'I write as an ugly one for the ugly ones,' Despentes spits in an absolute banger of an opening. King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes (2006) It's a slim blade of a book at 224 pages: mordantly funny, utterly unforgettable. His younger brother tells the story of a family in fiendish pain and their individual journeys into the future. Their older son has a grotesque and life-changing accident. Family Life by Akhil Sharma (2014)Ī family immigrates from India to the U.S.

Stay for the towers falling, for Netherland's charismatic, Trinidadian take on Jay Gatsby, for the sweet and haunted narrator, Hans van den Broek, and for O'Neill's long and elegant opera gloves of sentences. Masterly - perhaps one of the greatest New York City novels. Incredible literature, and everyone should read it. It is moving, muscular, fiercely idiosyncratic, and scream-out-loud funny. The Shipping News took me to the harsh chill of Newfoundland, and the hunger for a new life, and I gladly went. This was the book I read at nights while I wrote a huge chunk of All This Could Be Different. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.Ī beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant's journey to make her home in the world.Sarah Thankam Mathews' debut novel, All This Could Be Different, is the coming-of-age story of a young woman from India who after finishing college moves to Milwaukee just as the Great Recession hits. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. Painful secrets rear their heads jobs go off the rails evictions loom.

She begins dating women-soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.īut before long, trouble arrives. She's moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. 'Sarah Thankam Mathews' prose is undeniable.' -Raven Leilani, author of Lusterįrom a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself-a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America 'An extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving.' -Lauren Groff, author of Matrix

Sarah thankam mathews books