The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The titular sisters of this expansive, lightly metafictional novel, the Mikkolas, are haunted by an intergenerational curse. At the dawn of the millennium, the three girls meet a neighbor who develops a lifelong fascination with their stories. Over more than thirty years, as the characters move across Sweden, Tunisia, and the U.S., the neighbor, Jonas—who shares not only the author’s name but also his Swedish-Tunisian heritage and his occupation—witnesses each sister evolve. Jonas gradually becomes a literary detective, tasking himself with solving the mystery of the Mikkola curse: whom it came from, how it connects him with the sisters, and what must be done to break it.
Necessary Fiction, by Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead). This polyphonic novel portrays a group of young, queer creative types in Lagos as they carve out space for themselves in an unwelcoming world. “Before we met each other,” one says, “we all had lies we needed to tell ourselves and others if we were going to live well . . . necessary fictions.” Many of the friends are fleeing parents who are abusive or closeted; in some cases, they want to leave Nigeria altogether. What saves them is the community—the family—they build with one another. That and, perhaps, money. At a commitment ceremony, one character says to his groom, “Thank you for being the type of partner who doesn’t think a butler is too extra, who wants to travel the world finding Michelin-star restaurants.”
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Make It Ours, by Robin Givhan (Crown). In this biography of the late Virgil Abloh—the founder of the luxury streetwear brand Off-White, and the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line from 2018 until his untimely death, in 2021—there are few moments that highlight his prowess as a designer. Instead, the narrative centers Abloh’s collaborative instincts and his genius for slamming contexts together, often in ways that ironized fashion itself. One episode related by Givhan, a Pulitzer-winning fashion critic, involves Abloh screen-printing flannels produced for a now defunct Ralph Lauren sub-label to create “new” pieces that sold for more than five hundred dollars. As one of Abloh’s enduring bon mots has it, “Design is the freshest scam. Quote me on that one.”
Exophony, by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions). In these deft essays, Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, wanders through cities and languages, treating every border crossing as an adventure. Meditating on the notion of “exophony”—writing outside one’s native tongue—each installment blends anecdote, literary criticism, and cultural history to examine the “poetic ravine” that exists between languages. Tawada was born in Japan and immigrated to Germany more than forty years ago; as she recounts making her way from Dakar to Seoul, Cape Town to Tübingen, she argues that “human beings in the modern world are repositories for countless languages that unmake and undo one another.”
