5 books from debut authors worth leafing through this fall
Fall brings a slew of new books to read. Here are some of the best tomes by debut authors making their mark this season.
‘What We Fed to the Manticore,’ by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (Tin House Books, $16.95):
From the melting Arctic to the bomb-ridden Gaza Strip to a Kenyan wildlife sanctuary, this collection tells stories of human suffering, connection and cruelty, but it tells them through the voices of animals. A hound at a wildlife sanctuary charged with protecting rhinoceroses, a starving tiger in the Sundarbans, a donkey at zoo in Gaza, a polar bear watching as his world melts around him — all of Kolluri’s stories are taken from real-life events around the world, sometimes mixing together different stories, myths and tragedies. Though each story is told by and from the perspectives of the animals, you can’t help but see the human imprint in each of them. We are there in the backgrounds — the cause of the melting glaciers, the caretaker at the zoo and the bombers threatening its existence, the protectors of the wildlife and the poachers that threaten it. This collection lays bare the inextricable human-animal connection.
‘Daughters of the New Year,’ by E.M. Tran (Hanover Square Press, $27.99, available Oct. 11):
A haunted journey through a family’s history, the book travels from present day New Orleans and the experiences of three second-generation Vietnamese American daughters back through their matrilineal line and across the Atlantic to the Vietnam War and colonial and
pre-colonial Vietnam. The way is guided by specters of Vietnamese women past as the daughters and their mother seem to become ghosts themselves the further you read into their ancestry. As their history becomes apparent to the reader, the daughters and even the mother remain in the dark about their ancestors’ secrets and lives, making the reader feel much more keenly how much was lost through colonization, war, racism and displacement.
‘White Horse’, by Erika T. Wurth (Flatiron Books, $27.99, available Nov. 1):
Equal parts horror and magical realism with a noir edge, Wurth’s debut with a major publisher sees its heroine face screaming ghosts, creeping shadows and a monster that smells of human flesh and that’s rarely made itself known outside of Indigenous communities. But there’s more to it than the supernatural. There on the edges of the pages haunts the real horror story of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States, Canada and Latin America. Of Apache/ Chickasaw/Cherokee descent, Wurth also draws on her own upbringing to bring a raw realism to her depictions of urban Indigenous life in the West.
‘The Mountain in the Sea,’ by Ray Nayler (MCD, $28, available Oct. 4):
I haven’t read this one yet, but the premise is too good to pass up. Remember the not-sobrief preoccupation with zombies and vampires in the early 2010s? Well, I think we have a new combo to capture our imaginations — androids and octopuses. Nayler’s novel sends the world’s first android a few leagues under the sea to break bread with a newly discovered (and rapidly proliferating) species of highly intelligent octopuses that may have developed their own language and culture.
‘Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood,’ by Chelsea Conaboy (Henry Holt and Co., $27.99):
Asa mom of a toddler with one on the way, I’m interested in a book about the legitimate science behind the thinly veiled insult/excuse of “mom brain.” I also happen to have a degree in behavioral neuroscience. As a demographic that is often trivialized, minimized and outright forgotten about in society, mothers deserve a book that takes a popular look at the science of how making a person with your body fundamentally changes your body’s chemistry and your brain. With a fair amount of disinformation out there about motherhood making women less suited for the workforce, here’s hoping we see a good amount of myth busting in this debut from journalist, public health enthusiast and mother Conaboy.