Spring is...well, six weeks away. BUT that means a little more time indoors with your next read. Find a list of titles to consider for the April LibraryReads list here. Reminder to get your votes in by March 1st for these April titles!
Happy reading,
-The LLF Team (Virginia, Lainey, and Grace)
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The Library Love Fest team is thrilled to share a letter to librarians by Boris Fishman, author of The Unwanted! He tells you a bit about his forthcoming novel, the backstory behind this latest work, and his own love of libraries.
More about The Unwanted (on sale 3/25/2025):
Award-winning, New York Times Notable author of A Replacement Life—“a born storyteller with a tremendous gift for language” (San Francisco Chronicle)— delivers a fierce and staggering new page-turner full of cruelty, tenderness, and heroism, about a young girl and her parents fleeing civil war and the brutal dictatorship that has targeted their family.
More about Boris:
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and many other publications. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and now teaches at The University of Austin.
Download an egalley on Edelweiss or NetGalley.
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Dear librarians,
I’m thrilled to write you about my new novel THE UNWANTED, out on March 25 from HarperCollins. As the proud recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for my first novel, A Replacement Life, and an immigrant who received a second education in the libraries of his adopted hometown of New York, it’s an honor to talk to you about my newest book.
THE UNWANTED is the story of a family in flight from civil war in an unnamed country, the lies they tell to protect each other, and how those lies slowly destroy them as a family. It’s a novel about refugees, but ultimately, it’s about power – who holds the power, whether they protect the people without, and what the latter will do for dignity and safety. This is why the country in the novel is unnamed – the name doesn’t matter. The story is always the same.
With this novel, I wanted to emphasize that refugees are not saints – and don’t have to be to deserve our understanding and empathy. They’re like you and me – human and imperfect. I would do exactly the same thing in their situations, and then only if I were smart and brave and resourceful enough. Of course, these ideas live in the background of the story – foremost, this is a novel about a family, the humiliations the adults undergo as “minority-sect” members of their country, the mistakes they make to protect their child, and what happens then.
The novel is a little different from my previous books in that it’s full of drama and incident, with lives in the balance – I wrote it to be a page-turner, a literary thriller. One thing that hasn’t changed is my interest in writing the smartest possible book for the broadest possible audience, a book that’s both complex and a page-turner.
It’s also my first novel without the Russian-speaking and Jewish characters who have populated my previous books, though of course, it’s about the same questions: How does a family survive the trauma of immigration? Where do you belong, if your life has been divided between multiple places? How to find dignity after decades of harm in a country that didn’t want you? How to put yourself back together in a new homeland where you are unavoidably “other”?
I thought these questions were particularly important to ask at this time in our nation’s history. And as you know, no medium can ask them as a novel can.
I love discussing these issues with booksellers and book buyers, but it means something special and essential to discuss it with you. Libraries, perhaps in addition to national parks, are some of the last truly democratic places in our country. When I travel with my children, the first place I take them is the local library – it’s how we get to know the place we’re visiting. At home in western New Jersey, we’re regulars at the local branch of the Hunterdon County library system. You are flame-keepers. Your work is noticed, and deeply valued.
Yours,
Boris Fishman
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Thank you, Boris, for such a thoughtful letter to librarians! We know you're going to love this novel as much as we do. It's a stunning story that is impossible to put down. We aren't the only ones who think so. Check out some of the praise that's been pouring in for The Unwanted:
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