Goldberg, Paul. The Yid. Picador. Feb. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9781250079039. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781250079046. LITERARY
Moscow-born Goldberg, a reporter and nonfiction author who immigrated to the United States in 
1973, offers an imaginative and blackly funny debut novel about the Soviet Union in early 1953, around the time of the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot. Here, Stalin is actually planning a final pogrom to rid the USSR of Jews, but he doesn’t reckon with wily Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an old-time actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater; his game and resourceful friends, surgeon Aleksandr Kogan and African American Frederick Lewis, working in the country as an engineer; and a mysterious young woman named Kima Petrova. Their little plot? To assassinate Stalin. Whoa!
Hill, Lawrence. The Illegal. Norton. Jan. 2016. 416p. ISBN 9780393070590. $26.95. LITERARY
Canadian author Hill is best known for his Commonwealth Prize–winning and internationally best-selling The Book of Negroes, originally published here under the title Someone Knows My Name and republished under the original title when a six-part miniseries was aired in this country by BET in February 2015. His new novel features Keita Ali, who lives in Zantoroland, the home of world-class marathoners, and dreams of nothing but running races. Then his father is murdered for his political views, and Keita races away to a wealthy nation called Freedom 
State (ring any bells?), where he must hide his status as an illegal alien. That gets harder and harder to do when he wins a race and must keep racing and winning to earn the money to pay off debts and ransom his kidnapped sister. Pubbing in late January (I just caught it now); allegorical, topical, and important to read.
Indridason, Arnaldur. Into Oblivion: An Inspector Erlendur Novel. Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Feb. 2016. 352p. ISBN 9781250077349. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9781466889293. POLICE PROCEDURAL
In Reykjavik Nights, published in spring 2015 in America, Icelandic crime fiction master Indridason gave fans a taste of the early life of his popular protagonist, Inspector Erlendur. In this follow-up prequel, so to speak, Erlendur has made detective but is divorced (you win some, you lose some). Even as police investigate the death of a man whose battered body is found in the Blue Lagoon, the country’s famed geothermal spa, Erlendur looks into a very cold case: the disappearance, 40 years ago, of a girl walking to school. Indridason won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for Silence of the Grave and is the only author to win the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel two years in a row, so he’s got to be on every suspense lover’s list.
Pinckney, Darryl. Black Deutschland. Farrar. Feb. 2016. 304p. ISBN 9780374113810. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374713140. LITERARY
A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, among other publications; author of the novel High Cotton, which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; respected for his nonfiction, which includes the recent Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy; and a theater insider who has collaborated with Robert Wilson on various projects, Pinckney is always an interesting writer. In this second novel, which enfolds the sexual and racial issues that accentuate much of his work, a young, black, gay man named Jed flees Chicago for 1980s West Berlin. Amid artists, intellectuals, expats, and queers, he looks for boys 
and longs for Weimar decadence, though he can’t entirely escape racism, judgment, the lure of alcohol (he’s fresh from rehab), and the haunting threat of AIDS.
Smith, Charlie. Ginny Gall. Harper. Feb. 2016. 464p. ISBN 9780062250551. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062250568. LITERARY
The winner of many honors (e.g., the Aga Khan Prize, the Levinson Prize) and routinely praised as one of our best writers (e.g., “[perhaps] America’s most bewitching stylist alive,” New York Public Library), poet/novelist Smith seems something of a best-kept secret. His gutsy new work could change all that. Set in the 1920s and 1930s Jim Crow South, it features Delvin Walker, just a child when his mother flees Chattanooga after being accused of killing a white man. Though he finds a measure of peace when he’s taken in by a prominent local undertaker, troubles that include a lynching and a church burning set him on the road. Just as he thinks he’s found love, he’s accused with several other young men of raping a white woman. His life is indeed “Ginny Gall,” an African American term for a punishment worse than hell. With a 35,000-copy first printing.