As the brand new yr kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story assortment in regards to the makes use of and abuses of historical past.
Easy methods to Commit a Postcolonial Homicide: A Novel
Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026)
As the brand new yr kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story assortment in regards to the makes use of and abuses of historical past.
Easy methods to Commit a Postcolonial Homicide: A Novel
Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026)
Typical homicide mysteries maintain readers guessing till the top of the story. Not so in Nina McConigley’s debut novel, Easy methods to Commit a Postcolonial Homicide, which begins with an request for forgiveness by its narrator. In the summertime of 1986, when Georgie Creel was 12, she and her sister killed their uncle. The novel unfurls as an prolonged mea culpa.
Georgie is the daughter of an American father and an Indian mom. She was born and raised within the fictional city of Marley, Wyoming, the place her dad works on an oil rig. “It’s not the beautiful Wyoming, the vacationer Wyoming,” Georgie explains. In a state outlined by cowboy tradition, Georgie clarifies that she is “the opposite sort of Indian.” (Like her protagonist, McConigley grew up as a mixed-race Indian American in Wyoming.)
“Every little thing fell aside that yr,” Georgie says of 1986. Amid an oil bust and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, she and her older sister determine to kill their uncle by poisoning his drinks with antifreeze. Vinny Uncle, as he’s referred to as, immigrated from India and moved in with the household just a few years prior and terrorized the 2 ladies. He “dipped into our lives like a tea bag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup” and “muddied the water,” Georgie recollects.
For Georgie, Vinny’s homicide in rural Wyoming is an extension of the colonial oppression that “[b]oth varieties” of Indians have endured over generations. She attracts from historical past to attach her personal trauma to that brought on by Partition and pioneers. To kill her uncle, Georgie concludes that she should shift her mindset. “We needed to do what was greatest for us, irrespective of the way it may have an effect on different folks,” she explains. “That’s what colonizers do.”
Regardless of its heavy undertones, Easy methods to Commit a Postcolonial Homicide is a pleasant learn. McConigley’s prose is elegant, and her storytelling is equally imaginative. The ebook manages to juggle a number of seemingly contradictory identities: homicide thriller, anti-colonial manifesto, and time capsule of Eighties girlhood. On TV, Georgie uneasily watches the Challenger catastrophe and Prince Andrew’s wedding ceremony. She has a Trapper Keeper, is a Woman Scout, and describes the native shopping center as “my most favourite place on this planet.”
Maybe as a result of a lot of the story is instructed from the angle of a straight-talking 12-year-old lady, Easy methods to Commit a Postcolonial Homicide feels totally different from most Western writing about decolonization. “On the finish of the day, we knew that no acknowledgment, no apology, no rewriting of our historical past may ever change how we felt,” Georgie says of hurt induced each by Vinny and colonial conquest. “We didn’t need a sorry. We needed it to cease.”—Allison Meakem
The Age of Calamities: Tales
Senaa Ahmad (Henry Holt and Co., 240 pp., $17.99, January 2026)
A cocktail party with Blackbeard, Ibn Battuta, John Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Nefertiti, and Queen Victoria. A ramshackle home stuffed with Napoleon Bonapartes that maintain multiplying. An alternate historical past the place Anne Boleyn simply gained’t die, irrespective of what number of instances Henry VIII plots to kill her. A choose-your-own-adventure for a lab assistant engaged on the Manhattan Challenge.
These are a number of the premises for the tales in Canadian writer Senaa Ahmad’s The Age of Calamities—a rollicking debut assortment filled with entice doorways, absurdist humor, and dazzling creativeness. What ties these surreal tales collectively is an consideration to historical past and its distortions. Because the narrator writes of Queen Victoria, caught in the course of a homicide thriller: “She doesn’t wish to take into consideration what makes somebody an skilled in historical past and what doesn’t. Whether or not a historian is supposed to safeguard the mission of the previous or, extra probably, to recommend its structure.”
Ahmad isn’t just involved with the nice males (and ladies) of the previous. One standout story facilities on a technician in Los Alamos in 1945: a “footstool in historical past” in contrast with solitary genius J. Robert Oppenheimer, who “radiates the knowledge and sorrow of his place in time.” In fact, even footstools bear weight. The underling has actually touched the bomb, feeling the “darkish foreboding swell of its abdomen. The sheer scale of it. The data that you simply had been touching a bit of the world.”
In one other author’s fingers, these tales may danger coming off as gimmicky. In Ahmad’s, they emerge as a collection of funhouse mirrors that, in refracting components of the previous, lay naked one thing true and at instances revelatory. It’s not onerous to see why the lead story was plucked out of the slush pile on the Paris Overview. In these meditations on character, context, and contingency, we are able to glimpse an amazing thoughts at work—one influenced by the likes of short-story geniuses Angela Carter and Karen Russell, but in addition wholly her personal.—Chloe Hadavas
January Releases, in Temporary
A Faustian cut price lies on the coronary heart of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest novel, The Faculty of Night time, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. In Deepa Anappara’s The Final of Earth, an unlikely duo undergoes a treacherous expedition into Nineteenth-century Tibet. Pakistani American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is The place the Serpent Lives holds up a magnifying glass to feudal divides in up to date Pakistan. In Jean, Madeleine Dunnigan reimagines the traditional British schoolboy novel. A jaded CIA officer is thrust right into a geopolitical flash level in The Cormorant Hunt, Latvian American author Michael Idov’s newest spy thriller.
Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes releases his fifteenth novel, the autofictional Departure(s), on the event of his eightieth birthday. Novelist-cum-anthropologist Nahoko Uehashi’s ecological fantasy, Kokun: The Woman from the West, is translated from the Japanese by Cathy Hirano. Chinese language folklore and colonial historical past converge in Alice Evelyn Yang’s debut novel, A Beast Slinks In the direction of Beijing. Liadan Ní Chuinn’s short-story assortment, Each One Nonetheless Right here, provides an unflinching have a look at Eire below British occupation. And Brenda Navarro’s award-winning 2022 novel, Consuming Ashes, is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.—CH
