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. It is a National Book Award finalist.
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)
This was the book I read at nights while I wrote a huge chunk of All This Could Be Different. The Shipping News took me to the harsh chill of Newfoundland, and the hunger for a new life, and I gladly went. It is moving, muscular, fiercely idiosyncratic, and scream-out-loud funny. Incredible literature, and everyone should read it. Buy it here.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (2008)
Masterly — perhaps one of the greatest New York City novels. Come for the cricket. 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. Buy it here.
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