Convenience Store Woman, the English-language debut of Japanese writer Murata, is brilliant, witty, and sweet in ways that recall Amélie and Shopgirl. Keiko, a Tokyo woman in her 30s, finds her calling as a checkout girl at a national convenience store chain called Smile Mart: Quirky Keiko, who has never fit in, can finally pretend to be a normal person. Her story of conforming for convenience (literally) is one that women all over the world know all too well, as is her family’s pressure to get married and settle down, but Murata’s sparkly writing and knack for odd, beautiful details are totally her own.
Before she’d even published in the U.S., New Zealand novelist Young had been lauded here—winning the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2017. Like a Lena Dunham from Down Under, Young’s writing explores fragility and resilience with a visceral, bodily focus. Her essays are both grounded in particulars—there are ruminations on Katherine Mansfield, arm hair, and the oppression of attempting to work in the same space as someone else—and universal.
Arceneaux is a hysterically funny, vulnerable writer whose memoir is a triumph of self-exploration, tinged with but not overburdened by his reckoning with our current political moment. His story of growing up black and gay in Houston, in his very Catholic family, is more than a little heartbreaking at times, though knowing that Arceneaux has come through the other side as a successful author with such a strong sense of self makes it ultimately uplifting. He navigates with crucial nuance his many worlds as they’ve hemmed him in, made him stronger, and brought him to new places. The result is a piece of personal and cultural storytelling that is as fun as it is illuminating.
Amid the raft of motherhood memoirs out this summer, it’s refreshing to read a book unapologetically dedicated to the fulfillment of single life. Like a more zoomed-in chapter from Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies, MacNicol’s offering is a personable, entertaining reflection on the author’s 40th year. Though she is known for her exacting, emotional, and poignant writing on things like career burnout and parental illness, as well as founding the women’s networking organization The List, this memoir allows MacNicol a broader and looser canvas.
When Davis left her urban, magazine-editing life, she wanted to do something more fundamental. Rather than tell people what to eat, where to travel, and how to lead their best lives, she wanted to, well, learn how to carve a pig. The quest took her to a slaughterhouse in Gascony, France, where, under the tutelage of some no-nonsense meat-revering brothers, she learned the art and labor of butchery. Back in the U.S., she founded the Portland Meat Collective, a school that would extend the lessons she had absorbed and bring the experience of eating and cooking meat away from mass production and into people’s hands and homes. Davis writes with the precision and pacing of a former editor, but one who has gained experience that extends well beyond Manhattan skyscrapers.
A dense, powerful novel, Citkowitz’s The Shades tells the story of married couple Catherine and Michael Hall and their lives following their daughter’s death. This is only Citkowitz’s second book—her debut, Ether, was published in 2010—but it reads like the work of a writer with a much lengthier pedigree. In fact, Citkowitz possesses literary bona fides that are not immediately apparent, having worked as a screenwriter and coming from bookish stock: Her mother was Anglo-Irish novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood and her stepfather was poet Robert Lowell.
This debut novel from Colombian writer Contreras—original, politically daring, and passionately written—is the coming-of-age female empowerment story we need in 2018, infusing a genre that feels largely tapped out with much-needed life. The author creates a lush but very harsh world—Pablo Escobar’s Bogota of the 1990s—that could feel familiar (see: Narcos) if not for her heroines, who make the story new again. Two young women, one wealthy and one not, try to survive in increasingly unstable times, and what unfolds is an intimate story that also feels global, showing how women in particular are caught up in violence and resource exploitation.
Dangarembga’s first novel, Nervous Conditions, published when she was in her 20s, has since become part of the national canon of Zimbabwe, called by Doris Lessing “the novel we have all been waiting for.” (It also recently ranked on the BBC’s The 100 Stories That Shaped the World.) Set in what was then called Rhodesia, before the country ended white rule, that first book follows her protagonist, Tambudzai Sigauke, as she embarks upon her education. Dangarembga has returned to that central character in her latest book, opening with her living in a squalid youth hostel in Harare, confronting the limits of her hoped-for future.
When Jeanne McCulloch’s mother insisted that her father go off alcohol cold turkey before her daughter’s wedding, it sent Mr. McCulloch into a coma. But the show—or wedding—must go on, at least according to Jeanne’s high-drama mother, and so while her father lay in Southampton Hospital, Jeanne walked down the aisle and into her short-lived marriage. Set mostly over the course of the wedding weekend in 1983, the memoir expands to tell a bigger story about society in the late 20th century. Partly a breezy scene piece, partly a meditation on the familial forces that make us who we are, All Happy Families is a distinct and evocative work.
Is seaweed the new kale? The market for edible seaweed, according to Shetterly’s Seaweed Chronicles, is about $5 billion per year. (Some think the longevity of the Japanese people can be traced to their consumption of the algae.) This book is no diet manifesto, however; instead it’s a lovely, first-person consideration of the diaphanous organisms—and an evaluation of their environmental history and promise: A carbon-absorbing environmental superhero, macro-algae biofuel may fuel your VWs and Hondas in the future, to boot.
New England native Nicole Hennessy is devoted to her Buddhist practice and a particularly demanding guru. But after several years as the Master’s most dedicated pupil—and sometimes sexual partner—she finds herself needing to sever the connection and move on with her life. A belated coming-of-age novel with a quest at its core, The Devoted is an assured and promising debut.
Riffing off of Virginia Woolf’s desire for “a room of one’s own,” renowned literary biographer Tomalin’s memoir recounts how she ironically found herself in bringing other, mostly dead people back to life in her work. The writer is a master craftswoman, and it’s a thrill to see her prose and capacity for moving storytelling turned on her own life. Delving into the more difficult parts of her past—her husband, a journalist, was killed in Israel in 1973, leaving her on her own with their four children—Tomalin also re-creates a few raucous London literary scenes (particularly in the ’70s and ’80s) and discusses falling in love again in her 50s. If it leads you to read some of her biographies (Jane Austen is a favorite), you’ll be better off.