Gripping New Fiction

Victor LaValle’s novel, The Changeling, is a dark fairy tale of New York, in which a father quest for his wife and child takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever. Lisa Ko‘s powerful debut, winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, follows one young man’s search for his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappears when he’s 11 years old. Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling depicts a fourteen-year-old girl, trapped in the thrall of her tortured father, in a heart-stopping fight for her own soul.