Eager to go further afield? So was first novelist ZOË FERRARIS. Once married to a Saudi-Palestinian Bedouin, she has crafted the tale of a Saudi desert guide troubled by a teenaged girl’s death in Finding Nouf (Houghton Mifflin, June 20). FADHIL AL-AZZAWI’s The Last of the Angels (Free Press, July 22) introduces us to an Iraq we’ve never known, as the author guides us through the back alleys and coffeehouses of 1950s Kirkuk, his hometown. The novel was first published in Iraq in 1992 and subsequently banned.
Whereas the hero of ROSE TREMAIN’s The Road Home (Little, Brown, August 26) flees Eastern Europe for a better life in London, DOMNICA RADULESCU’s Train to Trieste (Knopf, August 5) carries 17-year-old Mona Manoliu all the way to America, where she’s stuck wondering whether the dreamboat she left behind belonged to Romania’s secret police. National Book Award nominee JOAN SILBER’s The Size of the World (Norton, June 9) also ends up in America, by way of 1920s Siam and war-ravaged Vietnam.
What’s fiction without fraught family relationships? A couple slowly fractures owing to a child’s genetic disability in JENNIFER HAIGH’s The Condition (HarperCollins, July 1). In JOHN DUFRESNE’s Requiem, Mass. (Norton, July 21), down-to-earth Johnny tries to survive a wacked-out mom, an elusive dad, and a sister who locks herself in the closet. In Sorry (Europa, June 28), GAIL JONES, whose Dreams of Speaking was shortlisted for the 2008 Dublin IMPAC award, introduces us to a domineering Englishman pursuing his anthropological studies in the Australian Outback at the expense of his wife and daughter.
In Undiscovered Country (Little, Brown, July 3), a first novel by LIN ENGER (brother of Peace Like a River’s Leif Enger), Minnesota boy Jesse Matson might as well be in Denmark; he thinks that his recently widowed mother is a little too cozy with her husband’s brother. LINN ULLMANN’s A Blessed Child (Knopf, August 15) transports us to the remote Swedish island of Hammarsö, where three sisters recall the shifting alliances and petty betrayals of childhood, which sometimes become dangerous.
HANIF KUREISHI has Something To Tell You (Scribner, August 19) about psychoanalyst Jamal, who’s divorced, middle-aged, and troubled about some nastiness associated with a lover from his past. CLYDE EDGERTON’s The Bible Salesman (Little, Brown, August 11) has troubles of a different sort; he’s excited to think he’s helping an actual FBI agent until he slowly realizes that he’s been conned. As the Wall falls, PAUL BEATTY sends an obsessive Los Angeles DJ to the Berlin bar Slumberland (Bloomsbury, June 17) in search of a legendary jazz musician. In BEATRICE COLIN’s debut, orphaned Lilly Nelly Aphrodite makes it to The Glimmer Palace (Riverhead, July 24) as a film star in prewar Germany.
Black, white, and Asian, five families living on the same street in New Orleans disclose the subtle but distinctive patterns of American racism in AMANDA BOYDEN’s Babylon Rolling (Pantheon, August 5). In DAÍNA CHAVIANO’s The Island of Eternal Love (Riverhead, June 12) — an award winner in Spanish — a Cuban woman on her own in Miami recalls the Spanish, Chinese, and African strands that make up her heritage.
