This debut novel by Nazanine Hozar could easily be just another slice of “misery lit” if its eponymous heroine weren’t such a firecracker.
Author: Jane Wallace
Based on a true story, this debut legal thriller is a simmering tale of passion and murder set in the murky world of the wakaresaseya: agents hired to break up marriages.
Part travelogue, part study of comparative religion, this debut novel by Felicia Nay is a love story and a love letter to the city where it is set—contemporary Hong Kong.
Presented as a confession, this first novel in English from screenwriter and Iranian exile Javad Djavahery is a deeply nostalgic tale of love and loss set against the revolution of 1979. The unnamed narrator, relating events to an unnamed companion, has some odious wrongdoing to admit. He reveals himself to be self-serving and cowardly as the story progresses. Yet such is Djavahery’s skill that the reader never entirely loses sympathy with him.
If you fancy a lost weekend of drink and drugs, Low, the third novel from poet and musician Jeet Thayil, is for you.
Former journalist Deepa Anappara exposes the plight of India’s “missing” children in a story of abduction told from the viewpoint of a nine-year old boy, Jai.
Racial and gender divides in contemporary Britain are cross-examined in this intelligent courtroom thriller by Kia Abdullah. The case under consideration concerns Jodie Wolfe, a 16-year old girl who is facially disfigured by neurofibromatosis. She claims she has been raped by a group of four classmates. The fact that she is white, and the accused are Muslim and of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, adds racial conflict to an already incendiary legal battle.