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Barry, Quan. When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East. Pantheon. Feb. 2022. 320p. ISBN 9781524748111. $26. Downloadable. LITERARY

A young monk named Chuluun has been handed a daunting task: He must find the reincarnation of a legendary lama within the great sweep of Mongolia, trudging from the sere Gobi Desert to the ancient capital ruled by Chinggis Khan. Along the way, he seeks help from his identical twin, Mun, who was once seen as a reincarnation himself but has since abandoned the monastic life. They’re not actually together in this quest, but they can hear each other’s thoughts. From the author of the multi-best-booked We Ride Upon Sticks, an Alex Award winner.

Doyle, Roddy. Life Without Children: Short Stories. Viking. Feb. 2022. 192p. ISBN 9780593300565. $25. Downloadable. LITERARY/SHORT STORIES

An end-of-her-rope nurse, a man unable to return home, a middle-aged son who cannot attend his mother’s funeral: these are some of the characters in Booker Prize winner Doyle’s new collection, featuring stories written mostly during last year’s pandemic lockdown. Irish author Doyle investigates how we learned to survive loneliness and grief in a whole new way.

Hadley, Tessa. Free Love. Harper. Feb. 2022. 320p. ISBN 9780063137776. $26.99. LITERARY

It might be 1967 England, but the conventional Fischers—dedicated mom Polly; Roger, a Foreign Office careerist and loving father; and their teenage children, smart Collette and savvy Hugh—aren’t exactly swinging. At least not until the son of an old friend comes to dinner and drunkenly kisses Polly, which sets her on fire and ends up subverting the entire family. From Windham-Campbell Prize winner Hadley; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

Mishra, Pankaj. Run and Hide. Farrar. Feb. 2022. 224p. ISBN 9780374172169. $26. LITERARY

Renowned for nonfiction titles like Age of Anger that rigorously assess class, ethnicity, and postcolonialism, Windham-Campbell Prize winner Mishra also received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for 2000’s The Romantics. His new novel opens with hopeful young Arun at the elite Indian Institute of Technology, struggling to overcome a hard, low-caste upbringing and dazzled by two self-confident friends who eventually become hard-partying international players in finance. Arun’s life is not so flashy—he retreats to a Himalayan village to write—and when he later encounters a journalist writing an exposé about his friends, everything spins out of control. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

Petterson, Per. Echoland. Feb. 2022. 144p. tr. from Norwegian by Don Bartlett. ISBN 9781644450765. pap. $15. LITERARY

Petterson, Per. Men in My Situation. Graywolf. Feb. 2022. 304p. tr. from Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey. ISBN 9781644450758. $26. LITERARY

Published in the United States in 2007, Norwegian author Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses was proclaimed a New York Times Best Book and won the International Dublin Literary Award. After other appreciated U.S. publications, Petterson now arrives with Men in My Situation, the portrait of a man undone. Arvid Jansen bitterly mourns the loss of his parents and brothers in a terrible ferry accident, after which his wife divorced him and whisked away their three daughters. A year later, when she asks for a ride home from the train station, he sees that his family has moved on without him and confronts his now aimless life. Poignantly, Arvid first appeared as a bright-eyed 12-year-old in Petterson’s debut novel, Echoland, now receiving its first U.S. publication.

Zambra, Alejandro. Chilean Poet. Viking. Feb. 2022. 368p. tr. from Spanish by Megan McDowell. ISBN 9780593297940. $27. LITERARY

In high school, Gonzalo and Carla loved each other, then broke up catastrophically. Nine years later, their attempt at reconciliation fails. But Carla’s six-year-old son, Vincente, absorbs the dreamy Gonzalo’s passion for verse and by age 18 is able to persuade American journalist Pru to write a piece showing that there’s more to Chilean poetry than Nobel Prize winners Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. Will it bring Vincente and Gonzalo together again? From the multi-award-winning Mexican author Zambra.

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