Jessica Olin

When we first meet Lena Rose, the ‘mildly retarded’ heroine and whirlwind centre of Karen Bender’s novel, it is her wedding anniversary, and she has set fire to her room at the residential home known optimistically as Panorama Village. Lena’s mother, Ella, has been summoned to deal with the situation and plead Lena’s case to Mrs Lowenstein, the home’s...

In Nani Power’s novel Crawling at Night, Katsuyuki Ito has only been in New York, his new home, for a few months. On the surface, his life in the United States is exactly the same as it was in Japan; as a shokunin, or sushi chef, he performs a strict series of daily tasks. For 42 years, his day has begun before dawn, as he picks out the best cuts of tuna and flatfish at the market and...

‘I am not very successful as a little girl,’ Mary Karr wrote in her diary when she was 11. ‘When I grow up, I will probably be a mess.’ This is how Cherry, the second instalment in her account of her early life, begins. The first, The Liars’ Club, was published in 1995. Now it is the summer before she enters sixth grade; she has no friends, her parents are out at...

Joseph Torra’s latest novel, The Bystander’s Scrapbook, opens in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected President. In Somerville, Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country, corporate growth and gentrification are changing the face of neighbourhoods that once boasted a mix of ethnic traditions: a tenement that housed Hispanic families is overhauled and made into condos for...

In ‘How to Become a Publicist’, the liveliest story in Jessica Francis Kane’s first collection, Bending Heaven, a young woman moves to Manhattan to pursue a career in publishing, and as part of a family tradition: ‘All the women on my mother’s side have come to New York, lived, burned out, and eventually left.’ She falls into the enthusiastic world of...