Check This Out

Kaliane Bradley's debut novel is "The Ministry of Time." The novel imagines a near future in which the British government is testing the viability of time travel by transporting various people from the past to the present.

They essentially pluck people out from the edge, grab them just before they die and bring them to the present so as to prevent ripples in the future. It all starts off with good intentions, very scientific - or so it seems.

The novel centers on a small group of these time travelers and their minders, a group of secret agents who are tasked with living with them and watching over them to study the effects of time travel.

The focus is Commander Graham Gore, who was plucked from 1847. The woman tasked with watching over him is our unnamed narrator.

Sparks fly between the narrator and Graham Gore. Mystery ensues, resulting in a time travel romance, a spy thriller and a workplace comedy all rolled into one.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Andrew Boryga has described his debut novel, "Victim," succinctly: Javi, a Bronx kid, pimps out his identity to achieve his dream of being a successful writer, but loses himself in the process.

Javi is an unreliable narrator who pulls us into the world of diversity, politics, and buzzwords. A world where we're never sure what is true and what is a lie. And the author seems to be asking, is this fiction that different from the real world?

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Zibby Owens has been called one of New York City's most powerful bookfluencers.

She is the CEO of Zibby Books publishing house, owner of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, CA, founder of Zibby Media and the podcast host of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.

She just published her debut novel, "Blank." Blank is about a 40-ish former literary sensation who fears she will be a one hit wonder as she stares at a blank page.

With nothing written, she has five days to come up with a new book or to repay the advance she's already spent. Desperate, she seizes on her 12-year-old son's idea. What about a blank book? Is that bold or terrible?

This debut novel is about family, friendship, success and rediscovery.

It's also about what's broken in publishing and how we can fix it, from the perspective of an outsized presence in the publishing world.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Jennifer Croft is the author of the new novel "The Extinction of Irina Ray." She is also an translator who translates works from Polish, Unkrainian and Argentine Spanish.

Croft's debut novel is about eight translators who gather in Poland to translate the newest book by a world renowned author.

Each translates a different language and have been selected by the author. They have worked for her before, and they have a ritual of coming together at the author's house on the edge of a primeval forest, to translate all at once, each working in their respective languages.

This time something is different. The author is with them on the first day, but then she goes missing.

Author Jennifer Croft is a renowned translator herself. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights.

This novel, about translation and translators by a translator, asks: What is translation and how do translations work?

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Inci Atrek is the author of the brand new novel "Holiday Country," set on a gorgeous Turkish coast. It's a coming-of-age story between a mother, Meltem, and her daughter Ada, exploring how decisions affect entire generations.

The two spend summers returning to Meltem's homeland, Turkey, where they vacation in a small, sun-soaked beach town. In winter they return to California, where Ada was born and where they live with her father.

The novel is set almost entirely in Turkey over the course of one summer and brims with lush descriptions of the Aegean coast.

Ada's connection to both countries is as fleeting as the seasons. No matter how hard Ada may try to be American or Turkish, something is always lost in translation.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Aube Rey Lescure is the author of the new novel River East, River West. In the days following this interview, Rey Lescure's book was shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, the only debut novel on the 2024 shortlist.

River East, River West is about an American woman, Sloan, who moves to China in the 1980s, has a daughter, and marries a Chinese man.

Using alternate timelines and perspectives, we see 2007 China through the eyes of Alva, Sloan's teenage daughter with a Chinese father.

In the 1985 timeline, we see China through the eyes of Alva's stepfather, Lu Fang, who was a blue collar worker caught in the Chinese Revolution.

It's a complex family story, the love and struggle between mother, daughter, and stepfather.

We also see the fallout from the Cultural Revolution; how Lu Fang's life and dreams were crushed when he was sent to the tobacco fields, and a sense of how an entire generation is still dealing with that blow.

And we get to see Shanghai and China in a way one might never have seen before, in a way one might not be able to access as an American or as a tourist.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Leo Vardiashvili is the author of the brand new novel Hard by a Great Forest. His debut novel, it is set in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Vardiashvili takes us to Georgia through a character named Saba, who escaped the Civil War in the 1990s and fled to London. Now in his twenties, he returns to search for his father and brother, who have both disappeared.

Saba's journey takes us through big swaths of Georgia, where we hear how the war affected so many, leaving soil soaked in blood. It's dark, but there is light, and there is love, and there is hope.

Much of this narrative is based on Leo's own life. He fled Tbilisi, Georgia, when he was 13 and sought asylum in London. It took him more than 15 years to return to Georgia. When he did, he realized the pain of returning to a country you can no longer recognize, and the invisible private toll that all wars take on those fortunate enough to survive them.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Maura Cheeks is the author of the brand new novel Acts of Forgiveness.

Her debut novel is set in a slightly speculative America, in a world where the government has approved reparation payments for black Americans if they can prove they are descended from slaves to tell the story.

She focuses on the Revel family as they struggle to keep their family construction business afloat while retracing their lineage throughout the book.

With the Revel family, Maura shows us people praying, hoping, rooting for the Forgiveness Act and those fighting against it, sometimes violently.

Cheeks asks, can forgiveness be political and can it be lasting?

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.

Check This Out is a seasonal, literary series airing each spring and fall. Stayed tuned for more conversations with emerging and diverse authors beginning in April 2024.

Vauhini Vara’s story collection, "This is Salvaged" has been named by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Vox, and the New York Public Library as one of the best books of the year.

While each story is independent, all her characters are searching for meaning through one another. In one story, a young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. In another, a pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. Vara writes about a competitive sibling who tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications.

These stories are wild, at times wacky, and you will read them quickly one after the other as Vara asks in each vignette: How can we connect to one another, to this world, to this life?

Vara is a journalist and editor. She's also a Visiting Assistant professor of English at Colorado State University.

Host Rachel Barenbaum sat down with her colleagues from the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire to discuss their favorite reads from 2023.

Recommendations by Rachel Barenbaum:

"The Possibilities" by Yael Goldstein

Hannah is having a bad day. A bad month. A bad year? That feels terrible to admit, since her son Jack was born just eight months ago and she loves him more than anything. But ever since his harrowing birth, she can’t shake the feeling that it could have gone the other way. That her baby might not have made it. Terrifying visions of the different paths her life could have taken begin to disrupt her cozy, claustrophobic days with Jack, destabilizing her marriage and making her husband concerned for her mental health. Are the strange things Hannah is seeing just new-mom anxiety, or is something truly weird and sinister afoot? What if Hannah really did unlock a dark force during childbirth?

"Blood Sisters" by Vanessa Lillie

As an archaeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land’s Indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.

While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Even though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.

Recommendations by Jared Jenisch:

"Life on Other Planets" by Aomawa Shields

"Life on Other Planets" is a journey of discovery on this world and on others, a story of creating a life that makes space for joy, love and wonder while being driven by one of our biggest questions: Is anybody else out there? It is about the possibility of living between multiple worlds and not choosing, but instead charting, a new path entirely.

"Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden" by Camille T. Dungy

In "Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden," poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado.

"Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation" by Camonghne Felix

When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics, shows up in the tapestry of her healing.

In this exquisite and raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her childhood “dyscalculia”—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain?

Recommendations by Mike Morris:

"I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself" by Marisa Crane

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement. Rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime and a warning to those they encounter.

"Bad Cree" by Jessica Johns

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt.

"Small Worlds" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson.

"Land of Milk and Honey" by C Pam Zhang

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

Recommendations by Megan Coleman:

"Kinauvit: What's Your Name" by Dr. Norma Dunning

From the winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag System.

"There's No Way I'd Die First" by Lisa Springer

A spine-tingling contemporary horror novel that follows a scary movie buff as she hosts an elaborate Halloween bash, but soon finds the festivities upended when she and her guests are forced to test their survival skills in a deadly game.

Check this Out features lively conversations with up and coming authors, and serves as a platform for diverse voices and stories to be heard. NHPR and The Howe Library are proud to be able to bring these conversations into your homes and headphones.