Kickass Diverse Novels of 2015
Short sentences, long sentences, suspenseful sentences, funny sentences, profound sentences, to-the-point sentences, meandering flowery sentences; young adult, middle grade, romance, literary, women’s fiction, science fiction, fantasy, I love them all. Nothing gives me more joy than than an electric first line of a novel or a short story collection – what Sona refers to as pure agony.
Last year I wrote two book lists over Christmas and New Year on my site: 8 Short Story Writers of Color and First Lines From 36 Novelists of Color, as well as one on travel memoirs that don’t involve middle-class white women or white boys leaving their corporate jobs and going to brown and black countries to discover themselves (and so can you!). I originally wrote the lists because it was perplexing to hear people, including my incredibly diverse and smart creative writing students, drinking the Koolaid and parroting the lie that people of color either aren’t writing novels, or the novels aren’t that “great” (because there aren’t any mediocre novels by white men populating the book lists).
This year my list includes 54 novels and these are just the books I liked. My criteria is not particularly complex and is pretty much the exact same criteria I use in deciding to spend cash money to buy all of these books in the first place (except for Tiny Pretty Things, which I got for free due to my intimate relationship with one of the writers: my wife, Sona Charaipotra).
My criteria:
- A gorgeous first sentence that invites you to sink into a large, fluffy chair, with a warm cup of cha, and an aromatic novel.
- The authors and the content of their stories have some level of diversity. People of color writing novels filled with white people is just not my thing. I’d rather read white people writing about white people.
- Everything was published in 2015. In rare cases where a novel was published in England or South Africa in 2015, but doesn’t come out in the U.S. until 2016 I’ve put a link to the available e-book. Aside from Toni Morrison being on the top of the list, this list is not in any particular order. They all have gorgeous first lines that drew me in.
Let 2016 be the year of more mirrors and windows. And to diverse vampires . . . As usual, Junot Diaz perfectly sums it all up:
“You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.” ~ Junot Díaz
God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
1. “It’s not my fault.”
Re Jane by Patricia Park
2. “Home was this northeastern knot of Queens, in the town (if you could call it a town) of Flushing.”
Tiny Pretty Things by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton
3. “It always feels like death.”
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya
4. “Everything Job Ogbonnaya knew about sex he learned from American pornography.”
The Tusk That Did The Damage by Tania James
5. “He would come to be called the Gravedigger.”
Delicious Foods by James Hannaham
6. “After escaping the farm, Eddie drove through the night.”
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
7. “Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep.”
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
8. “Sierra? What are you staring at?”
The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev
9. “How do you explain losing your words to someone?”
Ruby by Cynthia Bend
10. “Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high.”
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh
11. “It would not be a welcome dawn.”
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
12. “My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.”
Loving Day by Mat Johnson
13. “In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”
Only The Strong by Jabari Asim
14. “Guts Tolliver hadn’t killed a man in two years.”
Dragonfish by Vu Tran
15. “Our first night at sea, you cried for your father.”
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-Sook Shin
16. “I find myself here, in this place where I have never been before, contemplating myself at sixteen.”
The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
17. “The people on the hill liked to say that God’s smile was the sun shining down on them.”
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
18. “The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.”
Frog by Mo Yan
19. “Dear Sugitani Akhito Sensei, it has been nearly a month since we said goodbye, but I can relive virtually every moment of our time together in my hometown as if it were yesterday.”
The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer
20. “Skanda is deep into his translation of The Birth of Kumara when his mother calls to say his father is on his deathbed”
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
21. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet
22. “Canals zigzag across the city I used to call home.”
In The Language of Miracles by Rajia Hassib
23. “When Khaled fell sick at age nine, his grandmother descended on his parents’ house and promised him healing.”
Mayumi and the sea of happiness by Jennifer Tseng
24. “It began at the library.”
Blue Sun, Yellow Sky by Jaime Jo Hoang
25. “Have you ever noticed that fire hydrants are rarely alike in shape or color?”
White Light by Vanessa Garcia
26. “Sometimes you wake up with a hole in your heart and you’re not sure why.”
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
27. “I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man.”
More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera
28. “It turns out the Leteo procedure isn’t bullshit.”
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
29. “The brown ant had already forgotten its home.”
The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
30. “Felícito Yanaqué, the owner of the Narihualá Transport Company, left his house that morning, as he did every morning Monday to Saturday, at exactly seven thirty, after doing half an hour of qigong, taking a cold shower, and preparing his usual breakfast: coffee with goat’s milk and toast with butter and a few drops of raw chancaca honey.”
Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
31. “They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky.”
Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam
32. “Girls, everywhere.”
The Distant Marvels by Chantel Acevedo
33. “An unexpected envelope was delivered to me two months ago, on the first day of August.”
The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
34. “When the Shah was shot, he staggered several places in the shrine and fell stone dead in the lap of an old beggar woman.”
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
35. “Midway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto.”
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
36. “Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left!”
Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri
37. “He got up at around nine o’clock with the usual feeling of dread.”
Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe
38. “The young woman lay on the sands, her mouth frozen in a smile, as if nothing in the whole world surpassed the sweetness death.”
The Given World by Marian Palaia
39. “Jasper says this is the kind of heat that makes people in Australia shoot each other.”
A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor
40. “My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one.”
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
41. “When Madge arrived in Chicago, it was an unusually windless summer day, and she could not take her eyes off the bluest water she had ever seen.”
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan
42. “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.”
The Automobile Club of Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany
43. “My wife finally understood that I needed some time on my own.”
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
44. “I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus, reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair.”
Jam on The Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett
45. “Ivoe liked to carry on about all she could do.”
Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie
46. “A green palm wine bottle rolled on the wet London Street.”
A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin
47. “My mother used to say, ‘Lillian, as long as I’m alive, you must have nothing to do with that woman.”
Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi
48. “He’s human, but don’t look into his eyes.”
Diamond Head by Cecily Wong
49. “Inside the car, it smells like hibiscus.”
Sweet Medicine by Panashe Chigumadzi
50. “‘You cannot fight an evil disease with sweet medicine,’ says the n’anga.”
Serpentine by Cindy Pon
51. “The mountain was still shrouded in mist.”
What Will People Say by Rehana Rousouw
52. “The South-Easter lifted the smell of pig manure spread across farms in Phiippi, crossed Lansdowne Road and dumped it like a wet poep over Hanover Park.”
The Offering by Salah el Moncef
53. “There is something oddly stark and unqualified about the memory of pain visited upon others: a feelings of guilt and unworthiness that is so pervasive it becomes an integral part of everything you are; so total that it strips you of every sense of nuance and proportion, every shade of self-justification that might alleviate your feeling of culpability.”
Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy
54. “‘Ma,’ said Amit, ‘I have to talk to you about something.'”
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