Upcoming books of 2018

A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee, Publisher - W. W. Norton Company:  Five characters deal with dislocation, whether voluntary or enforced, from the author of The Lives of Others. In this stunning novel, prize-winning author Neel Mukherjee wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters, in very different circumstances?from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, to a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city?find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more.

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, Publisher - Soho Press: A mystery set in India in the 1920s about the first female lawyer in Bombay, who fights for women's rights.  1920s India: Perveen Mistry, Bombay's first female lawyer, is investigating a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in full purdah when the case takes a turn toward the murderous. The author of the Agatha and Macavity Award-winning Rei Shimura novels brings us an atmospheric new historical mystery with a captivating heroine. Inspired in part by the woman who made history as India's first female attorney, The Widows of Malabar Hill is a richly wrought story of multicultural 1920s Bombay as well as the debut of a sharp and promising new sleuth.

Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, Publisher - Soho Press: American-born seventeen-year-old Maya Aziz deals with cultural divides in Chicago as she prepares for college. In this unforgettable debut novel, an Indian-American Muslim teen copes with Islamophobia, cultural divides among peers and parents, and a reality she can neither explain nor escape.  American-born seventeen-year-old Maya Aziz is torn between worlds. There's the proper one her parents expect for their good Indian daughter: attending a college close to their suburban Chicago home, and being paired off with an older Muslim boy her mom deems "suitable." And then there is the world of her dreams: going to film school and living in New York City-and maybe (just maybe) pursuing a boy she's known from afar since grade school, a boy who's finally falling into her orbit at school.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, Publisher - Penguin Publishing Group: A scavenger in US-occupied Baghdad stitches together the body parts of corpses in an effort to get citizens a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a series of murders begin plaguing the city, leading to an undead killer who must be stopped. From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi-a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café-collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive-first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

All the Names They Used for God: Stories by Anjali Sachdeva, Publisher - Random House Publishing Group: Unusual and entrancing speculative fiction stories about fate, for fans of Dave Eggers and Kelly Link. Anjali Sachdeva demonstrates a preternatural ability to laser in on our fears, our hopes, and our longings in order to point out intrinsic truths about society and humanity. "Killer of Kings" starts with John Milton writing Paradise Lost and questions the very nature of power-and the ability to see any hero as a tyrant with just a change in perspective. The title story presents a stirring imagining of the aftermath of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram that leaves us pondering what is lost when we survive the unsurvivable. And in "Pleiades," genetically modified septuplets are struck by a mysterious illness that tests their parents' unwavering belief in the power of science.