APSARA ENGINE, South Asian graphic story collection

APSARA ENGINE
Bishakh Kumar Som
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: By turns fantastical and familiar, this graphic short story collection with South Asian roots is immersed in questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity.

Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel/Comics

Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comics

Finalist for the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction

The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality. A woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.

Painted in rich, sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds—which ring all too familiar—Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.

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

My Review: A beautiful work of South Asian-set and -themed mostly queer stories. All take place in elegantly, cleanly rendered spaces, involve women in transitional times and relationships, and stress the pleasures and/or complexities of being in the midst of Life.

these are the spreads provided for publicity use

The author's website contains much more varied artwork from the book. It is very much worth you time to view.
The stories themselves are not really interlinked, though all feel like they're meant to form something greater than the sum of their parts. If there's more than the thinnest connective tissue, though, I didn't find it. Straight people on a shoreline are surprised by merfolk accosting them; differing degrees of queer/trans people in their cells...apartments really, but cells in all the confinement senses...are the focus of the title story, one that fascinated me but never paid off in the way I was built up to expect. I think my personal favorite story was "Swandive," in which Onima...a "cartographer of trans realities" who uses her own blood to make maps, thus create art, that explains other Desi trans people to themselves.

It's not hard to see this opening a young trans person's eyes to the welcome reality that others feel the same way they do. No one in the 21st century, with all its stunning technological advances in medicine, psychology, communication should ever again feel isolated. A work like this that was created by someone deeply marginalized yet extending her hand to others, is a lifeline for a struggling trans person.

"You, as you are right now, are not alone and do not need to change to be loved" is still the most intensely powerful message you can send with this gift.

THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY, loneliness is a cultural phenomenon

THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY
KIRAN DESAI
The Hogarth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

One of Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025!

One of BookPage's 10 Best Books of 2025!

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025 selection!

Finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

Behind every love story are the myriad stories of two families.

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.

Back in India, Sonia and Sunny's extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

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

My Review: If this *immense*, intense, and deeply emotionally charged novel is not on the Booker shortlist tomorrow, I will kick off big time.

Sonia and Sunny and their families are excellent company. Like anyone you spend this much time with, there are moments of irritated shouting, times of sad, misty dripping, and the occasional whoop of glee. (Note to self: reading stories like this at 3am can lead to justifiably angry quarters-sharers. Best not to.)

What I got out of this Dickensian-in-scope tale of love, Love, imperialism, racism, chicanery, skulduggery, and the immutable urge to discover Truths greater than self-actualization, was the conviction that there needs to be a new category of read: a Bildungsroman for adults figuring their {stuff} out; a one-volume roman-fleuve for the increasing number of Indian-authored epic novels that feel even bigger in scope than they are.

Love, love, and desire figure into both of the above subgenres. I think of the old joke describing Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses as "horny Irish medical student goes on a rampage" and I'm still pretty sure that is the whole reason Joyce didn't stop at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...he had so much more to say.

This could have been A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-length but Author Desai had a Ulysses-esque lump in her throat. It's a lot, Sunny alone is a novel's worth of weird (mother Babita and her...unexpected...opinions and cheese-related kleptomania), but Sonia and her nasty time with Ilan (older, jealous artist-lover) could've been another entire book fully satisfying the criteria of novelhood. (NB: this is the beginning of the book; persevere, ye who dislike this truthtelling trope. It's not like that all the way through.)

The weight of expectation, of cultural baggage, on aspiring artist Sonia (I'd read her novel!) and journalist Sunny (a byline I'd look for!) as they try to figure out their paths in the buzzing hive of US culture and politics, all stewed up with many people they run into (sometimes literally) along the way: crushing, annihilating, and in the end energizing. Loneliness and fear and baggage motivate these two, where they squash so many. Across the world there are people with the talent and the drive, but not the luck, of Sonia and Sunny, and we will never hear their names.

We have, now, heard their names, in Author Desai's busy, overstuffed novel. I hope in that magical-realist liminal place they are, they know and are happier for it. Seher, Sonia's mother said it best: "Loneliness could mean abiding peace. It could mean understanding your happiness backward, when you happened to exclaim out loud, surprising yourself when there was no apparent reason, I'm happy!"

Shout it, folks, you've been found.