook, but there are enough recipes for you to know the author loves food and loves cooking. I'm dying to trip out a few of the recipes myself, the butter pecan cake in particular.

Murder with Fried Chicken and Waffles and Murder with Macaroni and Cheese are out now. Murder with Collard Greens and Hot Sauce is out March 26 and I promise you're going to love it like a red velvet cupcake!