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A haunting first novel that recounts a Tibetan family’s fifty-year journey through exile and their struggles to forge new lives…
of dignity, love, and hope.A New York Times Book Review Summer Read PickA Washington Post Noteworthy Book of the MonthOne of Booklist's Top 10 Historical Fiction DebutsOne of Publishers Weekly's Writers to WatchA Most Anticipated Book - The Millions * Ms. Magazine * BustleLonglisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Toronto Book Awards.In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp on the border of Nepal, having survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas into exile when so many others did not. As Lhamo—haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, the village oracle—tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint, a relic long rumoured to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is living with Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood. While Tenkyi works as a cleaner and struggles with traumatic memories, Dolma vies for a place as a scholar of Tibetan Studies. But when Dolma comes across the Nameless Saint in a collector’s vault, she must decide what she is willing to do for her community, even if it means risking her dreams. Breathtaking in scope and powerfully intimate, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a gorgeously written meditation on colonization, displacement, and the lengths we'll go to remain connected to our families and ancestral lands. Told through the lives of four people over fifty years, this beautifully lyrical debut novel provides a nuanced portrait of the world of Tibetan exiles.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • An orphan grapples with gender, siblinghood, family, and coming-of-age as a Muslim in…
America in this lyrical debut novel that &“shimmers with love&” (Los Angeles Times), from the acclaimed author of If They Come For Us &“Haunting . . . a knife-sharp story of self-discovery.&”—PeopleIn this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her &“crybaby&” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency that she&’s known or carve out a new path for herself. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who&’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
A blazingly original debut novel about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed,…
fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls. &“An acute study of those tender moments of becoming, this is an ode to girlhood, inheritance, and the good trouble the body yields.&”—Raven Leilani, author of LusterMOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS—The New York Times, Bustle, Nylon, PopSugarIf you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil . . .Welcome to Queens, New York, where streets echo with languages from all over the globe, subways rumble above dollar stores, trees bloom and topple over sidewalks, and the funky scent of the Atlantic Ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Within one of New York City&’s most vibrant and eclectic boroughs, young women of color like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and countless others, attempt to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture in which they come of age. Here, they become friends for life—or so they vow.Exuberant and wild, together they roam The City That Never Sleeps, sing Mariah Carey at the tops of their lungs, yearn for crushes who pay them no mind—and break the hearts of those who do—all while trying to heed their mothers&’ commands to be obedient daughters. But as they age, their paths diverge and rifts form between them, as some choose to remain on familiar streets, while others find themselves ascending in the world, beckoned by existences foreign and seemingly at odds with their humble roots.A blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices, Brown Girls illustrates a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond, and is a striking exploration of female friendship, a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today. For even as the conflicting desires of ambition and loyalty, freedom and commitment, adventure and stability risk dividing them, it is to one another—and to Queens—that the girls ultimately return.
An epic, boundary-pushing tale of five young women rebelling against an era that relies on their submission, from the acclaimed…
author of Etta and Otto and Russell and James.During the golden age of the Roman Empire, five girls enjoy a modest childhood in their small Portuguese village. They race each other through lemon orchards and pick fresh fruit for the commander who overlooks his people from a large house on the hill. Though the girls are all raised by different families, there is one thing they know without a doubt: they are sisters. What they don&’t know is that their simple existence is about to be irrevocably changed. When soldiers abduct them from their village and bring them to the commander, the sisters are suddenly forced to confront long-buried secrets that reveal their lives to be anything but ordinary. Burgeoning on womanhood just as the Empire begins to show signs of crumbling around them, they soon find themselves at the centre of a deadly standoff and must part ways to fight their own battles in order to survive. One of Emma Hooper&’s most compelling novels yet, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky is bursting at the seams with abstract miracles, devastating tenderness, hope, desire, and treachery—with life and death in all their glory. Demonstrating both the force and fragility of human nature, Hooper urges us to consider how we&’ll each face our own final hour, to examine what the end really means: is it something to fear, or is it a daring leap into the blaze of a new beginning?
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Finalist for the 2023 Gotham Book Prize Longlisted for the 2023…
Carol Shields Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Vogue Best Book of the Year A "beguiling and brilliant" (Viet Thanh Nguyen) debut novel on the interconnection between art, work, care, and the passage of time.How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time—in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year—and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and tenderly observes her father’s slow decline.Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. Activities of Daily Living is a lucid, intimate examination of the creative life and the passage of time.
Finalist for the Story Prize Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction A BookPage and Kirkus Reviews Best Book…
of the Year A masterful collection of interconnected stories from the "genius enchantress" (Karen Russell) author of Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award.In Natural History, Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books since her National Book Award–winning collection, Ship Fever. The six exquisite stories in Natural History are set largely in a small community in central New York state and portray some of her most beloved characters, spanning the decades between the Civil War to the present day. In “Henrietta and Her Moths,” a woman tends to an insect nursery as her sister’s life follows a different path. In “Open House,” a young man grapples with a choice between a thrilling life spent discovering fossils and a desire to remain close to home. And in the magnificent title novella, “Natural History,” Barrett deepens the connection between her characters, bringing us through to the present day and providing an unforgettable capstone.Told with Barrett’s characteristic elegance, passion for science, and wonderful eye for the natural world, the psychologically astute and moving stories gathered in this collection evoke the ways women’s lives and expectations—in families, in work, and in love—have shifted across a century and more. Building upon one another, these tales brilliantly culminate to reveal how the smallest events of the past can have large reverberations across the generations, and how potent, wondrous, and strange the relationship between history and memory can be.