While I'm glued to the Democratic Convention and the wide array of speakers, there are still new books to discover later on. Here are some of this week's fiction releases. As always, the links are to The Literate Lizard, online bookstore of Readers and Book Lovers nonfiction expert Debtorsprison, and blurbs are from the publishers.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
A timeless story of strife and hope set during the conflict in the Balkans in the early '90s—a searing debut novel about a woman who faces the war on her doorstep with courage, fierceness, and an unshakable belief in the power of art.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki
Translated from the Japanese bestseller, this charming and magical novel, inspired by the myth of cats returning favors to those who care for them, reminds us that it's never too late to follow our stars.
Wild Failure: Stories by Zoe Whittall
In Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations and fraught relationships.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water.
Interpretations of Love by Jane Campbell
A profound debut novel that explores complicated love, secrets, and familial misunderstandings from the celebrated octogenarian author of the “trail-blazing” (Oprah Daily) collection Cat Brushing.
The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera
El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways.
Sensitive Anatomy by Andrés Neuman
The thirty brief chapters of Sensitive Anatomy form a celebration of the body in its glorious entirety, from the most obvious zones to those commonly less appreciated. This is a poetic, political, and hedonistic journey across the very matter that makes us. A book that questions how we see ourselves, how we are made to see, and what beauty really is. It playfully stands against the culture of Photoshop, against oppressive images, against all those edits and erasures which end up excluding the vast majority of real people.
The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones
Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.
A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.
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