This month, we’re studying in regards to the complexities of affection—significantly queer love—in environments which can be hostile to it, from war-torn El Salvador to modern-day Lagos.
Archive of Unknown Universes: A Novel
Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner Books, 288 pp., $28, July 2025)
It’s exhausting to think about a narrative extra deftly engaged with the political themes of our time than Archive of Unknown Universes. In his debut novel, Salvadoran American writer Ruben Reyes Jr. sends his characters on an journey via a quasi-multiverse to discover alternate outcomes of El Salvador’s 1972-92 civil warfare—a battle that had implications for your entire Western Hemisphere.
Archive of Unknown Universes begins in 2018. Its protagonists are Ana and Luis, two Salvadoran American college students at Harvard College who’re courting. Regardless of bother of their relationship, Luis travels with Ana to Havana, the place she is because of conduct archival analysis on the Salvadoran Civil Battle. (The Cuban authorities aided El Salvador’s leftist rebels.) Ana is “after dignity for a tiny nation, a forgotten nation, a rustic conveniently erased from the map.” Luis has a “suspicion that the journey was a last-ditch try to save lots of a relationship on the rocks.”
Though she is a diligent researcher, Ana is enamored by a fictional gadget generally known as the Defractor, which permits customers to render totally different variations of their lives. The Defractor is experimental know-how, nonetheless housed largely in college libraries for tutorial use, however the “overeager American tech sector” seeks to “make it a scorching shopper product, regulation-free.” Debates over the Defractor have apparent parallels to synthetic intelligence. “Scrolling the web with out seeing an article in regards to the Defractor was unattainable,” Reyes Jr. writes; some folks “noticed the know-how as a one-stop resolution for all their private issues.”
The Defractor lends the story a component of magical realism, a literary custom with robust roots in Latin America. When Ana peeks right into a Defractor on the College of Havana, she deviates from her analysis inquiries to ask whether or not her relationship with Luis has a future. In a single Defractor-generated actuality, she sees herself with one other companion. Ana turns into satisfied that “the thriller man, her different boyfriend, held some type of reply” to lingering questions on her household historical past. (Each Ana’s and Luis’s moms fled El Salvador through the warfare.)
The Defractor rips the novel’s plot in two. Within the first universe—the recognized universe—U.S. President Ronald Reagan funnels “thousands and thousands of {dollars} in weapons, ammunition, and army coaching into El Salvador,” and the leftist rebels lose. Within the second universe, the “Salvadoran Revolution” succeeds as a result of the USA doesn’t intervene. El Salvador turns into a communist success story akin to Cuba.
Reyes Jr. weaves each universes collectively to disclose long-buried secrets and techniques. Ana and Luis’s fraying bond is contrasted with an intense historic homosexual romance, condemned “irrespective of which means the warfare shifted.”
It’s exhausting to learn Archive of Unknown Universes with out considering of El Salvador’s present president, Nayib Bukele, who has common himself a worldwide right-wing icon and vociferous proponent of mass incarceration. Reyes Jr. was strategic in setting his novel earlier than Bukele got here to energy in 2019. Bukele has reworked El Salvador, whitewashing authoritarian abuses with flashy tourism campaigns and social media stunts. His ascent might have disrupted the cadence of novel’s first universe.
However the fictional communist Salvadoran authorities and Bukele share some key traits. “Ana had learn sufficient to know that aesthetic upkeep was the federal government’s defend in opposition to the world,” she displays whereas visiting communist San Salvador. “The capitol was stunning, however magnificence was not justice.” Sure outcomes stay the identical throughout all universes.—Allison Meakem
Mandatory Fiction: A Novel
Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead Books, 320 pp., $28, July 2025)
“That is form of how we get via our lives: we inform ourselves tales in order that what’s taking place turns into one thing we are able to dwell with. Mandatory fictions.” This quote by Lidia Yuknavitch is an epigraph—and a guiding tenet—in Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s second novel, a feverish celebration of queer life in Lagos, a “quick metropolis” the place “shit retains spinning.”
Like Osunde’s debut Vagabonds!, Mandatory Fiction is a novel-in-stories. (The primary chapter, “Good Boy,” received the Paris Evaluate’s Plimpton Prize for fiction in 2021.) It’s structured round a collection of vignettes of characters who struggle to carve out areas for themselves in Lagos’s unforgiving sprawl, crafting narratives about their lives that assist them get by, even thrive, within the margins of a society that criminalizes queerness.
At instances, that’s performed with the common language of cash. As one character in a relationship with one other man notes, “a mad whip is an effective way to say, Don’t fuck with me, and right here the streets want to listen to that in pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, plus many different languages. … Me and Ok put on rings, however folks don’t ask private questions after they see what you’ve come out of. We purchased that proper to go unchallenged. It was not low-cost.”
Extra typically, although, their identities are constructed via self-questioning and, importantly, conversations with pals. Osunde’s characters prefer to shoot the shit, and Mandatory Fiction is a love letter to the narratives painstakingly crafted about one’s life over the course of dinners, raves, “reality circles” round yard fires, and watching Powerpuff Ladies reruns at a good friend’s house.
Regardless of the novel’s robust sense of place, the vocabulary of those heart-to-hearts will probably be acquainted to 20- and 30-something urbanites in every single place. Osunde’s characters really feel horror at their skill to only get on with their lives within the face of state brutality (of their case, the 2020 #EndSARS crackdown). They need to be fierce activists however stay “mushy” and lead lives that really feel “sustainable.” They sob freely. They dissociate; they’ve aspect quests. They discuss—quite a bit—about boundaries. “I believe the extra I dwell, the extra I can see that boundaries can apply to every part. Even spirits. Even God,” one character tells one other.
In one other author’s fingers, these discursions would possibly really feel overly indulgent. However it’s exhausting to not look after these characters, who’re brazen and achingly earnest, rendered totally human in Osunde’s expansive prose. A lot of them are burdened by the burden of their households, which exist “behind them in memory-clots.” For them, friendship is probably the deepest type of love, and collectively, they crawl “via loopholes in an unfair system, constructing a secure world inside a metropolis that all the time desires blood.”—Chloe Hadavas
This text is featured within the FP Weekend publication, a curation of our greatest guide evaluations, deep dives, and different reads that take a step again from the drumbeat of the information. Get the lineup immediately each Saturday.
July Releases, in Temporary
Soviet-born American author Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Religion traces the antics of a Russian-Jewish-Korean-WASP household making an attempt to get by in modern-day America. In South Korean writer Kyung-Ran Jo’s Blowfish, translated by Chi-Younger Kim, a profitable sculptor crafts a suicide plan involving a deadly seafood dish. Former overseas correspondent Dan Fesperman’s newest thriller, Pariah, follows a U.S. celebrity-turned-politician’s efforts to spy on an Jap European dictator. A lady makes an attempt to reconstruct her youth in Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann’s Woman, 1983, translated by Martin Aitken. Two former lovers who got here of age in a newly democratic Croatia reconnect in Lidija Hilje’s debut novel, Slanting In the direction of the Sea.
In Tehila Hakimi’s twisty Looking in America, translated by Joanna Chen, an Israeli girl takes to the woods after relocating to the USA. Wildfires, choreomania, and a love triangle converge in Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París’s The Dance and the Hearth, translated by Christina MacSweeney. Indian American author Nishant Batsha’s A Bomb Positioned Near the Coronary heart depicts a wedding caught within the crossfires of World Battle I-era revolutionary ferment. In Lisa Smith’s Jamaica Highway, a friendship unfolds in a close-knit British Jamaican group in Nineteen Eighties London. And a Chinese language American girl processes the spectacular implosion of her life in Katie Yee’s Maggie; or, A Man and a Girl Stroll Right into a Bar.—CH
