His first novel, There There, made a strong impression on me. This one is more powerful still. Even if you have learned about the Sand Creek Massacre, the forced assimilation of Native Americans including the horrors at Indian boarding schools, and even if you’re familiar with the concept of intergenerational trauma, such “knowledge” hardly prepares you for the emotional wallop of this novel.
Orange offers vitally alive characters, starting with 19th-century Cheyenne survivor Jude Star and continuing to his present day descendants of the Red Feather/Bear Shield families as they persist through disaster, resilience, joy, and bafflement.
Through the author’s language and vision the reader can recognize the wounds of culture loss and dislocation while the characters themselves often struggle to understand where the hurt lies. Orange illuminates what could be abstract concepts, like identity, but his poetic prose and in-depth characterizations make the book sing and breathe.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE• The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There ("Pure soaring beauty."The New York Times Book Review) delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR
Has Ben Fountain lived in Haiti? I don’t know, but I was utterly convinced by every detail of this novel set in the aftermath of the coup that deposed Haitian President Aristide. Fountain is great at limning the gray areas such as the compromises his Haitian characters – including the most idealistic - must make to survive. His American characters include a young man with a plan (that had not seemed insane at the outset), to start a scuba business on the Haitian coast, Embassy and CIA officers most of whom are both cynical and ignorant as they try to put in power someone who’ll be aligned with the US and not too much of a violent criminal. One CIA officer held my attention most. Of all the Americans, she cares the most about Haiti and its people, goes deeply into the culture, respects and even loves the Haitians she deals with while her efforts cause nothing but harm and she does not even have the power to affect policy or protect people who will likely be killed. Thrilling and startling, this novel may shed some light on what’s happening in Haiti today, but don’t expect to come away with much hope.
WINNER OF THE 2024 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE • WASHINGTON POST BEST FICTION OF 2023 • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti
"An engrossing, psychologically complex and politically astute novel." ―The New York Times
Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship…
One nonfiction book makes my list because Markham’s work moved me while giving me so much to think about. Here in the US, immigration and asylum are among the most contentious issues. This book offers another perspective – sometimes familiar, sometimes less so - by moving the debate to Greece. Markham not only reports on how residents on the island of Lesbos have responded to migrants (and the miscarriage of justice after a deadly fire) but also about how her heritage as the granddaughter of Greek immigrants to the US is a significant part of her identity. What was amazing to me here was how her own emotions and experiences lead to a meditation on national and personal identity. For example, how the image of Greece has been constructed by English speakers valorizing Ancient Greece and how this image has been embraced by the present day nation and the West even though it hardly reflect the realities of Greece today and isn’t even accurate about the history. Questions of borders and national identity begin to make no sense, though still hold immense meaning and power that are impossible to dismiss. And the prose is beautiful – much better than what I’ve offered in this brief appreciation.
“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today? In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp…
When a research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, a Turkish hydrogeologist is “in the wind”; the American office manager is detained as a material witness; a Mexican herpetologist needs to find a place of safety; a US college dropout must decide if violence is the answer; DIY citizen-scientists conduct unconventional experiments; and an FBI specialist, born in a refugee camp in Africa, proves his loyalty to his adopted country.
How do the dots connect? How do the puzzle pieces fit? With skeptical eye and fearless ear to the ground, Diane Lefer explores the human cost of the security state. In a novel spanning cultures and continents, an international cast of richly imagined characters have in common an unease that may well be true of most of us: feeling – or being seen as – out of place.
