Chandrasekera
first came onto my radar when I read a brilliant short story of his in 2021.
When I learned he had a novel coming out this year, I immediately preordered
despite vague doubts about his ability to extend his meta, liminal brand of
short fiction into novel form. Well, I’m pleased (and annoyed and envious)
to admit I was wrong.
In The Saint of Bright Doors, a boy named Fetter is
raised by his mother to one day kill his father, who is a saint not in the
figurative sense of the word but in the has-godly-powers sense of the word.
Meanwhile, in his city, strange, colorful, unopenable doors have been
popping up all over the place.
The beautiful prose alone makes this book worth
reading, but those who read for the plot will still find plenty to enjoy in this
imaginative, fast-paced, and thought-provoking book.
The Saint of Bright Doors sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life, resulting in a novel that is revelatory and resonant.
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.
He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader…
There
are two scenarios in which I will set a book down after reading only the first
page: either the prose is so atrociously bad that I fear neuronal loss if I
read any further, or the prose is so incandescent that I fear irreparable
damage to my self-confidence as a writer. James’s prose made me consider giving
up writing and transitioning to, I don’t know, goat farming.
None but the Righteous follows a boy named Ham, who is possessed by the spirit of the saint
whose relic he carries around in a pendant. After Hurricane Katrina, he must
try to find his way back to his adoptive home of New Orleans despite complicated
feelings about the woman who took him in as a child.
Part climate fiction and
part mystical tract, this book is hypnotically, hauntingly beautiful.
Lyrical, riveting, and haunting from its opening lines, None But the Righteous is an extraordinary debut that signals the arrival of an unforgettable new voice in contemporary fiction
"[A] profound debut novel . . . James captures the simple kindnesses of a cup of coffee or a shared cellphone as though they were religious acts. Where a more ponderous writer might lapse into a lengthy stream of consciousness, James uses short chapters to weave a story of fractured time and uncharted space into the fabric of life after Katrina . . . This is a book of faith aching to…
Look, this book isn’t for everyone. But it has been a
long time since I’ve encountered a novel so weird, so incisive, and so
unapologetically itself that I had to include it here.
The protagonist is an
obsessive fan of one member of a K-pop boy band that is totally not based on
BTS. She travels from Germany to South Korea to meet her obsession, Moon, all
the while writing fanfiction featuring Moon and a protagonist called Y/N (short
for Your Name).
The prose is intentionally, gleefully abstruse, the ponderings
about the twisted nature of desire so revelatory that I underlined half the
book. Yi is an unforgettable new voice.
"Wondrous and weird." -New York Times "Gorgeous." -New Yorker "High Brow x Brilliant." -NY Mag (Approval Matrix) "So good it's hard to believe." -New York Times Book Review Podcast "Rare." -n+1 "A true novel of the era." -Elle "Piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing." -Entertainment Weekly "Utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing." -Cosmopolitan "Freakish and hallucinatory." -Vulture "Absurdly funny." -Ms. Magazine "Savage." -Vanity Fair "Playful, immersive yet unreal." -Esquire "Riveting and innovative." -TIME "Curious, cerebral . . . with moments of tender poetry." -Times Literary Supplement "It."-SSENSE "Sophisticated." -Chicago Review of Books "Strange, haunting, and undeniably beautiful." -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "One…
When Shek Yeung sees a Portuguese sailor slay her husband, a feared pirate, she knows she must act swiftly or die. Instead of mourning, Shek Yeung launches a new plan: immediately marrying her husband’s second-in-command and agreeing to bear him a son and heir to retain power over her half of the fleet.
But as Shek Yeung vies for control over the army, she knows she was born to lead, and larger threats loom.
The Chinese Emperor has charged a brutal, crafty nobleman with ridding the South China Seas of pirates, and the Europeans―tired of losing ships, men, and money to Shek Yeung’s alliance―have new plans for the area. Even worse, Shek Yeung’s cutthroat retributions create problems all their own.
