Nina McConigley’s ‘How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,’ Senaa Ahmad’s ‘The Age of Calamities’

With the beginning of the new year, we open a novel and a collection of short stories about the uses and abuses of history.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel

Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pages, $26, January 2026)

With the beginning of the new year, we open a novel and a collection of short stories about the uses and abuses of history.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel

Nina McConigley (Pantheon, 224 pages, $26, January 2026)

Traditional murder mysteries keep readers guessing until the end of the story. Not so in Nina McConigley’s first novel, How to commit a postcolonial murderWhich begins with the narrator confessing his guilt. In the summer of 1986, when Georgie Creel was 12 years old, she and her sister killed their uncle. The novel unfolds as an extended crime scene.

Georgie is the daughter of an American father and an Indian mother. She was born and raised in the fictional town of Marlee, Wyoming, where her father worked on an oil rig. “It’s not beautiful Wyoming, it’s touristy Wyoming,” Georgie explains. In a country defined by cowboy culture, Georgie explains, “The other kind of Indian(Like the novel’s protagonist, McConigley grew up as a mixed-race American Indian in Wyoming.)

“Everything collapsed that year,” Georgie says of 1986. In the midst of the oil meltdown and nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, she and her older sister decide to kill their uncle by poisoning his drinks with antifreeze. Uncle Vinny, as he is called, immigrated from India and moved in with the family a few years ago and terrorized the two girls. He “came into our lives like a tea bag in the white of a porcelain cup” and “muddied the waters”, Georgie recalls.

For Georgie, Vinnie’s murder in rural Wyoming is an extension of colonial oppression that “[b]“Other types” of Indians have suffered for generations. She draws from history to connect her trauma to that caused by Partition and the pioneers. To kill her uncle, Georgie concludes that she must change her mentality. “We had to do what was best for us, no matter how it affected others,” she explains. “That’s what colonizers do.”

Despite its heavy tones, How to commit a postcolonial murder It is an enjoyable read. McConigley’s prose is gorgeous, and her storytelling is imaginative, too. The book manages to reconcile several seemingly contradictory identities: a murder mystery, an anti-colonial statement, and a time capsule of an 1980s childhood. On the TV, Georgie watches the movie anxiously Challenger Disaster and the wedding of Prince Andrew. She has a Trapper Keeper, is a Girl Scout, and describes the local mall as “my favorite place in the world.”

Perhaps because much of the story is told from the point of view of a frank 12-year-old girl; How to commit a postcolonial murder This seems different from most Western writings on decolonization. “Ultimately, we knew that no confession, no apology, no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt,” Georgi says of the damage caused by Finney and the colonial invasion. “We didn’t want to apologize. We wanted it to stop.”Allison Meekm

The Age of Disaster: Stories

Sina Ahmed (Henry Holt & Company, 240 pages, $17.99, January 2026)

Dinner party with Blackbeard, Ibn Battuta, John Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Nefertiti and Queen Victoria. A dilapidated house filled with Napoleon Bonaparte who continues to multiply. An alternate history where Anne Boleyn would not have died, no matter how many times Henry VIII planned to kill her. Choose your own adventure of a laboratory assistant working on the Manhattan Project.

These are some introductions to the stories by Canadian writer Sana Ahmed The era of disasters– A debut collection full of trap doors, absurdist humor, and dazzling imagination. What ties these surreal tales together is an interest in 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 on history and what doesn’t. And whether the historian is meant to protect the project of the past, or, more likely, to suggest its architecture.”

Ahmed is not only interested in the great men (and women) of the past. One notable story centers on a technician at Los Alamos in 1945: “a footstool in history” compared to the reclusive genius J. Robert Oppenheimer, who “radiates certainty and sorrow with his place in time.” Of course, even the footrests bear the weight. The subaltern literally touched the bomb, feeling “the dark bulge of his stomach. The sheer size of it. The knowledge that you were touching a piece of the world.”

If in the hands of another writer, these tales might seem extraneous. In Ahmed’s work, they appear as a series of playful mirrors that, through the refraction of elements of the past, reveal something real and sometimes revelatory. It’s not hard to see why the main story was pulled from the slush pile Paris Review. In these meditations on character, context, and possibility, we can glimpse a great mind at work—a mind influenced by the likes of short-story geniuses Angela Carter and Karen Russell, but also entirely her own.Chloe Hadavas

January releases, in a nutshell

A “Faustian bargain” lies at the heart of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novel, Night schoolTranslated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken. In Depa Anapara Another landthe unlikely duo undergoes a treacherous expedition to 19th-century Tibet. By Pakistani-American writer Daniel Moinuddin This is where the snake lives He holds a magnifying glass on the feudal divisions in contemporary Pakistan. in JanMadeleine Donegan reimagines the classic British schoolboy novel. An exhausted CIA officer is thrust into a geopolitical flashpoint Cormorant huntingthe latest spy thriller from Latvian-American writer Michael Edoff.

Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes has released his fifteenth novel, an autobiographical novel departure)On the occasion of his eightieth birthday. The environmental imagination of novelist and anthropologist Nahoko Ohashi, Cocoon: The Girl from the WestTranslated from Japanese by Cathy Hirano. Chinese folklore and colonial history meet in Alice Evelyn Yang’s debut novel, A monster is creeping towards Beijing. A collection of short stories by Lidan Ni Chuen, Everyone is still hereProvides an unflinching look at Ireland under British occupation. And Brenda Navarro’s 2022 award-winning novel, Eat ashtranslated from Spanish by Megan McDowell.—CH