April Fiction

A romping Bollywood epic, a sinister family drama, secrets at an Italian villa, and more

Edison

by Pallavi Sharma Dixit
Read it if you’re into: Indian culture, television & film, feel good stories

Sweet and sensitive Prem, the black sheep son of one of New Delhi’s most successful business magnates, has never really fit in with the rest of his high-powered family. While he’s content to watch and dream of Indian cinema day in and day out, his father is intent on having him join the family business and finally make something of himself. When he gets what seems like the opportunity of a lifetime—to make a movie in America—he jumps at the chance, only to crash land on a stranger’s living room sleeping under a bag of onions with ten other immigrants.

What follows is one of the most delightful, charming, and big hearted novels I’ve read in a long, long time: an inexplicable joy from start to finish. Set in the Indian enclave of Edison, New Jersey, it follows Prem and a motley but lovable supporting cast, all cheering each other on in their individual quests for the American dream. This is a Disney-movie for adults, a hopeful story full of miraculous life that manages to inspire without being corny. It feels like being transported into a Bollywood epic, a rare and unique book with the staying power of a classic for the ages.

Wolf at the Table

by Adam Rapp
Read it if you’re into: Dark and gritty literary fiction, haunting coming of age stories, multigenerational epics

Herein we follow the Larkins, a large Catholic family with roots plunged deep in the soil of Elmira, New York. We meet the siblings, starting in 1951, as they grow and change and embark on divergent paths. There is Myra, the oldest and perhaps most central, who becomes a prison nurse in Chicago. Then Lexy, who follows her fate to marriage with a successful businessman and a picture-perfect family life. And Fiona, a rambling hippie who never has enough money in her pocket. And finally, Alec, a peripatetic drifter who wanders into a life of violence.

Razor sharp and often disturbing, Wolf at the Table is taut as a violin string for all of its nearly 500 pages. It is a multigenerational tale done well, long and sometimes fragmented, spanning half a century, but never bogged down. On its face the story of a family, this is a rumination on violence and evil and their far reaching impacts, and a profound contemplation on nature vs nurture.

I Give It To You

by Valerie Martin

Read it if you’re into: Italian culture, historical fiction & World War II, the nature of stories and who they belong to

Jan, an American writer, rents a small apartment on a Tuscan estate owned by the friend of a friend, in order to work on her novel in peace. She is soon entranced by the owner of Villa Chiara, the sharp, mercurial and meticulously dressed Beatrice. Over beautifully described aperitivi, Beatrice tells Jan the story of the villa during the second World War, as well as the strange and mysterious tale of her uncle, shot to death on the property many years ago.

I Give It To You captures that luminous, intangible something about Italy just perfectly. Cocooned in its transportive setting, a reader is invited to get lost in the lemon trees and the capricious ways of the Italians. The title is a reference to Beatrice’s casual remark that makes Jan believe she can use the stories she’s told in her own writing. This book is less about the characters and more about what makes a story a story and who, really, owns it. It’s a writers’ book, storytelling in its purest sense, one to be savored and lost in.

Penitence

by Kristin Koval
Read it if you’re into: Emotional family dramas, secretive characters in atmospheric settings, meditations on guilt and forgiveness

In rural Colorado, Angie and David Sheehan’s lives are upended when their 13-year-old daughter Nora shoots and kills their 14-year-old son Nico inside his bedroom. Torn between mourning their son and protecting their daughter, they quickly enlist the help of a older local lawyer on the brink of retirement. The lawyer also happens to be the mother of Angie’s first great love, from whom she was wrenched years ago over a long buried secret.

Secrets, guilt, and grief lay over this book like a thick veil, sorrow seeping through its fabric. Everyone is harboring something undisclosed that holds the key to understanding their actions, and these backstories are as deeply compelling as the central story of Nora and Nico, if not moreso. Some of the characters are left to twist in the wind with scant attention that can feel frustrating to a reader wanting to know more. It’s a conflicting book, one I’m not entirely sure whether I’m satisfied with, but thought provoking and transfixing all the same. We as readers are left to decide: What does it really mean to forgive? And how much does a person’s past define their future?