Review by New York Times Review
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.) In Moshfegh's darkly comic and profound novel, a troubled young woman evading grief decides to renew her spirit by spending the year sleeping. "I knew in my heart," she tells the reader, "that when I'd slept enough, I'd be O.K." DAYS OF AWE, by A. M. Homes. (Viking, $25.) The author's latest collection of stories confronts the beauty and violence of daily life with mordant wit and a focus on the flesh. Hanging over it all are questions, sliced through with Homes's dark humor, about how we metabolize strangeness, danger, horror. The characters seem to be looking around at their lives and asking: Is this even real? THE WIND IN MY HAIR: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran, by Masih Alinejad. (Little, Brown, $28.) In her passionate and often riveting memoir, Alinejad - an Iranian-American journalist and lifelong advocate for Muslim women - unspools her struggles against poverty, political repression and personal crises. IMPERIAL TWILIGHT: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt. (Knopf, $35.) Platt's enthralling account of the Opium War describes a time when wealth and influence were shifting from East to West, and China was humiliated by Britain's overwhelming power. FROM COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia, by Michael McFaul. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) McFaul's memoir of his years representing the United States in Russia describes how his lifelong efforts to promote international understanding were undone by Vladimir Putin. HOUSE OF NUTTER: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, by Lance Richardson. (Crown Archetype, $28.) You may not know the name Tommy Nutter, but you should; he was a brilliant tailor who transformed stodgy Savile Row men's wear into flashy, widelapeled suits beloved by the likes of Elton John, the Beatles, Mick Jagger and Diana Ross back in the 1960s and 1970s. SPRING, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Ingvild Burkey. (Penguin Press, $27.) This novel, the third of a quartet of books addressed to Knausgaard's youngest child and featuring the author's signature minutely detailed description, recounts a medical emergency and its aftermath. HALF GODS, by Akil Kumarasamy. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Across decades and continents, the characters in this affecting debut story collection are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next. STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL: Poems, by Diane Seuss. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Death, class, gender and art are among the entwined preoccupations in this marvelously complex and frightening volume. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Kumarasamy's brilliant collection of interlinked short stories is a masterful combination of strong, insightful storytelling and tangential political commentary. With changing narrators, she travels across time and place contemporary New Jersey, a Sri Lankan tea plantation on the eve of independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lanka's turbulent civil war during 2008-09, and Calcutta during Bangladeshi turmoil. The themes are as ambitious in scope as the sprawling canvas as Kumarasamy captures the sense of dislocation that comes with imminent adulthood, political change, immigrant uncertainties, and a marriage in flux. Identity individual, within a family, and in a community as an immigrant or refugee is a constant thread, and her deftness in ensuring that religious and sexual elements all feel integral to each story deserves much credit. Arjun and Karna, the half gods of the title; their mother, Nalini; and their grandfather provide the pegs that anchor this must-read collection. The changing narrative voices and the back-and-forth between past and present leave the reader with a deep understanding of the lives of the two boys who start out on a tea plantation in Nuwara Eliya all those many years ago.--Viswanathan, Shoba Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Kumarasamy's debut collection of linked stories, a boy disappears in the wake of a storm, an entomologist stages an act of political resistance after his son disappears, and a pair of brothers go to Lake George with a young Sikh boy who changes both of their lives in different ways. At the center of it all is a family whose patriarch, Muthu, escaped Sri Lanka during the civil war and settled in New Jersey with his only surviving daughter, Nalini, who would later birth two sons, Arjun and Karna. Each gets his or her turn as the focus of a story. Nalini, who straddles both her father's war-torn Sri Lanka and her sons' suburban New Jersey, is easily the collection's strongest character, embodying the tension between the two. Though, as a young woman, she seems to get it all right-she escapes from New Jersey, finds a loving husband and a big house-the lingering trauma of her past leads her to implode her marriage, sending her back to her father's side. Kumarasamy's prose is gorgeous and assured, capable of rendering both major tragedy (war, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child) and minor tragedy (a botched effort at matchmaking, a pitying Christmas invitation) with care and precision. Though the stories can sometimes blend together, the writing is strong throughout, resulting in a wonderful, auspicious debut. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of stories about a family for whom the Sri Lankan civil war is a constant backdrop.The Sri Lankan civil war, a bitter fight between the country's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, lasted for decades; tens of thousands of people died. In Kumarasamy's first book, that war is always present. At the center of these stories is a family: Nalini, her father, and her two sons, Arjun and Karna. During the war, Nalini's mother and twin brothers were brutally murdered. She and her father manage to flee to New Jersey, but the war, and their grief, follows close behind. Each story takes a different vantage point: In one of them, Nalini is a child, making friends in their dinky apartment complex; in another, she's a grown woman with teenage sons. The stories vary between characters' points of view as well as location and time. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of a family. While the book is moving and the writing elegant and clear, the collection begins to feel almost like a writing exercise, moving from third-person to first-person and back; when it finally comes to the rarely used second person ("You are thirty but can pass for someone seven years younger"), the effect isn't nearly as surprising as it might otherwise have been. It might be that Kumarasamy's control on the stories is too tight. One wonders what might happen if she were to loosen her grip.An otherwise moving collection feels overly prescribed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
