Yoojin Chung Chung থেকে Pyrbaum, Germany
The amount of imagination Slavin has concentrated into this one novel could easily fill thirty novels. I've been longing for someone to combine satire and magical realism like this for years. This book is often really, really funny, and weirdly moving (my favorite kind of "moving") -- and there's something enigmatic going on beneath the surface, a little hard to see because the surface shimmers so ornately. I couldn't put this book down, nor did I want to. I can't believe more people aren't talking about it. A lot of reviewers seem to have complained about a shift in tone toward the sober in the last quarter or so of the book, but I personally was impressed by it and grateful for it (and in my opinion it's not really all that extreme a shift anyway).