Pamuk's latest translation from Turkish into English, Nights of Plague (coming out October 4th, 2022) is an epic both historical and contemporary. I need not remind anyone reading this that we are still, as a global community, navigating the Covid-19 pandemic (and monkey pox is making rounds again as well!) The timing must be viewed as deliberate; Pamuk's commentary embedded within this novel can only be seen as prescient or proof of an uncanny insight into the human psyche as it relates to existential threat.

In short, Nights of Plague is epic.

The stories that unfolds within its pages are reminiscent of epic prose as well. Pamuk's novel is spun around a royal Ottoman princess, Pakize and her husband, Prince Consort and medical doctor, Nuri; however, the tale is more accurately about the unravelling of a community and its denizens as they face possible annihilation and suffering from a breakout of plague. The locale of this event is a fictitious island, Mingheria, an outpost of the Ottoman empire that reflects the empire as a whole: multicultural in its constitution with ancient and new settlers of Greek, Muslim, Eastern European, African, Christian, and Colonial European descent; in precarious harmony with the multiple discordant voices, needs, and ambitions of politicians, medical professionals, ordinary citizens, foreign heads of state and their ambassadors, Ottoman royals, and immigrants; and gorgeous and complex in its rich history. Mingheria is a plague-beset limb of an empire popularly described as "the sick man."

Pamuk's tale of Mingheria does not confine itself to the accounts of elite royals, though it is ostensibly based on recently unearthed archival records and it is told as a historical monograph, through the eyes and pen of one of Princess Pakize's descendants. Pamuk regales the reader with stories of its other denizens too: its merchants and common folk. There is the security guard of the local prison and the tale of him and his family as they struggle to survive and live their lives in the wake of plague and death. There are the doctors who work to eradicate the plague, demand quarantines. There is the governor too, all too human in his own ambition and fear.

Nights of Plague is about Mingheria and its people, how their present fears and dilemma(s) are shaped by their history of ethnic division and unity, religious and ideological differences, their universal humanity. They react based on their subjective desires, but are also creatures of their communities, their actions are shaped by the expectations of those around them, their enemies, their allies.

Our unknown narrator writes as a historian might do, providing context where necessary, but imbues the academic narrative with a novelist's attention to texture, aroma, and the sensation of place. Mingheria is as real as the Ottoman Empire can be to a modern reader: the spicy, heady fragrance of a time and place that no longer exists is palpable.

Nights of Plague is a more gorgeous, more exotic -- and historical -- reflection of our own contemporary experience with Covid-19. The arguments between medical professionals, politicians, and the citizenry in this novel are all too familiar to anyone who has been watching the news for the past three years. The heated debates, the refusals to quarantine, the seeming indifference of the populace to the threat of death and suffering might make a reader feel queasy. The Lacanian recognition is jarring. But perhaps, for all of us, this is a necessary cognitive event in order to reconcile the past with the present and future. Pamuk delivers that lesson with poetic grace in Nights of Plague.

I have been keen to read this book for some time. Small Country was published in 2016 in France and in French, and translated into English by Sarah Ardizzone in 2018. I saw it on the Book of the Month website and it immediately caught my eye. It’s not often that African literature — especially a novel focused on something as horrific as the Rwandan Genocide and the Burundian Civil War, both connected in their origins of ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi — finds a way into mainstream, popular book culture.

It was worth the wait. Small Country delivers a powerful, immersive, historical experience. I felt as if I were there, transported back to the early 1990s, growing up with Gaby, a silent witness to the terror and happiness of his childhood. We are not so far apart in age that his childhood feels foreign to me, and there is a common experience in living in former colonies, French or British, that pervades the postcolonial world. Faye’s prose helped a lot; I could smell the fruity air of tropical Burundi, sense the light dusting of brownish-red earth on my skin as Gaby and his crew ran down the roads of their neighbourhood, the scorching heat of the sun, a trickle of sweat run down my neck.

But of course, Gaby’s path and my own diverge wildly on the occasion of war. Faye’s portrayal of that period of time and conflict was palpable. By that point in the novel, the characters felt like friends: ordinary and familiar like those who populate our own worlds. They were likeable and hateful, annoying and lovable, flawed and perfectly so — and then they were thrown, involuntarily, into an unimaginable violence. Much like Gaby and his family and friends, the war approached slowly, then arrived suddenly. The effect is jarring — purposefully — on the reader. The events of the novel force the reader to wonder, “What if this were me? What would I do?”

The story follows the chronological path of Gaby’s life, a mixed-race boy of French and Rwandan parentage, growing up in Burundi. It spans his early life from about age four or five to the time of the Genocide, when he is a teenager and evacuated to France. The novel is one that revolves around the nuances of race and interracial relationships, the push and pull that is inherent in transcultural lives, and the desire for a sense of place when one is trapped in a Venn diagram of multiple belongings. Gaby’s mother is one of these out-of-place women, French by marriage and in part by design, but also Rwandan and not-Rwandan, Burundian by default and yet rejected by Burundians on account of her Rwandan origins. Gaby’s father also straddles multiple worlds, first as a colonial settler in a time when such settlements can no longer exist as they were; he is out-of-time, rather than out-of-place. Second, in the matter of class, Gaby’s father possesses status, but only on the African continent, not in France. Gaby, the protagonist of the novel, is also caught between worlds on account of his mixed-race, his socio-economic class as the son of a middle-lower-upper-class businessman, and because of his nationality being a French passport-holding Burundian. The characters exist in a kind of suspension. This uncertainty is, on the one hand, brought on by the war, but it existed before as well, as people in this community reconcile their ethnic history or their settler status with the new postcolonial order of things.

Small Country is about the loss of one place of belonging when another one exists. It is about loss of the things (including people and practices and languages) that bind us to one another and to ourselves. It is about how we individually must grapple with that loss, how we deal with it or how it deals with us. Every character in this novel loses something or someone (a spouse, a child, a family member, or themselves), gains something (freedom, independence, clarity of self, madness, grief), and plods onwards in life because there is no option to do otherwise. The reader cannot help but recognize their suffering and their experience.

Small Country is about refugees, both the kind we see in the news and the kind we do not see, those who occupy our own worlds and are, in a sense, “hidden in plain sight.” Faye presents to the reader a reflection of themselves, turning the refugee of the news into an all-too-familiar face, our own. Perhaps as we encounter refugees in our lives, those of the news-kind as well as others, we might find common ground with them on the basis of this shared humanity.

Thrillers are not usually my jam, but after reading Truth is a Flightless Bird I wonder if they should be! This novel was a breathless rush from beginning to end. I can see how this would make a fantastic television series and I am looking forward to seeing the unravelling around Duncan, Ciru, and Nice on the screen. I even want to see Toogood -- which is a commendation to Hussain's skill at writing terrific flawed villains.

The novel is explosive from the get-go. Nice is a drug mule flying from Mogadishu (Somalia) to Nairobi (Kenya) and Duncan, her friend and a pastor, is unwittingly dragged into the mess that she has made of this illicit mission. The story revolves around Duncan's nightmare as drug dealers, corrupt officials, petty thieves, and others attempt to take advantage of Nice and the dangerous situation which naturally results from ingesting and walking around with drugs in your body. Ciru is one of those individuals who attempts to use Nice and the drugs to further her own agenda. She is a witch doctor, a con-woman, a mother who has lost her wayward child due to the machinations of others further up in the drug-smuggling world. Toogood is a Somalian gangster, also trapped in this convoluted drug-criminal world trying to make amends for a past he had little control over. Then there is Edmund, a young man deported from the United States, and Hinga, a corrupt police officer, and a crew of other characters who each come into the tale with their own ambitions.

As a thriller, there isn't much interiority to these characters, but the reader will discover that no one is who they seem to be on the surface. The truth matters very little in this underbelly world; what matters is using what you have to get what you need or what you want. I don't usually try to read too much into thrillers; but, it is here -- in this discussion of the utility of truth -- that Hussain's title has to give the reader pause to reflect. There is something being said here about the futility of struggling against tides that are out of our control. Truth is one of those obstacles, or at least, the idea that there is a single Truth, capital T. All the characters of this novel, Duncan, Nice, Ciru, and Toogood, have found themselves in situations less than ideal, despite their best efforts. The truth, their truth, does not matter to the forces and people who hold the reins of their lives. It should not even matter to themselves; to survive Nairobi they've got to let go of the idea that there is only one truth, one version of events, one version of a person. They have to let go of an idea of themselves that either doesn't really exist or will drag them down. In a way, their blind pursuit of truth stifles them, prevents them from taking flight -- being free.

The novel also makes a subtle comment on the corruptibility of the human soul -- and the possibility of redemption. As events unfold, it becomes clear that the characters are more than what they appear. They are flawed, corrupted, but that doesn't mean they are wholly bad people. The bad decisions they've made in their lives should not define them, but inevitably do. The novel is about their attempts to right their wrongs. Some of them succeed, some of them fail -- and spectacularly. Entwined in a drug-smuggling mess the characters find that one error leads to another one, deeper and darker and more dangerous than the last.

Plot and characters aside, Truth is a Flightless Bird is a fantastic novel of place. It gives the reader a view into a world most of us will never get to see or experience in person: the seedy underworld of Nairobi and Mogadishu. I don't doubt these worlds really exist. Every city in the world has its unsavory parts, its criminal societies, and there are good people everywhere who are drowned in it. People like Nice and Duncan and Ciru. Even Hinga and Toogood. The interactions of the characters, the crimes committed, and Hussain's prose take the reader there, immerse them in it for a brief moment.

This novel devastated me. And in the most profound and satisfying way. I could not put this book down; despite being a hefty read at 368 pages I devoured it in a weekend. This novel is a serious contender for my Book of The Year.

Razak’s Moth is set in Partition era India and Pakistan, the former mostly. Its events unfold in the year leading up to India’s independence in 1947 and the year directly after it, a violent and terrible time when Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians violated each other’s homes, families, bodies, and holy places of worship. Moth does not shy away from the terror or the brutality of this history; its story is premised on gendered violence, sexual violence, the kind wrought on women and girls before and since Partition.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart. Readers should prepare to feel chilled to their marrows at the cruelty Razak lays bare.

At the same time, Moth is an empowering read. This is a feminist novel. Not only is it told from the perspective of a young girl desperate to become a woman, Alma, it revolves around the actions of the women in her life and in her community. Alma comes from a high caste Brahmin family, a pair of progressive-minded parents who are highly-educated and who view their India as a place of ethnic, class, and caste equality. But Alma is a victim of her own immaturity and her Brahmin, Hindu grandmother’s ambitions and traditionalism. The history of India at this junction of conflict between colonial rule and independence, Hindu and Muslim segregation or peace, traditionalism or modernity plays out in Alma’s family’s words and deeds. The story opens and hinges upon Alma’s wedding to a Brahmin man, much older than herself.

Here is the first of the gendered debates the reader will encounter in this novel. Marriage, in its traditional and modern forms, the domains of power which men and women occupy — according to their familial rank, their class, their caste, they religion — is one of the fascinating, golden threads of this novel. Alma’s mother is unique in her historical time and place: She is a lecturer at a university, she works. Her marriage to Alma’s father is a foil to to the other marriages in the novel where wives are beaten, raped, abused in other myriad ways.

Moth is also compelling for its frank discussions of caste and class. Ethnicity, religion, race, nativism and xenophobia also serve as the fabric on which the patterns of its stories are told. While Moth is a historical fiction, these threads are visible in India today; this is not merely a fiction of the past, but also a commentary on Indian politics and society right now. Moth is truly an intersectional novel, one which weaves history into the present, one whose characters are shaped by their age, their experiences, religion, gender, ethnicity, and caste.

The characters are complex and developed. Even Razak’s villains are soft and vulnerable. In this novel no one is who they seem, even to themselves. The primary cast consists of Alma’s immediate and servile family: Her father whom we meet mostly as Bappu, simply, “father” and her Ma, named Tanisi; her sister, fondly nicknamed, Roop; her paternal grandmother, a matriarch in their home and her dead husband, the ghost of her Alma’s grandfather, a silent but present and poignant character in the events of the novel; their servants, Dilchain, a Hindu woman and Fatima Begum, a Muslim woman.

Religion and culture shape these characters, give them their reasons for compliance and rebellion, motivate them in their actions. Community expectations and subjective desires come into conflict within these characters, in some cases these poles are reconciled or exist in uneasy harmony. Razak places the reader in the midst of palpable, relatable characters who walk us through their lives as if we were there in the room with them. In Razak’s prose we can taste India, envision the hot sun and the colors of its markets and streets, feel the moisture of sweat and floral fragrance on our skin. Razak brings the reader so close to the characters we might detect their bodily scent or feel their eyes on our skin. In the characters’ actions and thoughts we, the readers, can recognize universal needs and motivations: teenage longing, maternal affection, filial piety, desire for belonging and approval — even while we are treated to a view into a world that is not our own, one that is past and gone, an India of long-ago and far-away.

That said, Moth is brilliant in its nuanced portrayal of India and Indian life and culture. It rejects the exoticism that so often plagues Indian literature, colonial and postcolonial alike. Instead its honest portrayal of Indian people and their experiences connect them to others; we may not know anything of the first hand experience of war, but through Moth we get a real feel for what that might look like, feel like, smell like. Razak’s India is a terrible, beautiful place. Its people are inhuman and yet, all the more human for their cruelty. In these pages the reader will encounter suffering, but, also inspiration. I was awed by the strength of the women and men in Moth. I felt hope, even while I cried as a witness to their pain. They were transformed by their experiences, in good and bad ways.

Moth highlights the catalytic effect of history in the most bitter-sweet way. This is a book you will regret and never regret reading. 

Tabemasho! Let's Eat! reminds me of one of the very first times I went out to eat in America. I'd been in the country for a few days, maybe a week and I was taken out to dinner at a local Chinese American restaurant. I was thrilled, having never had Chinese American food before. At the end of the meal my hosts asked me, "What kind of fortune cookies do y'all have over there?" I was stunned, "We don't have them in Asia." Then they were shocked, having always assumed that fortune cookies were authentic desserts from the exotic East. The culture shock on both sides of that encounter and the histories behind the assumptions made around food are what Asakawa's Tabemasho! Let's Eat! brings to the forefront.

Though there is a serious side to Asakawa's Tabemasho! Let's Eat!, the book is a fun, fun read. Asakawa's prose is super-casczz, chummy, and hilarious. Reading him is like having a beer with a friend who's found a great place to eat and can't wait to take you there. Asakawa was quick at the elbow with a witty comment. He was there to give the reader the low-down tale behind a (his)story.

I appreciated was the book's serious side too. I enjoyed how unafraid Asakawa was to speak his mind on the tougher topics of cultural appropriation and America's racist history of Asian exclusion. Indeed, much of Asakawa's point is that Japanese American cuisine and culture is borne out of that dark period.

The book is split into thematic chapters, each one taking on a different dish like Noodles or Bowls of Rice (don), or Sushi. Asakawa also devotes a chapter to Japanese American history and the ways in which transcultural cuisine develops through migration, separation, and racism. The sushi and noodle chapters are especially extensive, providing the reader with tips on where to go and what to expect, types of dishes, the differences between Japanese and American interpretations of various dishes, as well as histories of these dishes from both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

There are also chapters on lesser known delectables such as Japanese soft drinks. I was so happy to read about Pocari Sweat -- one of my childhood favorites, sold in Southeast Asia by the case! -- which is (I think), the inspiration for one of my favorite fizzy drinks, 100 Plus. I can't describe how they taste; they're a cross of salty sweetness, their appeal much like chocolate-covered pretzels. I grew up in South Korea for a time as well and there I became familiar with Yakult, Calpico and the whole plethora of yogurt-based drinks that are so popular in East Asian culture. Reading these chapters was like sipping at a memory of my childhood.

The chapter on baked desserts and pastries made my mouth water. Stopping at a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese bakery is one my favorite weekend treats. The soft, sweet, white bread that melts in your mouth is a paradise. The red bean pastes, creams, and the custards are unique interpretations of Chinese, French, and European treats.

Asakawa also provides the reader with an extensive (though non-academic) bibliography and reference list so the reader can let themselves wander further on this culinary path.

Jollof rice is the stuff my dreams are made of. The whiff of tomato, chili, white-, and black pepper, piquant and nose-tickling, the aroma of ginger and garlic and onion. Jollof is West African, but the recipe and desire for it is universal. In my case my dreaming mind classifies jollof rice as nasi goreng, Malaysian style with Maggi's cili sos, a sweet and spicy ketchup. Chunks of browned chicken thighs, that crust of flesh and crispy skin, dotted with red grains of rice.

Coming from a rice-eating culture I like to think of myself as a specialist in the business of rice-eating and rice dishes. As a historian and reader of postcolonial literature and archival text, I like to think myself an expert in those domains too. But, I remain amazed by what I do not know; there is always a new rice dish, a new recipe, a new flavor to make my tongue and memories alight. There is always a new perspective, a newly discovered history, another layer of human experience to see, enjoy, and revel in.

Ogunyemi's Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions is that new rice dish, that new revelation. You see, the stories in Ogunyemi's novel are like jollof rice, grains tossed together, held together in harmony by a dry sauce. Sweet and salty and spicy, a mouthful of emotions that are sometimes in conflict, sometimes piquant, but always in balance.

The novel is familiar and comforting in its focus on men and women of color, their lives indelibly part of the muss and tumble of Nigerian marketplaces, cities, and villages, so similar to those in Southeast Asia, where chickens are still sold live, butchered and feathered at the time of purchase. A place where fish and seafood lie on slabs of ice that are slowly sweating like the people haggling with each other over their prices. There is the aroma of overly sweet fruit in the air: jack fruit, bananas, some kind of incense. There is smoke and pungent exhaust from a motorbike put-put-putting away. A glot of languages rumbles in the background, ever-present as there is no reprieve for the ears in places like these: dialects, pidgins, mix-n-matches of accents and lilts. On occasion there is a puncture of British English (always British it seems), and a few heads turn to see the foreigner. (It is usually me.) Like a Nigerian market place, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions is dominated by women and their stories; men are present, they form part of the fabric of the novel, but it is the women and their experiences who thread the pattern and the connections between motifs in its cloth.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions is a collection of Nigerian and transnational Nigerian, historical and contemporary experiences, spanning from a time under the British and under British influence (for Britishness and Western-centrism continued even after decolonization) to the present -- and here is where it gets really interesting -- the future. Ogunyemi's novel recalls to mind another like it, Yaa Gyasi's Home Going (2016), but it differs on this particular point: Ogunyemi reaches into the future and lets the reader dwell on our current states through poignant examinations of the present.

Jollof Rice ranges across multiple generations, includes the lives of members of different and intertwined families. The reader is given a glimpse into the past when precolonial gender relations were more fluid. The reader accompanies characters in their education under the British, travels with them as they become transnational cosmopolitans, and will find themselves in the uncomfortably familiar place of racialized, racist America. The reader will find themselves in a near future moment, built on the present and past as we know it.

Sometimes, alongside the odor of modernity and vehicle exhaust, there is a faint scent of history and the supernatural, that which exists beyond the usual plane of our understanding. This is like biting down on a pepper seed in your rice, getting that jolt of zing on the tongue. You can't be sure if it was a seed or a pepper or a tiny grit of sand. You hope it was the former and not the latter, but then the moment is gone, the thing is swallowed and you continue on with your meal, with your life. The next story is waiting on your spoon. I deeply appreciated how Ogunyemi wove these elements into the novel; what the West deems supernatural is not so in many parts of the "formerly" colonized world. Spirits, ghosts, and memory were part of our cultures before and remain so.

Ogunyemi's characters and their experiences are what give the novel its unique quality. The characters connect to each other through their shared experiences in schools, in migration, in marriage and love, in childhood and navigating adulthood, in how they reconcile their colonial pasts with their "post"colonial presents and futures. Ogunyemi brings the Nigeria of the past into the present and future through their transnational and transcultural journeys. The characters are related by bonds which are sometimes considered casual; in Jollof Rice unbreakable relationships are broken, death is a cause for life, and disappointment is a gateway to revival. In this way, Ogunyemi delivers to the reader the nuances of human love and its endurance across time and space, makes a case for their eternal universality.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions makes me want to grab a friend and say, "You must try this! It's new!" And how special must it be, that it has taken the old topic of history and identity and made an original spin on it?