What We Are Reading in February

Anabelle Gage is trapped in a male body, but she can’t afford to escape it, even as the wealthiest residents in Caimor buy and discard expensive designer bodies without a thought. Her only option is to use her illusion magic to steal a healthy new body, before her own — rotting from the inside out — kills her.

But when Ana is caught, she’s faced with an ultimatum: face execution for her crime or become a mercenary under the command of the person who caught her. With no choice but to accept, Ana will steal, fight, and kill her way to salvation. But her survival depends on a dangerous band of renegades: an impulsive assassin, a brooding bombmaker, and an alluring exile who might just spell her ruin. As Ana is drawn into a web of secrets, the line between villain and hero shatters — and Ana must decide which side is worth dying for.

Seventeen-year-old Emma Nakamura-Thatcher doesn’t believe in love, not after her parents’ bitter divorce. So when she attends the festival of Tanabata, her wish is simple: proof that love is real and can last.

Emma thinks little of her wish … until she finds a note from someone claiming to be her greatest love writing to her from the future. As the notes pour in, each revealing secrets only she knows, Emma is forced to accept the impossible: Someone is actually reaching out to her from across time.

Set in Hong Kong and America, Ysabelle Cheung’s debut story collection asks what it means to be Asian and a woman (or what does it mean to try to break free from that?). 

In the title story, a young woman of color realizes she can make her fortune by surgically selling her facial features to whiter, wealthier clients. In “Please, Get Out and Dance,” rebels escape a city that is literally disappearing around them to migrate to a new home beneath the ocean. “Herbs” follows an elderly widow who must grapple with her memories when the clones of her dead husband start to appear uninvited.

In each story, Cheung tilts the world just slightly off its axis to bring together a haunting meditation on what it means to survive within our increasingly digitized and mechanized world. 

College roommates Ah Lei and Panda wake up with very different reactions to their night of being tear-gassed and chased while protesting a national security law that would end democracy in Hong Kong. Ah Lei, her heart heavy, can’t get out of bed. Panda, whose resistance is no less ardent, wants to go out for brunch.

While the demonstrations rage, life remains routine for Ah Lei, Panda, and people in their orbits, but looming political tension and anxiety transform their everyday encounters. Within a few months, life as they know it changes: the comfort of air-conditioned shopping malls is disrupted by bloodshed; tear gas and the sounds of rubber bullets amid neon signs strangely evoke happier memories of summer night fireworks.

Shanghai, 1911. Lisan Liu is hired as secretary to wealthy American Caroline Stanton, the new mistress of Lennox Manor in Shanghai. However, the Manor has a dark past due to a previous owner’s suicide, and soon Lisan’s childhood nightmares resurface — with haunted visions of a woman in red. 

Meanwhile, newly married Caroline looks forward to life in China with her husband. But at a party that she throws, an attendee claims to know secrets Caroline can’t afford to have exposed. At the same party, Lisan is approached by the notorious princess Masako Kyo with questions about the young woman’s family that the orphaned Lisan can’t answer.

Siriwathi Perera is a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at 28. The true crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.

When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they quickly connect through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship … until she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.

When a major Pakistani political figure is hanged, OK Town erupts in protest. A few miles away, Sir Baghi gets an unexpected visitor at the Rebel English Academy, his tuition center that offers affordable English lessons. Sabiha, seeking refuge at the Academy, has a gun, her parents are political prisoners, her husband has just died in a suspicious fire, and she’s clearly hiding something. Sir Baghi encourages Sabiha to write, and throughout the book, her life unspools on the page.

Meanwhile Captain Gul, a disgraced intelligence officer, has been banished to OK Town, where he aims to silence protesters by any means necessary. But his duties — and romantic desires — begin to overlap, and his already-dubious power is further threatened.