50 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
In Keiichiro Hirano’s stylish, suspenseful noir
A Man, a widow discovers her late husband had
used a stolen identity (reviewed on this page).★ Crooked Hallelujah
Kelli Jo Ford. Grove, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-
8021-4912-1
In Plimpton Prize–winner Ford’s gritty,
elegant debut novel in stories, a young
Cherokee woman tries to break a genera-
tional cycle of broken families while
finding strength in an enduring bond
with her mother. Ford opens with “Book
of the Generations,” about Lula, whose
husband abandoned her and her child,
Justine. Justine, 15, rebels against her
mother’s conservative Christianity by
sneaking out one night to meet a boy. After
Justine is raped by the boy, she becomes
pregnant with Reney. Justine’s love for
her daughter is all-encompassing (“I
think it makes Mom proud to say I am—
and always have been—perfect,” Reney
later reflects) while Reney grows into a
life that feels far from perfect. In “Hybrid
Vigor,” she ends up working in a Dairy
Queen in Bonita, Tex.; grieving several
miscarriages; and in a dead-end marriage.
When her physically abusive, unemployed
husband leaves her pet mule to die, Reney
takes it as the last straw. Later, Ford gives
Reney opportunities to pursue a healthy
relationship, an education, and a stronger
understanding of the legacy of her family
and heritage. Ford’s storytelling is urgent,
her characters achingly human and com-
plex, and her language glittering and
rugged. This is a stunner. (July)Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Del Rey, $27 (320p)
ISBN 978-0-525-62078-5
Moreno-Garcia’s energetic romp through
the gothic genre (after Gods of Jade and
Shadow) is delightfully bonkers. In the
1950s, Noemí, a flirtatious socialite and
college student, travels from Mexico City
to rescue her cousin Catalina from the
nightmarish High Place, a remote Mexican
mountain villa. Catalina has recently mar-
ried the chilly, imperiously seductive Virgil
Doyle, heir to a now defunct British silver
mining operation. Beset by mysteriousfevers, Catalina has written to her uncle,
Noemí’s father, telling him, “This house
is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with
every single evil and cruel sentiment.”
Noemí clashes with Virgil’s father,
Howard—who subscribes to theories of
eugenics—along with a set of oddly robotic
British servants. Beset by horrifying dreams
and visions, and unsettled by a peculiar
fungus that grows everywhere, Noemí soon
fears for her own life as well as Catalina’s. In
a novel that owes a considerable debt to the
nightmarish horror and ornate language of
H.P. Lovecraft, the situations in which
Noemí attempts to prevail get wilder and
stranger with every chapter, as High Place
starts exhibiting a mind of its own, and
Noemi learns that Howard is far older than
he appears to be. Readers who find the usual
country house mystery too tame and lan-
guid won’t have that problem here. (June)A Burning
Megha Majumdar. Knopf, $25.95 (290p)
ISBN 978-0-525-65869-6
In Majumdar’s audacious debut, a
politically conscious English tutor who
works with an aspiring film actor is
wrongfully accused of terrorism. After an
ill-advised Facebook post criticizing the
police’s response to a train bombing in
Bengal, Jivan, a Muslim, is charged with
the attack. Jivan has an alibi; she was on
her way to tutor Lovely, whose testimony
might be able to save Jivan from execution.
A right-wing party luminary, hoping to
gain political mileage from the case,
bribes one of Jivan’s former teachers fromgrammar school in exchange for his false
testimony about Jivan, and his lies in
court lead to Jivan being jailed. A large
portion of the chapters devoted to Jivan,
told in the first person, come in the form
of expository monologues to Purnendu, a
reporter. Lovely’s dialect-heavy passages
speak to her difficult life as a hijra (a third
gender in India), and her desire to become a
star despite being marginalized. Majumdar
expertly weaves the book’s various points
of view and plotlines in ways that are both
unexpected and inevitable. This is a
memorable, impactful work. (June)A Man
Keiichiro Hirano, trans. from the Japanese by
Eli K.P. William. Amazon Crossing, $24.95
(302p) ISBN 978-1-54-200688-0
Hirano’s English-language debut, a
shape-shifting psychological thriller,
begins with the death of Daisuké
Taniguchi, a forester crushed by a crypto-
meria tree. After Daisuké’s wife, Rié, tells
Daisuké’s estranged brother the news, Rié
discovers that the man she was married to
was not Daisuké, but someone using the
real Daisuké’s identity. The story follows
Akira Kido, a divorce attorney with a
failing marriage, as she investigates the
identity of the dead man and slowly
becomes obsessed with the case—and with
the real Daisuké. Kido interviews a bar-
tender who makes mouthwatering vodka
gimlets, a con man who believes people
can live to be 300 years old, and a former
pro boxer who, once upon a time, had been
bullied. As back-alley gritty and enter-
taining as a Raymond Chandler novel, the
book asks what it means to be “you,” and
suggests that the answer means nothing
at all. Hirano’s stylish, suspenseful noir
should earn him a stateside audience. (June)Everyone Knows How Much
I Love You
Kyle McCarthy. Ballantine, $27 (288p)
ISBN 978-1-984819-75-8
Rose, the unhinged narrator of
McCarthy’s grimly comic debut, is the
sort of childhood friend best left behind.
In high school, Rose set her sights on Leo,
the boyfriend of her best friend, Lacie.
After Leo “wouldn’t shut up” about Lacie
while Rose was driving him to meet her in
the middle of the night, Rose crashed her
car and ran away, leaving Leo bloodied andFiction
Reviews
© mikiya takimoto