One Year of Ugly

February 1, 2020

Award-winning Métis author Dimaline makes her debut with an American publisher, Empire of Wild, the edgy story of Joan, heard fighting vituperatively with her now missing husband, who believes she spots him posing as a charismatic preacher in a battered revival tent (75,000-copy first printing). The youngest winner ever of Italy's prestigious Premio Strega, Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers) returns with Heaven and Earth to limn the enduring bonds linking Teresa to three young men she meets one summer in Puglia, her father's childhood home. From debuter Mackenzie, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner, One Year of Ugly (60,000-copy first printing) takes a humorous approach to recount the travails of a Venezuelan family living illegally in Trinidad. A best-selling author in mass market, McKinlay moves into trade paperback original with Paris Is Always a Good Idea, the story.` of a young woman who revisits her gap year in Ireland, France, and Italy, looking for lost loves but finding something different. In the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Macomber's A Walk Along the Beach, shy Willa--especially close to sister Harper after their mother's death--is ready to follow Harper's advice about risking love until tragedy befalls Harper. Martin returns after his high-flying debut, Early Work, with the story collection Cool for America about the gap between what people want and what they achieve. Winner of the Terry Southern Prize, Nugent shows us all the stumbling antics of near-adults in Fraternity. In Poeppel's Musical Chairs, Bridget and Will hatch a plan to lure shining-star violinist Gavin Glantz back to their Forsyth Trio, which they founded together as Juilliard students, even as Bridget wrestles with multiple family complications (40,000-copy first printing).

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May 1, 2020
A Venezuelan family living illegally in Trinidad is forced to work for a crime lord in this comic novel. Twenty-four-year-old Yola Palacio and her extended family are having a backyard barbecue when a man holding a gun strides into the gathering, introduces himself as Ugly, and announces that Yola's recently deceased Aunt Celia owed him a large sum of money, which the entire Palacios family must pay off by working for him--on pain of death or deportation back to the dysfunctional Venezuela they fled two years earlier. The four Palacios households begin receiving waves of illegal immigrants, whom they must house, feed, and entertain for free. Shuttling these refugees is Ugly's handsome enforcer, Rom�n, toward whom Yola feels an immediate and bewildering carnal pull. Soon the Palacios settle into a sort of rhythm: Every few months, they host "a mix of fleeing intellectuals, political refugees, impoverished asylum seekers, and a smattering of adventurers just looking for a new start," befriending their kinder guests and tolerating the obnoxious ones. Everyone, that is, except Yola's Aunt Milagros, who becomes suspicious of the refugees and eventually shoots a child living in her home. Rom�n tells Yola--they've become lovers who bond over their "shared love of books"--that he's sent Milagros back to Venezuela and told Ugly that she's dead, and the remaining Palacios are forced to work in Ugly's clandestine high-end strip club in various capacities. Debut author Mackenzie maintains a jangly, casual sort of humor throughout ("My father was born for safe-housing illegal migrants...he fell upon our new houseguests with all the bonhomie of a Sandals Resort manager, bearing three buckets of fried chicken and a bottle of rum"). But just as often her prose is choked with clich�s--"With a thunder crack, in a perfect display of pathetic fallacy, the clouds split." And while the novel provides a much-needed view into the many double binds of illegal immigration, it also, troublingly, seems to prop up stereotypes. At one point, Yola curses her "inability to thwart all those genetically wired impulses that allow pop culture to accurately peg Latin women as 'feisty, ' 'fiery, ' and 'mothafuckin' crazy as shit.' " Really? An intriguing premise turns disappointingly banal.

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August 3, 2020
Trinidadian writer Mackenzie debuts with this sparkling account of a romance between Venezuelan immigrant Yola Palacio in Trinidad and a man working for a human trafficker amidst Yola’s family drama. After sardonic writer Yola’s aunt Celia dies, her debt to human trafficker Ugly puts the undocumented Palacio family in danger. Ugly threatens to report the Palacios unless they host newly arrived immigrants fleeing from Venezuela in their Port of Spain house. The Palacios fear their Venezuelan guests and lock themselves in their rooms each night. Ugly, meanwhile, tasks his enforcer Román with ensuring none of the Palacio family leave the city or contact the police, and Román becomes a love interest for the conflicted Yola (“I know what you’re thinking—This guy’s a criminal who was just choking your father, you horny bitch! All I can say is: forbidden fruit is the original aphrodisiac”). Mackenzie skillfully balances the trope of sordid romance with a sympathetic portrait of the people exploited by human traffickers, but the strongest element is the portrait of the family, which Mackenzie fills out with a deep understanding of Venezuelan history. Passages of Aunt Celia’s diary recall memories of a more prosperous Venezuela before it was brought down by environmental exploitation and political corruption, and further inform the family’s conflicted relationship with their fellow Venezuelans. This thoughtful and entertaining saga will move readers.