“I married a creature of stone, though they are the curse of our land. 

Her skin peeled away. She didn’t believe it at first. She thought it was something else, maybe a layer of dead cells so thick it curled onto itself, but soon she could no longer ignore it, what emerged from underneath.

Reviewed by Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur (Locus)

It feels to me as though sometime after my grandmother vanished, perhaps even the very next day, I’d taken a wrong turn and never looked back.

There has always been a sparrow inside me. At first it was just an egg, something I felt in my belly before I even had the words for it.

Reviewed by A.C. Wise and Paula Guran (Locus), Maria Haskins, Vanessa Fogg

This soup, you like it soured with fermented wheat bran, full of the herbs you can’t find where you live, and every year I make it redder, darker.”

Recommended by A.C. Wise (Locus)

Little by little, I bloomed: a single clocktower (there is a tower at the heart of every living city), no bigger than a blade of grass, with little dirt roads radiating from it; then tiny red-roofed houses and a neoclassical theatre and kiosks on every corner and markets and packs of stray dogs.” 

Reviewed by Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur (Locus)

Maria Haskins' 2023 Recommended Reading List

Amar never touched the pomegranates. If I ever bought one, I’d take it home like a dark secret and eat it when he wasn’t there.”

Reviewed by Vanessa Fogg