In the Feb. 15 International Issue of Kirkus Reviews, we’re highlighting recent books from around the world, and I’ve always thought the best way to experience different countries is by getting yourself adopted into fictional families. From Anna Karenina to The Makioka Sisters to Pachinko, some of my favorite novels are family stories that illuminate different times and places. Here are recent selections that fit the bill.
Floodlines by Saleem Haddad (Europa Editions, Feb. 24): The Mathloums are an Iraqi British family, and in the summer of 2014, they find themselves at odds with one another. The late Haydar, a painter, was part of a group of artists in 1950s Baghdad. Now living in London, his widow, Bridget, and three daughters, Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha, can’t agree over what to do with a cache of his paintings. They “wrestle with the fallout from decades of secrets, seemingly endless wars, and differing values,” our review says. “As the family works out how best to preserve and promote their legacy, larger questions loom involving the fallibility of memory, personal responsibility in the face of state overreach, and the value of women’s work in the arts.”
Tangerinn, by Emanuela Anechoum; trans. by Lucy Rand (Europa, Jan. 20): Like the Mathloums, Mina lives in London but her roots reach across continents. When her father dies, she travels home to Italy for his funeral and then stays to help her sister, Aisha, preserve his bar, Tangerinn, which has been a gathering place for immigrants in their town. In her second-person narration—addressed directly to her father—Mina moves between past and present, looking back on her father’s life growing up in Morocco and her own quest for meaning. Our review calls it “an elegy with momentum and teeth.”
The Complex by Karan Mahajan (Viking, March 10): The Chopras are another family at odds with one another—to put it lightly. Mahajan’s novel is set in 1980s and ’90s Delhi in an apartment complex built shortly after Partition by politician SP Chopra for his family; the descendants of his seven sons now live there, and though it’s a family, there is greed, infidelity, rape, and murder. Our starred review calls it “a masterly novel, seemingly influenced by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.”
The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian; trans. by Bruce Humes (Milkweed, Jan. 13): Narrated by an unnamed 90-year-old woman, this novel describes her family’s life among the Evenki people—an Indigenous group in northern China and Russia. “This is an exceptionally pretty novel and a fascinating look at a people that not many U.S. readers know,” says our review.
Steppe by Oksana Vasyakina; trans. by Elina Alter (Catapult, Jan. 20): The unnamed narrator, in her early 30s, never spent much time with her father, who’s just died. He was a gangster and drug addict who was in prison for much of her life, but when he was out, he was a long-distance trucker, and now she’s looking back on a weeklong trip she took with him across the deserted Russian steppe, after not having seen him for a decade. Our review calls it “an elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
