THE DEPOPULATION, interesting fictional treatment of factual event

THE DEPOPULATION
MARINA CLOSS (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Bellevue Literary Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From a major new talent in Latin American literature comes a tale of cultures, languages, spirits, and the natural world on the brink of transformation

“Of all the happy, hermitic lands, the Guayrá was the jewel.”

So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle.

Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world.

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My Review: A story of two halves: in the beginning were words describing a vanished jungle world, evoking heat humidity and the stunning void of loss and emptiness...I was utterly drawn into this world, so much so that my summer shirt-changing schedule ramped up. So sweaty in sympathy was I that I couldn't read the story in bed for obvious reasons. The evocation of the world where the colonizers and the colonized agreed that god(s) speak to us and through some of us they choose left me rapt.

Comes the arrival of Overá and the languid, interesting story of these spiritual imperialists trying to fill a void...a void of hierarchy...turns slower, because the focus stops being on Ruiz and Maceta working to learn about and build over the world they've chosen to be in. This is also when the main body of colonizers, rapacious boring caricatures to a man, arrive to rape, pillage, and clap.

It's ironic that my favorite part was when the spiritual imperialists were center stage. Given my antipathy to the religion the men were foisting on already traumatized people, it does not make any sense to me that the secular depredations, more kinetic in their lineaments, should be the part where my attention flagged. The truth is, if the focus had shifted to the acts and actions of these horrifying greed-machines in action, I'd've put the book down never to be picked up again. Tale as old as time, beauty destroyed by beasts; I've read it, no need for more.

Author Closs titled the book accurately. The story of these white-savior priests leading the great unwashed (in the blood of The Lamb, repulsive image that is) native people away from the slavers and the greedy just...well, it felt try-hard. They're good for trying to use their knowledge of what the colonizers are up to as a means to protect their charges from it.

It's the "their charges" bit that sorta messes up my pleasure in the story. Overá (it feels like there's a Portuguese pun in that name, I'm sure of it, something like "truth-teller" or "honest guy" but it can't quite form in my mind because I don't know enough) and his delusions popped me out of the story because my frame of reference...I've known schizophrenic men, with delusions they're certain are THE Truth, so Overá is familiar to me. The flipside of familiarity in this case is lack of ability to see through the story's deistic-sovereignty lens. I see through my twenty-first century mental-illness lens the disordered thinking of a paranoid person's delusions.

So it really frustrated me not to continue to be swept away, yet that was what I experienced. The language Translator Bunstead used to present the ideas was lushly evocative. It seems likely to me that most others will not be so rigidly entrenched in psychotheraputic ideas as to be unable to set aside the twenty-first century long enough to immerse themselves in the sixteenth. It was a lovely visit for me, just a mite too short to last all story long.

While I was there, I had a lovely time. I hope you'll get into the depopulating Amazon and stay for the full ride.

THE CAMINO, Anglophone debut of Dutch-language suspense star

THE CAMINO
ANYA NIEWIERRA (tr.Eileen Stevens)
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5- of five

The Publisher Says: From the Netherlands’s most popular crime writer, a literary thriller following a woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, searching for answers about her husband’s death.

Forty-four-year-old chocolatier Lotte Bonnet has been living happily in South Limburg for years with her husband Emil, a former refugee from Bosnia. But when Emil unexpectedly dies by suicide while walking the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James, Lotte is devastated.

Shocked and confused, Lotte resolves to follow Emil’s exact path on the Camino one year later, hoping for answers, or at least insights into what could have compelled him to take his own life. While walking the arduous trail through central France, passing idyllic villages and meeting fellow pilgrims, Lotte’s thoughts are also elsewhere, in Sarajevo, as she learns the terrors of a war and shocking secrets about her husband’s identity.

Inspired by the natural beauty that surrounds her, forming new friendships, and possibly a romantic connection on the Camino, Lotte is distracted as the trail grows more treacherous, and as it becomes clear someone is following her, someone who does not want her to know the truth.

Fans of Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache will be delighted by Lotte’s easy charm and enthralled by the revelations on her journey. Anya Niewierra’s blockbuster mystery The Camino has taken Europe by storm and is finally available in English for the first time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was dazzled.

It wasn't always *comfortable* reading but it was always to-the-point, even when it felt like it might not be. Every detail does indeed serve a purpose. There are dreadful deeds done in the past from the framework of the novel, that are definitely not for the fainthearted. I *strongly* discourage readers whose tolerance doe not extend to child harm not to read this book at all.

I'm not at all clear that the story's a thriller by my own lights. I'd call it an historical mystery/suspense novel that examines recent European history from a grieving woman's perspective; Lotte's decision to go on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage as a means of discovering her late husband Emil's secrets felt...forced...until I sank into the full implications of pilgrimage.

Her discoveries about her husband of a quarter century are, well, intense and not at all expected. It's a truth in any intimate relationship that there are unspoken things; mostly unspoken because they're not really important.

Not this time.

The Spoiler Stasi being among the nastiest of hazards on the internet, I won't detail the discoveries she makes; the CWs will be enough to warn the sensitive. I began my read aware of a few details so I was prepared, but I reiterate for clarity that you must heed the CWs.

The issues that arise as Lotte retraces the Way of St, James in the present are treated in a way that was very suspenseful...I worried for her safety from the time she decided to undertake her parallel pilgrimage, since Emil's suicide was at best suspicious. The bad stuff that happens is very well designed, in that it makes the stakes of her rash decision that much more obvious as each instance of near-miss violence more obviously targeted.

The why that we eventually learn for these events is fully explanatory. It changes the game for Lotte and for the reader as we learn why Emil's secrets and his lies are revealed to Lotte, and why that revelation is so deeply disturbing to the unseen others on her trail following his trail.

If the CWs make you nervous, read the book, because the resolution/revelations are well worth it. If they leave you deeply upset merely reading the words, do not touch the book at all.

It proved to me that Author Niewierra deserves her European fame as a creator of suspenseful stories.

PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE, charming and fun and amusing

PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE
K.S. SHAY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, preorder now for delivery 25 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thirteen stolen works of art. One haunted marsh.
And a Boston witch willing to risk everything for the friend she’s already failed.

An atmospheric, eerie debut for readers of Starling House and A Discovery of Witches, Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist aficionados, witchy girls, burnt-out former gifted kids, New England history buffs, the coven curious, ride-or-die friends, folklore fanatics, and anyone who’s ever wanted to wander through the looking glass.

Once, Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation. But Maeve messed up a spell to contact the Lady of the Fens, an eerie Revenant who lures the unwary to their deaths in the brackish marshlands of the North Shore. Maeve destroyed her reputation, hurt her best friend Ash, and tainted herself with unbound, wild magic that transforms witches into insane Revenants.

With unbound power eating away at Maeve’s mind, all she wants is to get rid of her magic. Forever. But Ash’s research into how the spell went awry leads in an unexpected direction: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a link between the Lady and a decades-old art theft worth $500 million. When Ash disappears through a stolen painting’s empty frame, Maeve has to follow.

Inside is the Other Marsh, a haunting, deadly realm where only the Lady’s rules apply. Within this half-world lie secrets about North Shore’s history, Maeve’s failure, and the fate of the masterpieces that disappeared over three decades ago. But as Maeve fights toward the truth, she risks her friendship, her coven, and her life against enemies hiding in plain sight.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The hardcover might be preferable to order, y'all:

Are these endsheets to die for or what?

And then there are the seven maps that this bloody program will not let me upload; just know that they'll enhance your reading experience for the mappish among you, like me. They're there because this is an undertaking to explain the long-ago, still unsolved, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. After almost forty years, I think it's safe to say the solution presented here...it's magic...might as well become the final word. Nothin' else but the death of some powerful people will bust open the truth and maybe not even then, so heck...why not magic?

Maeve, all of twenty-three during this story, is a really interesting magical practitioner. She's filled with insecurity after very publicly failing at an important working that unintentionally hurts her bestie in the Salem coven. This is the woman who still comes to her rescue when the cursed apartment she lives in is overrun by frogs...without harming the frogs. It was refreshing. Not a frog-fancier, me, but I do get the joke about witches who famously use frogs in magical working that don't turn out well for the frogs subverting that silly stereotype. Also subversive of stereotypes is the way these witches actually *fly*on*their*brooms* and still don't play it for a cheap snigger.

There's a male main character. He is Maeve's "love interest." Nothing about this part of the plot adds anything very interesting to the story. I'm moving on. The interplay among the coven members really exemplifies the use...bordering on overuse...of the miscommunication among people who have one big thing in common but little else drawing them together. It's a problem as the mystery of the art heist steadily takes over the coven's activities; the stolen artworks are, like much art, imbued with magical capability of being bridges between worlds. Maeve is forced to do her best magic in the scenes where she's working to focus everyone on the common goal of regaining these stolen portals. May not be all spells but it's for sure magic.

Maeve has the chops innate in her to be a leader, but she's twenty-three. The action spins out of her control as we-the-reader watch, amused and bemused, while the coven attempts solving the heist for their own, not-law-enforcing, purposes. It is clear Maeve could become the focus of a series with her coven as they redress imbalances and resolve mysteries. I hope they all come back soon. I also hope potential future lovely, fun reads will show Maeve grow into her leadership and not rely on the chaos that comes from poor communication again. Magic carries in its basis the wildness and chaos of Life, untrammelled; Maeve can shape that, can form it...if she's written that way.

Debuts seldom come with this much promise. Hope it's pointed in a positive way.

GHOST CITIES: A Novel, the trade of creating illusions at apotheosis

GHOST CITIES: A Novel
SIANG LU
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 25 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning international rising star, a dazzlingly inventive novel, spanning ancient and modern China, that interweaves stories of romance and showbiz

Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.

How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed—then recreated, page by page and book by book—all in the name of love and art?

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My Review: Xiang Lu...notice the author's first name's first letter is the sole difference in these names...is a man with excellent luck. Blagging his way into a job at the Sydney, Australia, consulate of China based on ethnicity and the ubiquity of Google Translate; getting fired when his incompetence at Chinese-language skills is exposed and then pilloried on social media; thereupon being discovered by a Chinese equivalent to Roger Corman, and getting hired to do the publicity on the guy's new film...no way could that be an unfolding, subtle plan on Xiang Lu's part, too much could go too wrong.

After joining Director "Baby Bao" in Port Man Tou, one of the infamous ghost cities of the title, Xiang Lu and Bao join a cast of thousands, and the spirits of Emperor Lu Huang Du and his willed-into-being alters across the multiverse. (Say the "Chinese" names aloud, more than once and with an approximate Aussie accent. It's a hoot.) The Wikipedia articles I've linked to offer some background will also afford a flattering angle of light on this slightly-too-long story, and should be read as they appear for best results. This story is subtle, is layered with jeux d'esprit, and that's the problem. Humor, satire oh dear oh my, is tough to convince people to read. Tristram Shandy and Candide aren't read as often as they're bought; and this skewering of the overweening egos that, in fact, summon their creators' visions into a weird kind of being is not at that celestial level.

Siang Lu is the 2025 Miles Franklin Award–winning author of this odd confection of past and present, reality as we know it and the self-aggrandizing reality-dismissing fantasies of two powerful creators of images. The Miles Franklin Award resembles the US Pulitzer Prize in that it is "...an annual literary prize awarded to 'a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'." So we know the author is either born or based in Australia; the utter absence of any indication of a translator on this or his first novel, The Whitewash (no US publisher, but available on Ammy's Kindle via the Aussie publisher University of Queensland Press), and the fact he "holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney" all rather makes me think he either writes novels directly in English or her self-translates his work. Author Lu also "...has written for television on Malaysia's Astro network. In 2021, {he} won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," (all from his Goodreads bio) so I'm betting he's pretty thoroughly polygot; there's no way in hell this read was made using Google Translate! So the opposite of Xiang Lu he writes in this novel, in other words.

As a story it was fun to read the ever-increasing parallel delusions of Baby Bao and Lu Huang Du, and those delusions' assuming a mirror corporeality and a deeply unsettling unity of purpose. It says so much about the visionaries of the world who dream big and act small and petty. Xiang and Baby Bao's assistant/translator/enabler Yuan (I believe this is a word for cash, get it?) are endlessly discussing how eerie it is that all Portmanteau...I mean Port Man Tou, of course I do!...are so indistinguishable, in their empty expensiveness, chewing over how it takes a powerful mind to snatch low-hanging fruit before others seize it...well, it's all very undergrad-philosophy, very obvious and ye I am absolutely certain that it will zoom over most heads like the starship Enterprise.

Maybe I'm just letting my inner old snob run the show. It made me snerk and chortle and even nod along once in a while. It's a good story, and a fine read. I'm not rating it a full five because I suspect most target readers will feel lost at key moments.

"You know," she {Yuan} says, looking out the window, "I have always had this silly thought that maybe, somehow, every city is the same. So when you go from one place to another, it's simply an illusion of flight. The take-off and landing is a simulation. In reality, you've never left the ground, or maybe you have, but are simply flying around in circles for hours, waiting for the new city to 'load.'"

Either too obvious or too weird or too simplistic, but too-too is likely to be a common response. I'm glad Author Siang made the story and that Simon & Schuster's international-lit imprint brought it out here in the US because it's the kind of story that skewers the pretensions and pretentiousness of people badly in need of it.

I'm so glad this story's coming out now, before the US version of #Jólabókaflóð that we prosaically call "fall new book releases" but are really the Yuletide rush. It could get buried now, of course, but I hope some few of y'all will see the appeal and feel the need to chortle along with Siang Lu and me.

GREAT AND UNFORTUNATE THINGS, the last words we will hear from the late JASON ARDAY

GREAT AND UNFORTUNATE THINGS
JASON ARDAY with Eve Claxton
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: With the power of Educated and the emotional sweep of When Breath Becomes Air, Great and Unfortunate Things is the inspiring, underdog story of how an autistic, non-verbal boy who society had all but given up on found his voice, literally and figuratively, became one of the youngest professors in the University of Cambridge’s history and put himself in a position to give back.

Jason Arday was born the second youngest of three boys and grew up in a colorful and lively section of South London. At three years old, he was diagnosed with autism and development delays. Experts told his parents that he would never be able to speak, write, or live independently. An institution would best serve his needs, it was suggested.

His parents would have none of it. Instead, thinking outside the box and drawing on her faith, his extraordinary mother Giff embraced his neurodivergence and fiercely dedicated herself to helping her son realize a potential few others believed was possible. Giff drew on proverbs from her West African culture, popular music by the likes of Enya, and comedic television shows and movies to help Jason make sense of the world.

In Great and Unfortunate Things, we see how Arday went from being nonverbal until he was eleven and illiterate until eighteen to becoming a professor at Cambridge. Without romanticizing the struggle, it’s a story of a son’s determination against insurmountable odds and how his family and a band of ordinary people with extraordinary compassion joined forces to encourage Jason to believe in himself and maximize his capabilities.

This is the story we need right now, and Arday, who believes in paying it forward, is the kind of figure the world can use more of now more than ever.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I avoided talking about this read after the tragic ending of the online attacks against Author Arday. It needs saying that this horrifying event should ever have happened, that it truly ought to reinforce in we-the-readers' mind that literally every accusation is a confession.

On to the read.

Someone needs to be enormously lucky to find people who offer this much support, this level of kind and sustained attention. Of course it didn't hurt that Author Arday was an attractive young man, and clearly quite charismatic. It was a case of luck coinciding with fertile ground for the luck to take effective root in. A tutor who committed his time and effort to help his fellow student pursue a huge goal, college graduation, after only very recently learning to read and write because a co-worker (later girlfriend, then wife) taught him to do so using readily available phonics courses? Support pouring in for a publicly documented goal of running 30 marathons in 35 days...a goal he achieved as the public record shows? It was an extraordiary life lived in a very public and vocal way. t is aways sad when allegations are assumed to be enough proof to, from the outside, judge a person guilty of misconduct. There is nothing like overachieving to attract scrutiny, but it's not always as dire as sensational headlines make it sound.

Its tragic ending ought to be the impetus for this inspiring, if somewhat gee-whiz in tone, story to climb bestseller lists. It is a sin and a shame the reason it is now likely to be the bestseller it's always, on its merits, deserved to be. A tarnished reputation is not a reason to think less of the real and difficult achievements of an imperfect, ambitious man.

DREAMS OF AYN ARA, never to forgive! never to forget!

DREAMS OF AYN ARA
SARA ABOU GHAZAL (tr. Katharine Halls)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.

Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic—culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.

Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.

Under 150pp telling most of a hundred years of historical dispossession, repression, genocide sounds...and is...ambitious, requiring time-jumps and dreaming visitations and other such narrative flummery that distracts from the core of the story: My home was forcibly taken from me. I do not have access to my family's source of identity. I live in a world without my roots, epiphytically resting on the place I am without a way to reach into it and root myself in welcoming soil.

It is ever and always the problem of the Othered. It is the reason ghettos exist, for the inhabitants; the sounds and smells of home plopped atop foreign soil. For the foreign-soil owners, it's crowd control, easy honeytrapping concentration without the bad optics of the word "camp." Not like this Palestinian family in these pages escaped the spaces where the word "camp" was le mot juste for what they were confined to. It's appalling that those confining them there were themselves the survivors or children of survivors of the same treatment....

Stories like this are proof that generational trauma is real. Damage done in malice survives and thrives and metastasizes and entumors its poisons like the body does when protecting itself. Stories like this are the pearl versions of the tumor-forming process, wrapping severed bits of essence in layer upon layer of nacreous story.

It's not long, it's not exhaustively researched and fact-checked. It's the living memory of a family victimized to redress wrongs done by others, done to strangers, and made into their problem by colonizers. Tale as old as time, then.

THE HAND OF IMAN, a title that's a statement of acts that carry tons of freight

THE HAND OF IMAN
RYAD ASSANI-RAZAKI
Arachnide Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Finalist, Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction

Dreaming is a luxury that few can afford. And yet, however inadvisedly, Iman dreams.

In an unnamed African country devoured by rampant urbanization and haunted by the mirages of Western prosperity, where for a few CFA francs a child can be bought and sold into slavery, Toumani's earliest education is in the tolerance of suffering. He endures one master then the next, holding his survival—his very self—with open hands.

For Iman, a black and white biracial boy with an elusive presence, the only viable option appears to be an escape to bountiful Europe, where everything must be easier. Obsessed with this idyllic elsewhere to the point of losing himself completely, he remains, for those close to him, an object of fascination difficult to define.

When Iman reaches out his hand to rescue Toumani from certain death, he sets in motion a friendship that may satisfy their need for connection but cannot fundamentally change their circumstances. What is the point of survival without hope for a more livable future? And what happens to them when they both love the same girl?

In this stunning translation of Ryad Assani-Razaki's award-winning debut novel, dreaming is a luxury that few can afford. And yet, however inadvisedly, Iman dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's hard to read about children abused by parents; harder still to realize they cared so little about the child as to sell him into slavery. It is a child who is the only one to see humanity in Toumani, the only one to care enough about his personhood to do the minimally decent thing, putting out a hand to stop Toumani from being killed.

In the context of this read, this is *the* ray of hope.

There is nothing happy going on in this Francophone African country. The author emigrated from Benin to Canada so it's easy to make the leap as to where we are, and how we should be seriously respectful of the revealed reality of the characters' lives. It's really not so much a novel as a series of heartbreaking character sketches that perforce tell the stories of some small, insignificant lives. Which of course makes them look large and their very "smallness" on the cosmic stage makes them universal, relatable.

It's dark and difficult to read at times, the world's an uncaring place; and, remember this very clearly: No good deed goes unpunished.

Ever heard of Mani? These characters live in his world.

I am not uplifted by this story. I am impressed so many lovely sentences, so many trenchant images, form stacks and ricks and piles of clever images that never once leave off being bleak. North Sea in 1953 bleak; all set in sunny Benin...proof there is no geographic cure for what ails us as humans.

I'm very glad I read it, but it takes a match between mood of reader and mood of book to create that positive experience.