Books from United States

Money can buy almost anything—but it cannot guarantee love, loyalty, or a clean family reputation. Jia Song, the ambitious daughter of Korean immigrant bodega owners, has spent her life chasing the luxuries she once admired from behind a shop counter. Now a rising star at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, she is closer than ever to the glamorous future she imagined. But her latest assignment plunges her into the spectacularly messy private lives of the Parks, a Korean American family whose billion-dollar beauty empire is threatened by scandal. The family patriarch wants a divorce from his terminally ill wife, while their three adult children wage war against their father and one another. Jia has just thirty days to investigate the family’s finances, uncover the truth, and protect her clients’ interests. As her investigation takes her from New York to Seoul and beyond, she discovers that the Parks’ wealth conceals secrets far darker than she expected. Glamorous, sharp-witted, and full of betrayal, Park Avenue explores ambition, family loyalty, and the price of success. Behind the designer handbags and extravagant lifestyles lies a question Jia must confront herself: what if getting everything you’ve ever wanted means losing sight of what truly matters?

Set in the politically charged atmosphere of an American university on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, The Laughter follows Dr. Oliver Harding, an aging white professor of English who considers himself a progressive, liberal intellectual. His carefully constructed worldview begins to unravel when he becomes infatuated with Ruhaba Khan, a younger Pakistani Muslim law professor whose confidence, intelligence, and political activism both attract and unsettle him. When Ruhaba’s teenage nephew, Adil, arrives from France, Oliver uses his growing relationship with the boy as a way to get closer to his aunt. At the same time, campus protests over diversity and representation challenge the university’s established power structures, forcing Oliver to confront questions about privilege, race, and his own supposedly liberal beliefs. As his obsession intensifies, his behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, and the gap between how he sees himself and how others might see him grows more dangerous. Told through Oliver’s unreliable perspective, the novel gradually reveals the prejudices and insecurities concealed beneath his intellectual sophistication. With dark humour and psychological suspense, Jha examines how people rationalise their own behaviour, how racial and cultural differences can become objects of both fascination and hostility, and how easily a sense of entitlement can disguise itself as virtue. The Laughter is a provocative exploration of power, misogyny, identity, and the contradictions of contemporary American liberalism.

When Ikemefuna, a young Nigerian dancer, boards a plane from Lagos to Texas, she imagines a new life filled with opportunity, freedom, and the promise of a happy marriage. Instead, she finds herself trapped in the home of her new husband’s parents, where her movements are controlled, her independence stripped away, and the pressure to produce a male heir grows increasingly intense. Her husband, Nna, initially struggles to reconcile his self-proclaimed feminist beliefs with his family’s expectations. As secrets emerge and the household becomes increasingly suffocating, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, tradition and cruelty, begin to blur. Ikemefuna’s apparent obedience conceals something far more complicated, and the family’s carefully maintained facade begins to unravel. Blending domestic thriller, psychological horror, and Nigerian diasporic fiction, House Woman explores patriarchal power, forced marriage, intergenerational trauma, and the devastating consequences of silencing women. It also questions whether moving to another country necessarily brings freedom when oppressive social structures travel with you.