Read This is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, or someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love.

Read This: Gina Chung

Gina and I met when we were put together because we’d both written books that featured octopuses – hers being the wonderful Sea Change, about a woman called Ro whose only real friend is a Pacific Octopus called Delores. She interviewed me about mine – The Memory of Animals at McNally Jackson, a gorgeous bookshop in New York. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel Sea Change, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, an APALA Adult Fiction Honor Book, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection Green Frog, which was a Good Morning America Book Buzz Pick. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.

Here are Gina’s recommendations:

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Mrs. Caliban is, to put it in modern Internet parlance, “my Roman empire.” I think about this book all this time and always have this one up my sleeve if someone wants an unexpected recommendation, particularly if that someone doesn’t mind creaturely stories or tales of interspecies connection. First published in 1982 and uncannily similar in tone and plot to 2017’s The Shape of Water—though, I’d argue, much darker and more haunting—Mrs. Caliban is about Dorothy, a lonely, neglected housewife who helps an aquatic/humanoid creature whom she christens Larry, who has escaped from a lab. Dorothy comes to fall in love with Larry (as much for his gentle attentiveness to her as for his unexpectedly muscled physique), but of course, complications and heartaches ensue. The ending of this book is perfect and makes me feel like dying if I think about it too much (complimentary).

Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang

Jiaming Tang’s masterful debut Cinema Love, just released this spring, has already gotten some much-deserved buzz both in the U.S. and in the U.K., but I’m including it on this list because I want even more people to hear about and read this gorgeous book! The logline for Cinema Love—it’s a novel about gay men in China and the women who marry them—is already enticing enough, but it’s also about love and intimacy in all their many forms, and grappling with the past. Tang’s debut breaks the heart and remakes it, as he investigates, with tenderness and moments of sly, glimmering humor, what it means to navigate the manifold desires and contradictions of the human heart.

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter, also a debut published earlier this year, bursts with beauty and compassion. It’s a big-hearted, engrossing narrative that spans multiple generations of a Jewish family, from the shtetls of Poland to the suburbs of Maryland to the hipster neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The story centers around protagonist Shiva’s search for diasporic connection and how to understand her own queerness in the context of her familial lineage, but also invokes Shiva’s mother Hannah, whom she has a strained relationship with; the mysterious Syl, Hannah’s mother; and the even more shadowy Mira, Shiva’s great-grandmother. Fruchter’s prose sparkles with vivid life and deftly traverses the boundaries between the fantastical and the quotidian, daring to posit that sometimes, the answers to our questions lie in the questions themselves. You’ll want to reread it as soon as you finish it, and recommend it to everyone you know. 

---

I haven’t read any of these books or any of these authors before. They all sound really appealing – and if you’re allowed to be intrigued by a book because of its cover then City of Laughter is definitely one I want to pick up. Which do you like the sound of? Let me know. And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive