Our First Impressions book this week is The Family Izquierdo, Rubén Degollado's captivating debut novel about a complicated family written from multiple perspectives.

In Editor's Choice, we have a surprisingly understated tale of German colonialism in East Africa, the novel Afterlives from recent Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Plus, if you haven't already, be sure to check out our interview with Julia Orlova of Vivat, Ukraine's second largest publisher, and our giveaway of Susanne Pari's In the Time of Our History.

With best wishes,

Davina Morgan-Witts

BookBrowse Publisher

Each month we give away books to BookBrowse members who live in the U.S. to read and review. Members who choose to participate receive a free book about every 3-4 months. Here are their opinions on one recently released title.

by Rubén Degollado

"Rubén Degollado has a well-regarded young adult novel, Throw, to his credit, and has published many stories, so it is not precisely accurate to call this his debut, yet it definitely has that feel to it. By this I do not mean that it is in any way amateurish—it is far from that—but that it has the feel of a book written with all of his soul, as if it is this that had been yearning to get out of him since he began to write...This is a community of people, enmeshed, supportive, resentful, petty, warm, and cold. But as is demonstrated time and again, no matter what animosity they may have between them, if a threat from outside the family shows itself, they will come together to vanquish it. There are disagreements, there are religious differences, there are curses and miracles. But what binds the Izquierdo family—and this novel in stories—together is love, pure and simple. What a gift Rubén Degollado has given us." - Reid B. (Seattle, WA)

"The Family Izquierdo relates the story of how a curse put on them by a jealous neighbor both divides and unites the family members. Each chapter is a piece of the puzzle told by a different Izquierdo and encompassing a different period in the family's history. The chapters are intriguing and even shocking, and you'll hate leaving the Izquierdos when the book ends." - Stephanie K. (Glendale, AZ)

"The relationships of the family members are well captured. They felt personal to me, as an Asian American, yet anyone could relate to many of the characters...the Izquierdo family struggles with holding onto their past and adapting to life in America at the same time. I am struck by this sentence: 'Dina spends her days thinking about the past because she has always wanted to hold onto the present, hoping things would never change.' I think this would be an excellent book club book." - Susan W. (Detroit, MI)

The just-published issue of The BookBrowse Review features 14 book reviews and Beyond the Book articles, covering Afterlives by Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott, and The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy, among others. We also have over 40 previews of new releases coming out in September, a new Wordplay and much more inside.

This twice-monthly e-magazine is just one benefit of being a BookBrowse member. Sign up for an individual membership today or ask your library if they subscribe (or check for yourself).

Vivat is Ukraine's second largest publisher, established in 2013 following the merger of two former publishing houses. Its head office is in Kharkiv, Ukraine's largest city after Kyiv, in the northeast near the border with Russia.

Vivat currently has 3,000 books in print and, in a normal year, would release about 400 new titles covering nonfiction, fiction, children's and young adult literature. Its slogan "read, dream, act" exemplifies its mission to popularize reading and promote Ukrainian authors.

In this interview, Vivat CEO Julia Orlova talks about the company's efforts to continue operations during the Russian invasion, the increased international demand for Ukrainian books, and its authors fighting on the front lines.

Afterlives, from Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, begins in late 19th century East Africa in the early years of German colonial rule.

The characters in Afterlives live in a small, unnamed town on the coast of what is now Tanzania. When World War I begins, and European empires conscript African troops to play out the war in Africa—to fight for a cause that has little to do with them and on behalf of countries that have invaded their own—Ilyas and Hamza both leave to join the schutztruppe.

The second half of the novel follows Hamza and Afiya as they make a life for themselves and with each other in the shadow of the war.

The surprising thing about Afterlives is how little narrative tension there is. Gurnah's playing the long game here; the more important effect is the cumulative one. Like in life, watershed moments are buried deep within paragraphs; plotlines are dropped and forgotten until hundreds of pages later. Sometimes the book rushes through years and distance so quickly that the narration seems breathless, and yet, without any big dramatic moments, the world feels static—like when you're on a plane and you look at the motionless squares of land beneath you. ... continued

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian-born British author of Afterlives, is the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first Black writer to win it since Toni Morrison in 1993. He was awarded the prize "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Gurnah is understandably interested in postcolonialism and displacement. He grew up in Zanzibar, an island off the east coast of Africa, when it was a British protectorate and a sultanate (now it is part of Tanzania). In January 1964, a leftist revolt overthrew the sultanate to establish a republic, which ended the power of the Arab ruling class over the majority-African population but also resulted in what TRT World describes as a "bloody reprisal against the island's Arab and Asian populations" and racial persecution.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Gurnah spoke about the revolution in Zanzibar and how it affected his writing: "A profound chaos descended on our lives in the mid-1960s, whose rights and wrongs were obscured by the brutalities that accompanied the changes brought about by the revolution… continued

The prodigal daughter of Iranian immigrants returns to her family home for her sister's One Year – the Persian tradition of marking the first anniversary of someone's death – in an intimate story of identity and duty set in late-1990s San Francisco and New Jersey.

In the Time of Our History will publish in January 2023. We have 50 advance reader copies to share with residents of the US and Canada. Offer ends Sept 12.