There is no hand-holding from Peters here as she takes us into the complex web that connects Reese, Ames, and Katrina as they navigate sexuality, gender, their own traumas, and parenthood in the twenty-first century. The plot centers around Ames, a detransitioned transgender woman, who comes to his ex-girlfriend Reese, a trans woman, with a proposal: to be a third parent to the child he and his boss Katrina are bringing into the world. As the story jumps back and forth through time, we are privy to how the characters grapple with their own identities and the complexity of existing as transgender women. Detransition, Baby is a sharp debut novel that is at once thought-provoking and tender, a grounded view of new understandings of family.
Rooney’s newest novel--a cause for celebration--may be her most personal and her most interrogatory yet. Featuring the intertwining relationships of four characters in varying degrees of intimacy as they navigate lives under constant threat of collapse, Rooney expands her literary frontiers by writing about familiar subjects: friendship, desire, youth, and a world in crisis. Few people can write about millennial existentialism and angst as well as Rooney, which has pigeonholed her as a millennial novelist--a misleadingly narrow descriptor, because her psychological acuity and insight rank her as one of the greats of any literary generation.
Murray’s latest novel tells the story of Christina, a Filipino expatriate, who, after initiating divorce proceedings, returns to Manila where the citizens of the city’s high society, of which she is part, chart a collision course with the iron-willed dictator. Interweaving the satirical comedy of the capital’s aristocracy--complete with all the melodrama of Filipino romance--with the social realities of life in the clutches of a repressive and violent government, The Human Zoo offers an introductory glimpse into the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of a country that has resisted, and continues to resist, imperialist forces, dictatorial leaders, and its own self-destructive impulses.
