Today I talked to Chikodili Emelumadu about Dazzling (Harry N. Abrams, 2023).

After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38.

A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.

Mustafa was born with a twisted neck and treated with disdain throughout his life. He works long hours as a janitor on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Isaac is a religiously observant new immigrant from New York who stumbles into a position as assistant to a famous rabbi known for curing the uncurable.

At the end of the 16th century, the powerful Medici family demanded that before marrying into the family, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, had to show his prowess by deflowering a virgin. This is her story.

Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives.

In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR.

No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn.

INSIDE THE MIRROR centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime.

Nadia is a young Bosnian refugee who has lost everyone she’s loved. In 1997 she gets into England on a fake passport and finds temp work in a shady office that might be doing something illegal. A new temp shows up and Nadia knows he’s from her country even though he says he’s Armenian. She can tell that he’s Serbian, perhaps the kind that hunted down Bosnians like her. Nadia sees danger everywhere.

It’s 2016, after an attempted coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and because of a tip, the police suddenly show up at the office of a young journalist. Nuray, her fellow journalists, and her visiting friend Adalet are thrown into a notorious prison. They’re placed in separate, filthy and horrifying cells, and Adalet has to confront the possibility of never getting out alive. Her Jewish boyfriend has already left Istanbul and is trying to get her to marry him, but Adelet loves her country. Nuray is alone in the world, but she has to confront the father who disappeared from her life and the soldier who wants to see her punished. This is a novel about regular people trying to live their lives in the aftermath of Turkey’s takeover by a populist, authoritarian leader.

In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police.

After her mother dies in a tragic accident, Anna cleans out her closet and finds a striking painting that she’d never seen before. She also finds a trove of letters from Stefan Terre, a name she’s never heard.

Nineteen-year-old pianist Marie-Thérèse has dropped out of her prestigious conservatory in favor of becoming a nurse, much to her mother’s disappointment. As she begins her final year of study, Germany invades Belgium on its way to France. It’s 1914, and Marie-Thérèse’s world is upended by harsh rules and demands that students and staff spy on each other.

"We can't all be heroes. Some try and succeed. Others posture and pretend. And a few--just a few--set off on their hero's quest only to discover that failure was within them all along."