As the new year kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story collection about the uses and abuses of history.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel
Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026)
As the new year kicks off, we’re cracking open a novel and a short-story collection about the uses and abuses of history.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel
Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pp., $26, January 2026)
Conventional murder mysteries keep readers guessing until the end of the story. Not so in Nina McConigley’s debut novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, which begins with an admission of guilt by its narrator. In the summer of 1986, when Georgie Creel was 12, she and her sister killed their uncle. The novel unfurls as an extended mea culpa.
Georgie is the daughter of an American father and an Indian mother. She was born and raised in the fictional town of Marley, Wyoming, where her dad works on an oil rig. “It’s not the pretty Wyoming, the tourist Wyoming,” Georgie explains. In a state defined by cowboy culture, Georgie clarifies that she is “the other kind of Indian.” (Like her protagonist, McConigley grew up as a mixed-race Indian American in Wyoming.)
“Everything fell apart that year,” Georgie says of 1986. Amid an oil bust and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, she and her older sister decide to kill their uncle by poisoning his drinks with antifreeze. Vinny Uncle, as he is called, immigrated from India and moved in with the family a few years prior and terrorized the two girls. He “dipped into our lives like a tea bag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup” and “muddied the water,” Georgie recalls.
For Georgie, Vinny’s murder in rural Wyoming is an extension of the colonial oppression that “[b]oth kinds” of Indians have endured over generations. She draws from history to connect her own trauma to that caused by Partition and pioneers. To kill her uncle, Georgie concludes that she must shift her mindset. “We had to do what was best for us, no matter how it might affect other people,” she explains. “That’s what colonizers do.”
Despite its heavy undertones, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a delightful read. McConigley’s prose is sublime, and her storytelling is equally imaginative. The book manages to juggle several seemingly contradictory identities: murder mystery, anti-colonial manifesto, and time capsule of 1980s girlhood. On TV, Georgie uneasily watches the Challenger disaster and Prince Andrew’s wedding. She has a Trapper Keeper, is a Girl Scout, and describes the local shopping mall as “my most favorite place in the world.”
Perhaps because so much of the story is told from the perspective of a straight-talking 12-year-old girl, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder feels different from most Western writing about decolonization. “At the end of the day, we knew that no acknowledgment, no apology, no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt,” Georgie says of harm caused both by Vinny and colonial conquest. “We didn’t want a sorry. We wanted it to stop.”—Allison Meakem
The Age of Calamities: Stories
Senaa Ahmad (Henry Holt and Co., 240 pp., $17.99, January 2026)
A dinner party with Blackbeard, Ibn Battuta, John Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Nefertiti, and Queen Victoria. A ramshackle house filled with Napoleon Bonapartes that keep multiplying. An alternate history where Anne Boleyn just won’t die, no matter how many times Henry VIII plots to kill her. A choose-your-own-adventure for a lab assistant working on the Manhattan Project.
These are some of the premises for the stories in Canadian author Senaa Ahmad’s The Age of Calamities—a rollicking debut collection full of trap doors, absurdist humor, and dazzling imagination. What ties these surreal tales together is an attention to history and its distortions. As the narrator writes of Queen Victoria, caught in the middle of a murder mystery: “She doesn’t want to think about what makes someone an expert in history and what doesn’t. Whether a historian is meant to safeguard the project of the past or, more likely, to suggest its architecture.”
Ahmad is not just concerned with the great men (and women) of the past. One standout story centers on a technician in Los Alamos in 1945: a “footstool in history” compared with solitary genius J. Robert Oppenheimer, who “radiates the certainty and sorrow of his place in time.” Of course, even footstools bear weight. The underling has literally touched the bomb, feeling the “dark foreboding swell of its stomach. The sheer scale of it. The knowledge that you were touching a piece of the world.”
In another writer’s hands, these tales could risk coming off as gimmicky. In Ahmad’s, they emerge as a series of funhouse mirrors that, in refracting elements of the past, lay bare something true and at times revelatory. It’s not hard to see why the lead story was plucked out of the slush pile at the Paris Review. In these meditations on character, context, and contingency, we can glimpse a great mind at work—one influenced by the likes of short-story geniuses Angela Carter and Karen Russell, but also wholly her own.—Chloe Hadavas
January Releases, in Brief
A Faustian bargain lies at the heart of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novel, The School of Night, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. In Deepa Anappara’s The Last of Earth, an unlikely duo undergoes a treacherous expedition into 19th-century Tibet. Pakistani American author Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives holds up a magnifying glass to feudal divides in contemporary Pakistan. In Jean, Madeleine Dunnigan reimagines the classic British schoolboy novel. A jaded CIA officer is thrust into a geopolitical flash point in The Cormorant Hunt, Latvian American writer Michael Idov’s latest spy thriller.
Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes releases his 15th novel, the autofictional Departure(s), on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Novelist-cum-anthropologist Nahoko Uehashi’s ecological fantasy, Kokun: The Girl from the West, is translated from the Japanese by Cathy Hirano. Chinese folklore and colonial history converge in Alice Evelyn Yang’s debut novel, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing. Liadan Ní Chuinn’s short-story collection, Every One Still Here, offers an unflinching look at Ireland under British occupation. And Brenda Navarro’s award-winning 2022 novel, Eating Ashes, is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.—CH
