Out There

Traditional Haitian storytelling and spirits flow through Chancy’s superb new novel about female friendship. Two young girls in 1940s Port-Au-Prince become inseparable despite their different backgrounds. “Simone flicks her ponytail across her neck and down her clavicle…as if to push Gertie away. She will forever be pushing Gertie back: it is instinct.” One will eventually move to Paris; the other will marry a rich Dominican man during the tyrannical dictatorship of Duvalier. A rupture in their friendship lasts for decades until a rapprochement in America seems possible. Chancy’s ability to endow her characters with such deep humanity informs this splendid work of fiction.

This highly acclaimed British author with Punjab roots has been a Booker Prize nominee twice. In Sahota’s fourth novel he continues exploring class consciousness, racial identity, community—and how mistakes can mount up until, like dominoes, there is an inevitable fall. Nayan has thrown himself into his work for the labor union after an accident killed his family. The novel traces his journey through grief as a possibly ill-advised attraction to a neighbor and her son helps him open his heart twenty years after the tragedy. It’s a captivating book that has the reader anxiously awaiting the revelation of the mystery that drives the action.